Crossing Ethnic Barriers Enforced by the KGB:
Kharkiv Writers’ Lives in the 1960s-70s
Olga Bertelsen
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Abstract: This study analyzes the foundations of unity developed by the Kharkiv
multi-ethnic community of writers, and explores post-Khrushchev Kharkiv as a
political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian
nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s-70s. Despite their various
cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct
bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the
result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and
memoirs suggest that the 1960s-70s was a period of intense covert KGB operations
and “active measures” designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to
fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews
along ethnic lines. The history of the literati residing in Kharkiv in the 1960s-70s,
their formal and informal practices and rituals, and their strategies of coping with
state antisemitism, anti-Ukrainianism, terror, and waves of repression demonstrate
that the immutability of ethnic barriers, often attributed to Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish
encounters and systematically reinforced by the KGB, seems to be a myth and a
stereotype. The writers negated them, escaping from and at the same time
augmenting the politics of the place. Their spatial and social practices and habits
helped them create a cohesive community grounded in shared history, shared
interests in literature and dedication to it, and shared threats emanating from city
politics and the KGB. They transcended ethnic boundaries constructed by the
authorities, striving for unity, free from Soviet definitions.
Keywords: Kharkiv literati, multi-ethnic community, Ukrainian-Russian-Jewish
encounters, state antisemitism.
INTRODUCTION
O
ver the years, Kharkiv writers and patriots have published several
collections of poetry and prose that include excerpts from works written
by celebrities (Stadnychenko; Beliaev and Krasniashchikh). They
offered comments about Kharkiv that largely conveyed a positive image of
the city as a significant cultural and literary centre. Most of these writers
happened to visit Kharkiv as tourists, reflecting their intimate experiences
of the place and viewing it viscerally and often superficially. These
reflections lack the discerning vision of Kharkiv’s permanent residents
informed by their experiences that for the most part were tragic, gloomy,
© 2020 East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (ewjus.com) ISSN 2292-7956
Volume VII, No. 1 (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.21226/ewjus568
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Olga Bertelsen
and dangerous, especially during the Soviet era. For example, the former
Kharkivite and writer Mykola Shatylov (b. 1939) remembered Kharkiv in
temporal terms—“the cursed seventies” (“kliati simdesiati”). His
predecessor Pavlo Tychyna (1891-1967) had doubts about Kharkiv’s
cultural pre-eminence, emphasizing its industrial prominence and its
resemblance to the Donbas (Stadnychenko 37-38). Another Kharkivite and
a historian, Volodymyr Kravchenko, has argued that the city’s borderland
history shaped its “middle way,” where the epithets “remarkable” and
“outstanding” seem out of place (“Kharkiv: A Borderland City” 221). In the
1960s-70s, the Communist Party and the Soviet Ukrainian authorities
solidified Kharkiv’s image as an industrial city rather than a cultural centre.
For them, the cultural history of Kharkiv, the first capital of Soviet Ukraine,
was a distant and possibly unknown past, and they promoted Kyiv as the
epicentre of Ukraine’s cultural development.
These views were shared by many Kharkiv literati who resided in the
city in the 1960s-70s. They defined the place as an archetypally provincial
backwater where culture was constrained and the political atmosphere was
musty. Indeed, Kharkiv’s political space was efficiently controlled by local
Communist Party officials, and the Committee for State Security (KGB)
ensured these practices. Despite Kharkiv’s rich cultural traditions within the
Russian empire and the cultural renaissance centred in Kharkiv during the
early Soviet period (Sumtsov; Kravchenko, Khar'kov/Kharkiv; Zaitsev et al.;
Leibfreid and Poliakova; Ploticher 18-34; Rakytians'ka; Bertelsen, “The
House of Writers”), tensions between the cosmopolitan demographics of
Kharkiv and Soviet politics, as well as the state’s strategic plan for the city to
be an industrial centre, obscured the luminosity of Soviet cultural Kharkiv.
This might be why most cultural historians turned their attention to
Soviet Kyiv and Lviv, where the movement known as “shistdesiatnytstvo”
encouraged by the 1960s generation (the “shistdesiatnyky”) was particularly
vibrant, valiant, and flamboyant (Bellezza; Amar; Risch; Yekelchyk;
Tarnashyns'ka; Tromly). As a result of the spatial focus of this scholarship,
most of the Kharkiv writers mentioned in this essay are unfamiliar to wellinformed readers and scholars of Ukraine’s twentieth-century literature, as
are the developments in Kharkiv pertaining to the most important scholarly
discourses, such as state violence and multi-ethnic cross-cultural dialogues
in twentieth-century Ukraine.
In the 1960s-70s, persecution of writers, and several waves of
repression targeting Ukraine’s intellectuals, coincided with re-Stalinization,
visible at all levels—social, cultural, and political. According to KGB reports,
the conversion of Kharkiv writers into a cogent cohort of Soviet writers who
were supposed to help the Communist Party build one Soviet nation by
bringing culture to the masses was not going well. Drunk with the freedom
allowed by the Khrushchev Thaw that lasted from 1956 to 1963, the writers
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wrote what they were not supposed to write, gathered where they were not
supposed to gather, and spoke non-Soviet (paraphrasing Stephen Kotkin’s
metaphor [220, 221-25]) in literary clubs that mushroomed in Kharkiv after
the late 1950s.1 They organized themselves on a basis of shared aesthetic
interests and political views, and began to express themselves in
ethnocultural terms. They established inter-ethnic alliances and bonds, a
serious concern for the KGB whose members designed a set of “active
measures” to disband congregations of the writers and to compromise the
friendships that began to form within the Writers’ Union, and in formal and
informal multicultural literary clubs.2 According to KGB professionals,
cultural Kharkiv presented a complex and dangerous network of
connections among literati, artists, and actors that transcended ethnic
boundaries. These inter-ethnic bonds ultimately negated ethnic barriers
covertly erected by KGB operatives during their “prophylactic” private talks
with the writers. In the KGB’s analyses, the desired ideological and
propaganda flair began to disappear from Kharkiv prose, poetry, and art.
Instead, romantic, intimate, national, and ethnically patriotic motifs
emerged, a phenomenon that was inconsistent with the notions of
undeviating fidelity to Communist doctrines demanded by the party. As one
Kharkiv party leader stated in the 1960s, “it seems quixotic—there is too
much of Shevchenko in the writers’ and artists’ works; it obscures the
Leninist international principles of art” (interview with Briuhhen, 16 July
2015; Iarova).3
Despite the pressure on editors of Kharkiv literary journals and
newspapers, many of them defended the writers’ innovative approaches,
publishing prose and poetry that were seditious in the KGB’s view. They
shared the writers’ enthusiasm associated with liberal changes launched by
Khrushchev, and their quest for moral and intellectual refinement. A shared
desire for freedom, amplified by the threat of imprisonment as punishment
for their failure to reconcile their creative work with propaganda, served as
the foundation for new rapprochement among Ukrainians, Jews, and
Russians in the Writers’ Union and informal literary groups.
1
For an analysis of political changes in the USSR and Ukraine during the Khrushchev
Thaw and its rollback, see Viktor Danylenko.
2 Similar tendencies could be observed in other Soviet republics, including the RSFSR
(Plokhy, Lost Kingdom 290-94). “Active measures” (or ideological subversion) is a
KGB term that emerged in the early 1950s and implied domestic actions and
transnational special operations designed to change the oppositionists’ and the
rivals’ ideology, their perception of reality, and ultimately the course of world events
to the advantage of the USSR (Schuman).
3 Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this article are mine.
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Olga Bertelsen
The shared history of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians, their inter-ethnic
relations, and the birth of new identities in Ukraine have been examined by
many scholars.4 There is a consensus among historians that, in a variety of
ways, the Soviet regime exacerbated the hostilities between Ukrainians and
Jews that went back to the seventeenth century (Kuzio, Putin’s War against
Ukraine 118-26; Zeltser; Liber; Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, and The
Gates of Europe 296; Kappeler 52-55; Benifand; Motyl 15; Conquest 83-84).
Thus, the rapprochement and the multi-ethnic cross-cultural dialogues that
occurred at the most tragic crossroads in Ukraine’s twentieth-century
history have been thorny. For example, World War II brought charges of
antisemitism and anti-Ukrainianism to the forefront of many scholarly and
public discussions in Ukraine and beyond (Snyder, Bloodlands, and Black
Earth; Himka “Interventions,” “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941,” and “Ukrainian
Memories of the Holocaust”; Radchenko, “‘We Fired All Cartridges at Them,’”
“Ukrainian Historiography,” and “The Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists”). Moreover, the chaos and inconsistencies of the Soviet era
produced paradoxes associated not so much with dual or multiple identities
(which is a temporally and spatially universal phenomenon), but rather with
unsubstantiated super self-confidence combined with confused mutually
exclusive identities: internationalists behaved like antisemites, racists
advocated equality, nationalists rejected other nationalisms, and
intellectually shallow bureaucrats who wrote their reports with
grammatical errors genuinely believed they were in a position to educate
brilliantly talented and highly educated intellectuals and writers and teach
them learning and writing skills.
The KGB took advantage of these oddities, covertly playing all sides
against each other and creating a space and rhetorical support for ethnic and
racial hatred. This strategy was supposed to perpetuate ideological
confusion and help control unruly nationalists in the republics and beyond
the borders of the USSR. With the exception of a few, the Kharkiv writers
refused to be persuaded by the KGB and refused to hate. The aesthetics of
the Kharkiv literati, a multi-ethnic community of men and women of several
generational cohorts, superseded the politics of the place. A culturally
diverse group, Kharkiv writers nevertheless strove for freedom and unity,
turning a deaf ear to KGB officers’ antisemitic remarks and disregarding
their diagnostic tests for nationalism or latent antisemitism. They saw these
See Shtif; Bartov; Gilley; Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern; Bilenky, Romantic
Nationalism 253-302, and Imperial Urbanism; Dekel-Chen; Fowler; Shanes and
Petrovsky-Shtern; Hunczak; Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War; Prusin; von Hagen;
Petrovsky-Shtern, “Reconceptualizing the Alien,” “Jews in Ukrainian Thought,” The
Anti-Imperial Choice, “The Art of Shifting Contexts”; Redlich; Abramson; Bartal and
Polonsky; Aster and Potichnyj.
4
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activities as provocations designed to divide and control the privileged
members of the Writers’ Union. Overdosed by fear, violence, and traumatic
memories of World War II, writers of various ethnic origins tried to create
not a Jewish, a Ukrainian, or a Russian street or neighbourhood but a multiethnic street, where everyone would be part of a shared but intimate
experience, the experience of writing.5 The entire “neighbourhood” became
a conceptual place for them where they acquired the strength and courage
to continue.
Thanks to archival documents and Kharkiv writers’ diaries, interviews,
memoirs, and personal documentation, we are privileged to catch a glimpse
of their relationships and to savour their experiences in Kharkiv in the
1960s-70s that would otherwise have disappeared from the multi-ethnic
cultural history of Ukraine.6 Importantly, these experiences, which included
the entire spectrum of human emotions, feelings, and mental states—
happiness, demoralization, disenchantment, fear, and love—were shaped by
the place and the political and social realities of the time, as well as by its
history. This spatial study offers an analysis of the patterns of human
behaviour and socialization among Kharkiv literati—ethnic Ukrainians,
Russians, and Jews—and their relationships and grounds for interaction in
a space of violence and intellectual abuse. The inter-ethnic bonds they
cultivated and the complex network of professional and intimate
connections they established in Soviet Ukraine stayed alive for decades,
often disrupted by geography and disagreements but reviving each time the
opportunity presented itself. An analysis of the Kharkiv writers’ interactions
with the Kharkiv authorities and the KGB, and the writers’ practices, rituals,
and views will help illustrate this point.
5 On the
notions of intimate or shared experience and neighbourhood, see Tuan 16971.
6 This essay is not a literary study and does not closely analyze Ukrainian and Russian
works published in Kharkiv under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Neither does it discuss
Jewish work in literatures other than Jewish (in this case in Ukrainian and Russian
literature, as Kharkiv was and remains a bilingual city), an approach that Vladimir
Zhabotinskii (Zeev) (1880-1940) found predominantly fruitless and humiliating for
Jews because of their forcible acculturation that cultivated slave psychology and
encouraged them to abandon interests in Jewish affairs and culture. Nor is this a case
study, but rather an overview of space and place, the Kharkiv of late socialism,
saturated with optimism, hope, sorrow, and frustration.
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Olga Bertelsen
KHARKIV WRITERS’ AMBIVALENCE TOWARD KHARKIV
Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things
Past, 1981) demonstrates that people and places intermingle in a variety of
ways.7 Places capture and shape people’s imaginations and keep their
memories alive. Kharkiv of the 1960s-70s was a space of “controlled
freedom,” using Ievhen Sverstiuk’s term, and, on a number of occasions, it
became the epicentre of KGB special investigations and interest. Petro
Shelest, Ukraine’s Communist Party leader, systematically alerted the local
authorities about professors’ seditious thinking at Kharkiv Karazin State
University, detailing the writers’ “ideologically harmful” congregations and
drunken parties, as well as foreign citizens’ interest in objects of military and
strategic importance located in Kharkiv during their tourist trips (Bertelsen,
“Political Affinities” 400; TsDAHOU, 1/25/17/36-37, 42-49; 1/25/387/2123; HDA SBU, 16/1/1017/6-8; 16/1/1064/10). Shelest insisted that,
considering the importance of Kharkiv to the USSR’s national security, the
ideological work among the nationally conscious intelligentsia and the KGB’s
intelligence service should be amplified and improved. He asked Moscow to
increase the quotas of KGB personnel and to create more KGB departments
in Kharkiv to cope with the challenges (TsDAHOU, 1/25/387/21-23). In May
1971, on the eve of the second wave of repression against the intelligentsia,
Ukraine’s KGB chief Vitalii Fedorchuk established two additional positions
in Kharkiv and Kyiv—deputy heads of KGB Oblasts’ Administrations, and
increased the number of KGB officers working in these localities (HDA SBU,
16/1/1017/182). For Kharkiv writers, these developments meant that their
activities and habits had to be changed, and their creative work must be
refocused in tune with Communist Party orders and the renewed
Stalinization of Kharkiv. In their memories, the Kharkiv of Khrushchev and
Brezhnev remained not simply a “sum of streets and houses” that they
tenderly remembered as places of gathering and youth, but a centre of
meaning, associated with shared experiences of state violence and national
humiliation (interview with Tret'iakova, 19 July 2005; Kotliarov;
Vysheslavskii).8 Like Marcel, the narrator in Proust’s novel, who inevitably
returned intellectually and physically to the place of his youth, Kharkivites
who lived through this period persistently followed this path, ruminating
about the pleasure and pain Soviet Kharkiv gave them, and writing about the
Proust’s novel in seven volumes was first published in France between 1913 and
1927. For a discussion about space, place, and people in Proust’s writings, see Poulet
19-33; Malpas 4-5.
8 The names of Moscow party leaders and of writers who wrote in Russian or who
resided in the Russian Federation have been transliterated from the Russian
language (i.e. Mikhail Suslov, Boris Chichibabin, Anatolii Brusilovskii).
7
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city in an attempt to grasp the meaning of their past, present, and, ultimately,
their future.
This desire to decode Kharkiv and their ambivalence toward the city
came to some of the “shistdesiatnyky” decades later, when the spatial
distance between their past and present was substantial. Many wandered
away from the city in the 1960s-70s, seeking freedom and fame, which
provincial Kharkiv, hijacked by the antisemitic Communist Party and KGB
leaders, could not offer (Lahoza 95-96; private correspondence with
Briuhhen, 2010-18). Many dreamed about escaping to Israel, Moscow, or
Kyiv, anywhere to prevent decomposition of their vulnerable and subtle
talent, and “excited and tender souls” (Brusilovskii 198; private
correspondence with Brusilovskii, 1 Sep. 2017). But many stayed, providing
Kharkiv with a certain distinctiveness through their cultural practices.9
In spite of their Kharkiv “topophilia,” the dominating force pushing
intellectuals away from the city was the choking atmosphere created by the
local authorities.10 The leadership of the Kharkiv Writers’ Union was part of
the nomenklatura of Ukraine’s Central Committee, presenting Kharkiv party
bosses and the KGB “ample room for interference” (Goble 136). Constant
threats and intimidation by the KGB and the local party organs disillusioned
a great many of the intellectuals (Bertelsen, “Shistdesiatnyky”). The KGB
personnel closely co-operated with the secretary of the Kharkiv oblast party
committee (“obkom”) Andrii Skaba (1905-86), a faithful Stalinist and an
antisemite who supervised ideological work in Kharkiv.11 In their dialogue
with the Kharkiv intelligentsia, away from the centre’s eyes, many Kharkiv
KGB operatives behaved frivolously and cruelly, often violating professional
ethics and being reprimanded and fired for that by their Kyiv supervisors
(HDA SBU, 16/1/1060/135-139; Kasha). The writers’ telephones were
tapped and their private conversations were thoroughly analyzed (HDA SBU,
16/1/1028/237). Their texts were carefully censored and extensively
“castrated,” as the Kharkiv poet Boris Chichibabin (Polushin) (1923-94)
characterized his own volumes of poetry published in the 1950s-60s
On “imagined places” and their perceived cultural essence and practices, see
Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism, and Romantic Nationalism; Berezhnaya; Ther;
Kravchenko, Khar'kov/Kharkiv; Wolff; Richardson; Reid.
10 For a discussion about “topophilia,” the love of a place, see Bachelard.
11 Skaba kept this position until 1959 when he left for Kyiv, being promoted to the
position of ideological chief of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Ukraine (1959-68). On Skaba’s attitudes toward Jews and his antisemitism, see
Rakhlin 95-98. Skaba’s infamous statement “We rehabilitated people, but not their
ideas” fully reflects his ideological and political stance that shaped his activities in
Kharkiv and later in Kyiv (Taniuk). For the tendency to exercise greater control over
non-Russian writers in the Soviet republics (other than the Russian SFSR), see Goble.
9
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Olga Bertelsen
(Rakhlin 4, 65). Poets made inscriptions on their newest volumes of poems,
burning from shame and humiliation, and apologizing to their friends and
colleagues for their content. Prophylactic talks between writers and officials
in the Kharkiv “obkom” or the KGB inevitably ended up with the official
suggesting that the writer watch for “those cunning Jews” or “nationalistic
khokhly” (interview with Briuhhen, 2 July 2011).12
There existed, however, uncensored and brilliant literature in Kharkiv
written mostly in Ukrainian and Russian. It lived its own life in unpublished
manuscripts and samizdat formats (“samvydav” in Ukrainian), betraying its
authors in the eyes of the KGB, if found, and simultaneously immortalizing
them. In this sense, Kharkiv writers were an inseparable part of a cultural
movement in the early 1960s. This was not a political movement but rather
a rebellion against the mediocracy that the Soviet regime cultivated over the
years. Interestingly, observing these cultural and literary trends in the Soviet
Union, CIA analysts emphasized in their reports the boldness of old and
young writers who “came into open conflict with the dictates of political
orthodoxy.” They wrote: “Soviet writers have demonstrated a measure of
personal integrity and unity of purpose unmatched by any other segment of
Soviet society” (CIA Archive, “The Soviet Writer and Soviet Cultural Policy,”
i). This was also true for a diverse and multi-ethnic community of the
Kharkiv literati, for whom the only space where they could exercise power
was the space of creative writing (DAKhO, R-6165/1/148/22).
Ethnic Jews constituted a small but noticeable and flamboyant part of
the writing community. The former Kharkivite, writer, and Russian
politician Eduard Limonov (Savenko) (b. 1943) once shared a much broader
observation with his readers: “If there were no Jews in Kharkiv, the city
would be so boring. It is not nice when the entire population has the same
temper. If only, say, calm and sedate Ukrainians wandered around the city—
how boring it would be. Jews animate Kharkiv, making it a market place and
representing the East in it” (133). Limonov became a successful professional
writer decades after he left Kharkiv for Moscow, and later for New York. But
he was among the first Kharkiv writers who offered readers a “taste” of
bohemian literary Kharkiv, conceived, lived, and perceived as an island of
freedom in the re-Stalinized Soviet Ukraine of the early 1960s.13 Like many
other literati, Limonov has been contradictory in his treatment of Kharkiv,
as it seemed to him a bohemian paradise and a cultural backwater from
which one needed to escape to Moscow and beyond.
12
“Khokhly” is a derogatory term for Ukrainians.
For an explanation of the triad “conceived, lived, and perceived” and the
connections among perceived social practices, conceived representations of space,
and lived spaces of representation, see Lefebvre.
13
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The KGB skillfully exploited a lingering historical hostility between
Ukrainians and Jews, and camouflaged traditional state antisemitism with
the necessity to fight “Jewish reactionary Zionism” and “inherent Ukrainian
antisemitism,” a strategy that disturbed both Ukrainians and Jews.14
Everyone sensed the disingenuousness of the authorities’ rhetoric but
largely ignored it. One of the most prominent Kharkiv poets, Marlena
Rakhlina (1925-2010), who wrote her poems and memoirs in Russian, once
stated: “Certainly, I always felt myself a Jew. Taking turns, Hitler and then
Stalin took care of this [perception]. These worries, however, had never been
dominant in my life” (90-91). Anatolii Brusilovskii (b. 1932), a famous artist
and a son of the Russian writer of Jewish origin Rafail Brusilovskii (18941971) (both were residents of “Slovo,” the legendary Writers’ Home in
Kharkiv), also affirmed that the 1960s was the time of artists and writers,
and for him, nation, ethnicity, or the Jewish question instilled by the
authorities were not his concerns; instead his focus was culture and art
(Studiia; private correspondence with Brusilovskii, 1 Sep. 2017). Rakhlina
spent her entire life in Kharkiv; Brusilovskii moved to Moscow, and later to
Europe. Both were repulsed by KGB tactics, but paradoxically they preserved
affinities with both the Kharkiv culture of the 1960s and the imperial culture
that for them had always been centred in Moscow.
The political instability in the 1960s-70s and the escalation of terror
against Ukraine’s intellectuals contributed to people’s mental confusion and
ambivalence. The discrepancy between the official Soviet discourse focused
on the new unity paradigm, advocating the “friendship of peoples” concept
(Tillett; Kolstø; Torbakov 112), and KGB divide and conquer practices
further puzzled the Kharkiv intelligentsia. Their existence was essentially a
life tied to a tiny space of freedom they created for themselves, a remnant of
the Khrushchev Thaw. They valued independent thinking and admired the
literary gift in others, an ability that shaped their collective identity.15 Their
choice, however, included the national: their mental maps and work were
populated with images imbedded in their ethnicity,16 cultural memories, and
14 For a discussion about Soviet state antisemitism and anti-Zionism, see Heiman;
Kuzio, “The Soviet Roots of Anti-Fascism and Antisemitism,” and Putin’s War, 118-26.
15 On the close connection between identity and space, and the flexibility of identity,
see Casula 9.
16 Like elsewhere, here the notion of ethnicity refers to people’s backgrounds,
associated with their culture and the family patterns of upbringing that include their
native language, heritage, religion, and customs. In the writers’ world, the
language(s) in which they write, think, and communicate most frequently, define
their membership in an ethnic group. This notion is closely related to the notion of
ethnic identity that implies people’s social identity, their affiliation with a cultural or
social group, and their knowledge about this group’s cultural traditions and history.
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Olga Bertelsen
experiences. Kharkiv’s political space systematically adjusted this choice,
but what survived unchanged over decades was their sense of spatial
belonging. Without thinking about it, they traversed ethnic barriers
reinforced by the KGB, yet they were constantly reminded of the fallacy of
both—their supranational existence and their sagaciously national
literature in which they advanced national themes. Subsequently, the
“cursed seventies” and the political space of Kharkiv shaped their
ambivalent attitudes toward the city, but likewise they fashioned an
unforgettable Kharkiv of the 1960s-70s, a place of hope and creativity.
A “RITUAL VICE”: SUBLIMATION OF FEAR
The years of 1961-62 were marked by literary experimentation and civic
courage. The youth contested the old world of conformism and dogmatism.
As in Moscow, Kyiv, and Lviv, Kharkiv poetry concerts became extremely
popular. Crowds of people packed lecture and concert halls to hear poets
reading their verses. The chief editor of the Kharkiv literary journal Prapor
(Banner) Iurii Makhnenko recalled that Kharkiv halls were usually packed
and could not accommodate all those who tried to get in (Zinkevych).17
“Shistdesiatnytsvo,” also known as the revolution of poets, liberated people
from their fears, awakening their dormant gravitation toward freedom and
creativity.
At the time, Prapor became the podium for many “shistdesiatnyky.”18 Yet
in 1963 the local authorities, inspired by Khrushchev’s ideological pogrom
at the March 7 meeting with the intelligentsia in Moscow,19 curtailed
Ukraine’s literary renaissance and the literati’s attempts to embrace the
liberal principles affirmed by the Twentieth Communist Party Congress. The
litmus test was the hijacking of the January 1963 issue of Prapor by censors
for four months (from October 20, 1962 to January 24, 1963). The
intellectual hunger of Prapor’s readers, developed during the Khrushchev
Thaw, was satisfied when, after the delay, the issue was finally published:
Zinkevych’s essay was initially published in Smoloskyp (Jul.-Aug. 1963) and
republished in Literaturna Ukraina, no. 14 (5302), Apr. 9, 2009.
18 The first issues of the journal Prapor appeared in 1956. In 1991 it was renamed
Berezil'. At different times the chief editors were Iurii Shovkoplias, Iurii Barabash,
Natalia Cherchenko, Ivan Maslov, and Iurii Stadnychenko. Since 2000, Volodymyr
Naumenko has served as Berezil'’s editor (Mykhailyn, Literaturna Kharkivshchyna
19).
19 Listen to Khrushchev’s shameful attack against Andrei Voznesenskii at this
meeting
on
YouTube,
1
June,
2010,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f9izHJGIoo. Accessed 20 Dec. 2019.
17
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every single copy of Prapor’s circulation of 7,800 was sold immediately. But
beginning in February 1963, the content of Prapor dramatically changed:
new literature written by young promising writers was replaced by works
resembling that of the Stalinist era (Zinkevych). As Feliks Rakhlin (b. 1931)
has metaphorically stated, censored poems evoked an image of stumps, trees
that had been mercilessly mutilated (65). To appear in the press, they had to
be unrecognizably distorted and purified of seditious and national allusions
(Goble).
Escalated by Moscow ideologues, the rhetoric of fighting Ukrainian
nationalism disenchanted Kharkiv writers. Many among the members of the
Writers’ Union could not handle the stress of surveillance that became quite
obvious in late 1964 (Kas'ianov 47). They fell into the abyss of alcoholism
and conformism. On March 16, 1963, the Ukrainian writer Iryna Zhylenko
(1941-2013) from Kyiv wrote in her diary: “Oh God, how much the boys are
drinking here [in Kharkiv]! Horrible … There is an acute and musty smell of
a war in the air” (352). Her second visit in December 1963 confirmed her
fears. The Kharkiv intelligentsia was hopelessly and constantly drunk: “We
went to visit Kharkiv. I remember a vigorous discussion at Kharkiv
University, where we read our poetry. What is left in memory is how the
Kharkiv poets were irrepressibly drinking, showing up at our hotel with a
bag of alcoholic beverages” (Zhylenko 166).
The 1964 Brezhnev coup, ousting Nikita Khrushchev as General
Secretary of the CPSU, entailed significant changes in the Kremlin’s political
course, particularly in the nationalities policy. Brezhnev’s closest associates,
Mikhail Suslov, Iurii Andropov, and Nikolai Tikhonov, helped the new
General Secretary rejuvenate the Stalinist methods of governing. In August
and September of 1965, some twenty individuals were arrested for
possession of “samvydav.” Among them were Ivan Svitlychnyi, Sviatoslav
Karavans'kyi, Valentyn Moroz, Mykhailo and Bohdan Horyn', Mykhailo
Osadchyi, and Ivan Hel'. The Dziuba and Chornovil affairs and the
subsequent 1968-69 arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia confirmed the
Kharkivites’ worst fears: the regime had rolled back to brutality and violence
(Bilocerkowycz; Kas'ianov; Bertelsen, “Political Affinities” 397).
The censors followed the trend. The secret May 31, 1968 report to the
Central Committee, produced by the head of the Administration of
Preservation of State Secrets in the Press M. Pozdniakov, reveals that the
Holovlit, Ukraine’s main censorship institution, managed to thoroughly
monitor 1600 republican, oblast, city, district, and institutional newspapers,
71 literary and thematic journals, and 234 scholarly and popular journals
published in Ukraine (TsDAHOU, 1/25/17/68-77). The editor of Prapor and
heads of its main departments were carefully watched by the Holovlit and
chastised for the slightest unintentional errors that seemed political to
Holovlit inspectors (TsDAHOU, 1/25/17/75). During this time the Holovlit
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Olga Bertelsen
was ordered to create a new department that should monitor and control
literary and artistic production in Ukraine (TsDAHOU, 1/25/17/77), a move
that was followed by the January 7, 1969 directive issued by the Central
Committee in Moscow that ordered an increase in party bureaucrats’
personal responsibility for ideological deviations in the media, in cultural
institutions, and in every publication printed in the USSR (Kas'ianov 80).
By 1970, state antisemitism and anti-Zionism had regained the militant
contours of the Stalinist era. Jewish nationalism, inspired by Israel’s victory
in the 1967 Six-Day War against the neighbouring states of Egypt, Jordan,
and Syria, and the Soviet Jews’ desire to assert their cultural rights in the
USSR or to emigrate to Israel, drove the KGB into active mode. In Ukraine,
the main concern was the attempts of Jewish youth to reach out to Jewish
intellectuals to revitalize Jewish culture, and the rapprochement of
Ukrainians and Jews among the intellectual elite. KGB operatives intensified
surveillance, investigated people’s connections and habits, and conducted
interviews with ideological deviationists in KGB headquarters (HDA,
16/1/1034/176-77).
During
individual
conversations,
through
intimidation, they turned Jewish wives against their Ukrainian husbands,
writers of Ukrainian or Russian origin against writers of Jewish descent, and
vice versa (Kasha; interview with Tret'iakova, 19 July 2005; Starodub).
Disillusioned and depressed, the writers gathered daily at the Prapor
headquarters and the Writers’ Union, discussing politics, reading poetry, and
drinking. Soon it became clear that the KGB had bugged the building, and the
Kharkiv writers ceased talking politics there. They also avoided political
discussions with writers from Lviv and other Ukrainian cities who were
critical of the Soviet regime. The guests did not quite understand this
behaviour, attributing it to the Kharkivites’ pro-Soviet position (Horyn' 29495).
To be safe, the writers moved their gatherings to cafés and private
apartments, but the spatial relocation did not change the routine. Alcohol
made them talkative, liberating the thoughts otherwise trapped inside
cautious minds. For many, an escape from reality became a “ritual vice”
(“ritual'nyi porok”), to use the Russian scholar Iurii Lotman’s term. Lotman
has argued that, from a semiotic perspective, poetry transformed alcohol
consumption from a physiochemical process into a fact of culture, where a
poetic masterpiece was a sublimation-product. Many Kharkiv writers had
this vice. The administrator of the Writers’ Union Serhii Boltryk stated in an
interview that “Everyone drank—Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews. What
varied was the length of time each of us managed to stay sober.” The writers’
all-pervasive alcoholism, however, became a concern for the KGB. The
pernicious habit was associated with having too much freedom. The Russian
writer Andrei Bitov most accurately explained this connection. He was
convinced that a writer needed a drink to write—to liberate his characters
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and make them talk: “Under the influence, I am giving them freedom to talk
about anything; or possibly I acquire freedom from them to write” (Bitov;
Zolotonosov).
The problem of Kharkiv writers’ drinking habits reached Kyiv, and in
May 1971, Fedorchuk wrote a report to Shelest in which several writers
were blacklisted: Radii Polons'kyi (1930-2003), Robert Tret'iakov (193696), Aleksandr Cherevchenko (b. 1942), Boris Silaev (1929-2005), Lev
Galkin (1913-92), and Vasilii Omel'chenko (b. 1931). The KGB leader also
expressed his doubts about their ideological fitness and ability to represent
the Kharkiv chapter at the VI Congress of the Writers’ Union. Fedorchuk
suggested that the Kharkiv chapter, in contrast to the Kyiv chapter, seemed
to be less divided, but the symptoms of stagnation and ideological
unorthodoxy were there. Beyond the writers’ alcoholism, Fedorchuk was
concerned about the poet Roman Levin who systematically slandered the
Soviet system, Chichibabin whose poems were permeated with antiSovietism, and Polons'kyi who adopted a nationalistic stance. According to
KGB operational documents, Polons'kyi privately stated: “We should treat
Russians as colonizers [...] The writers’ mouths are tightened up, and they
cannot write what they want” (HDA SBU, 16/1/1017/6-8). Decades later,
another Ukrainian intellectual who closely communicated with Kharkiv
writers, the director at the theatre “Berezil',” Anatolii Starodub (1948-2015),
confessed in an interview: “We drank too much and talked too freely, and
one day we might say too much to a wrong person or to a foreign guest […]
our alcohol consumption was for sure a problem for the KGB.”
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Olga Bertelsen
Figure 1. Members of the Kharkiv chapter of the Writers’ Union in the
1960s. Courtesy of the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and
Art of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine.20
The writers’ gatherings and their ritual vice united Ukrainians, Russians,
and Jews in the face of danger, which emanated from the KGB. This ritual
enabled them to write, to secretly read their unpublishable works to one
another, and to collectively produce ironic, sarcastic, and “difficult” poetry
(Cherevchenko, “Bunt bessmyslennyi i besposhchadnyi?”). The literati drank
enthusiastically and devotedly. Aleksandr Basiuk (years of life are
unknown), Vladimir Motrich (1935-97), Leonid Osmolovskii (Osadchuk)
(1940-?), and Stanislav Shumyts'kyi (1937-74), among others, became an
inseparable part of the writers’ memoirs about their pernicious habit
(Vernik). The KGB pressed the leadership of the Writers’ Union to break this
union and to punish those who frequently were seen drunk (interview with
Polons'kyi, 16 May 1988).
The early sixties protocols of the Kharkiv chapter of the Writers’ Union
reveal that attempts by its leadership to alter their members’ habits had
limited success. For instance, two talented writers of unique literary gift and
innovative style, Vladimir Dobrovol'skii (1918-2003) and Vasyl' Bondar
(1923-69), were frequently chastised for their alcoholism (DAKhO, R6165/1/134/70,71,93,99; DAKhO, R-6165/1/144/12; Sharova). In the view
of KGB literary experts, both individuals wrote ideologically doubtful prose
and poetry: in his novels I dukh nash molod (Our Spirit Is Young) and Za
20
TsDAMLIMU, Fond 783, op. 1, spr. 26, ark. 4.
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nedeliu do otpuska (A Week Before Vacation), Dobrovol'skii, a 1949 laureate
of the Stalin Prize, “slandered the Soviet system, depicting the insufficient
optimism of the Soviet youth and the nepotism of the current regime”
(Kasha). As a former prisoner of war and a survivor of the Dachau
concentration camp, Bondar had no prospects for publishing his work, yet
the few poems that he did publish before his death were interpreted as “ones
that glorified the suffering and the struggle of World War II prisoners,
offering metaphors evoking parallels between the Nazis’ and the Soviets’
violence” (e.g., “Chorne nebo zhorstoko katuie” [“The Black Sky Violently
Tortures”]) (Kasha). Dobrovol'skii was systematically reprimanded;
Bondar’s membership in the Union was under threat.
Despite the stigma perpetuated by the KGB, Bondar was respected and
admired by his fellow writers, and gathered around himself people of
various ethnic backgrounds. Together with other prisoners, he was liberated
from Dachau by American troops. He went through the American DPs
(displaced persons) camp and the Soviet filtration camp in eastern Germany.
After his return to Ukraine, he shared his knowledge and experiences of the
Holocaust and the Nazis’ brutality with the younger writers. Being a
perpetual suspect and incessantly guilty because of his imprisonment
experience, Bondar also had a tragic individual history. He fell in love with a
woman, but when Vasyl' was arrested by the Nazis, she married and bore
two children with his brother. Vasyl'’s brother died at the front, and Vasyl'
married his widow upon his return home, whom he never stopped loving.
Difficult memories about Dachau and routine persecution by the KGB
prompted Vasyl' to seek relaxation in alcohol which complicated the couple’s
life. During a fight, his wife confessed that it was his brother who betrayed
Vasyl' and surrendered him to the Nazis. Later, the couple divorced
(Marchenko; Kryvenchuk).
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Olga Bertelsen
Figure 2. Vasyl' Bondar (left) and Radii Polons'kyi (right), 1966.
Courtesy of the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of
Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine.21
In the early 1960s, to antagonize Jewish and Ukrainian members of the
Writers’ Union, the KGB spread a rumour that ethnic Jews insisted that
Bondar, an ethnic Ukrainian, should be excluded from the Union. Iurii
Zbanats'kyi (1914-94), head of the republican chapter, made a special trip
from Kyiv to Kharkiv to defend Bondar (DAKhO, f.R6165/1/134/70,71,93,99; DAKhO, f. R-6165/1/144/12). An influential
figure, Zbanats'kyi did not acquiesce and ignored the divisive rumours,
suggesting that Bondar experienced difficulty in social adjustment and
needed the friendly support of the writers’ community. Zbanats'kyi farsightedly kept silent about the political reasons inciting Bondar to drink
(DAKhO, f.R-6165/1/134/70,71,93,99; DAKhO, f. R-6165/1/144/12).
The members of the Union were hesitant to take radical measures and
delayed their decision in Bondar’s case until the following year. The
administrators of the Writers’ Union were frightened because they could be
accused of violations of Communist Party discipline. In the party’s eyes, they
were responsible for the morale of their colleagues. Yet the KGB’s divisive
tactics failed. Two highly regarded writers of Jewish origin, Union members
21
TsDAMLIMU, Fond 781, op. 1, spr. 72, ark. 6.
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Ihor Muratov (1912-73)22 and Zel'man Kats (1911-2008), saved Bondar,
suggesting a softer measure and a compromise that would help the suffering
writer—expelling Bondar from the Union for only a year and supporting him
while he would receive treatment in a rehabilitation clinic. Alternatively, the
oldest members of the Union, Ivan Vyrhan (1908-85) and Vasyl' Mysyk
(1907-83), asked the Union to grant Bondar another chance and to sustain
his membership. The majority supported Vyrhan’s and Mysyk’s request and
voted for obliging the Literary Fund (“Litfond”) to finance Bondar’s retreat
at a rehabilitation clinic (DAKhO, f.R-6165/1/144/12).
The suffocating atmosphere in Kharkiv culminated in the early 1970s.
Volodymyr Shcherbyts'kyi, who replaced Shelest as Ukraine’s party leader,
together with Fedorchuk and Ukraine’s party ideologue Valentyn
Malanchuk, choked the dissident and cultural nationalist movement in
Ukraine. Beginning from January 12, 1972, within a half year approximately
100 people were arrested, and tens of thousands were terrorized through
interrogation and fired from their work. Among them were Ivan and Nadiia
Svitlychni, V''iacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl' Stus, Ievhen Proniuk, Iryna and Ihor
Kalynets', and Stefaniia Shabatura. The Kharkiv chapter of the Fifth
Directorate and its head, Colonel Dubrava, created an unbearable
atmosphere for many writers (Cherevchenko, “Druz'ia davno minuvshikh
let”). Because of the fear of arrest, some developed claustrophobia and were
eager to move elsewhere. Limonov escaped to Moscow, Cherevchenko to
Magadan. The KGB operation “Blok” targeting Ukraine’s intellectuals and the
climate of terror exacerbated the drinking habits of Kharkiv writers and
tamed the most talented and innovative into submission. Tragically, the KGB
drove some to commit suicide. Others died under mysterious circumstances.
Among the tragedies that stunned the community of writers were the ones
experienced by Bondar, Shumyts'kyi, Osmolovskii, and Tret'iakov
(Polons'kyi; Shatylov 158, 173; Marchenko; Cherevchenko, “Trava
zabveniia”).23
Most Ukrainians were systematically called to make an appearance in
the “obkom,” where they were threatened and questioned about their
friendships with Jews. A functionary in the “obkom” frankly told a Ukrainian
22
Muratov was born in Paris to the family of a professional revolutionary, SRer
Levant Maksudovych Muratov (Leontii Maksimovich Muratov, according to his Soviet
passport) and the young Kharkivite from a wealthy Jewish family Ievgeniia Iosifovna
Rozenbaum (a relative of Charlotte Embden [Rosenbaum], aka Charlotte Heine, sister
of Heinrich Heine) (Muratova).
23 Both Bondar and Shumyts'kyi were inconvenient for the authorities—the former
for his concentration camp past, the latter for his openly hostile stance toward the
local bureaucrats. According to many memoirs, they were likely murdered by the
KGB.
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Olga Bertelsen
writer: “I do not understand what you are doing among those Jews. They
always stick together, and there is no place for you in this Zionist group. I am
just trying to help you. You need to publish, don’t you?” (Marchenko).
Similarly, Jews were questioned about their bonds with Ukrainians: “Stay
away from him, he is a Ukrainian nationalist. You’ll be in trouble like him.
Just warning you” (interview with Briuhhen, 2 July 2011).
The writers had to endure lengthy tirades and instructions by the
“obkom” and KGB leaders in their offices and elsewhere about how and what
to write (Bertelsen, “Shistdesiatnyky”). For instance, works by the Russian
writer of Jewish origin David Vishnevskii (1910-77) were viciously criticized
by Communist Party functionaries. In the late 1970s, the first secretary of
the Kharkiv “obkom” Mykola Siroshtan accused Vishnevskii of tarnishing the
heroism of Soviet soldiers during World War II in his new novel. Siroshtan
suggested that Vishnevskii should align his writings with examples of
literary excellence and historical truth, such as Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs
Malaia Zemlia (The Small Land). Vishnevskii constantly redrafted the text
but Siroshtan was adamant: “It won’t fly” (Shatylov 100-101).24 Vishnevskii’s
colleagues sympathized with his situation, as the majority were under
similar pressure.
Despite the increasing terror precipitated by the KGB, the writers tried
to grasp what was happening around them and within them, continuing to
gather in downtown Kharkiv. The most frequent places for their meetings
were the café “Avtomat” (later the Kharkiv literati gave it the nick-name
“Pulemet” [“A Machine Gun”]), a hand-made little waterfall adjacent to the
Park of Victory called “Dzerkal'nyi Strumin'” (“The Mirror Jet”) on Sums'ka
Street, the restaurant “Kryshtal'” (“Crystal”) in the heart of Shevchenko Park,
the legendary bookstore “Poeziia” (“Poetry”) on Poetry Square,25 and
Chichibabin’s apartment on Rymars'ka Street (Filatov, “Vdogonku”; Orlov;
“Ievtushenko i Khar'kov”; Limonov 31, 104, 155; Omel'chenko “Tam zhili
poety…”). A few writers resided in the House of Writers “Slovo,” where the
majority of their predecessors—known as writers of the Red Renaissance—
Brezhnev’s trilogy of memoirs was published in the Moscow journal Novyi mir
(New World) in 1978—Malaia Zemlia (The Small Land) in the second issue,
Vozrozhdeniie (Rebirth) in the fifth issue, and Tselina (Virgin Lands) in the eleventh
issue. The circulation of each issue was approximately 15 million.
25 In the 1960s, Ievgenii Ievtushenko, hoarse from reading his poetry outside the
doors of this bookstore, receiving a bottle of warm milk tied on a rope, dangling from
some caring fan’s balcony; in the late 1980s, at the same Poetry Square, in the
presence of thousands of Kharkivites, including the author of this article, Ievtushenko
granted Chichibabin his membership card, when Chichibabin’s membership in the
Writers’ Union was finally restored (Ievtushenko; interview with Polons’kyi, 16 May
1988; “Ievtushenko i Khar'kov”).
24
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suffered a tragic fate. A cultural marker of the 1930s, “Slovo” lost its
significance in the 1960s-70s, but it remained under surveillance, as did the
places mentioned above. Brusilovskii believed that the main problem with
the writers was that they were excessively chatty (Studiia). This factor, as
well as the close proximity of these places to the KGB headquarters on
Chernyshevs'kyi Street, facilitated the task of surveillance. Regardless of the
writers’ will, Kharkiv’s political space delineated and absorbed the cultural
space they created for themselves, threatening to abrogate their existential
values, imaginations, and practices. To better understand these dynamics, a
discussion of the inter-ethnic communication and cultural exchanges of the
Kharkiv literati will follow.
THE “JEWISH QUESTION” AND THE WRITERS’ CULTURAL GRAVITATIONS
The members of the Writers’ Union enjoyed perks and privileges in the form
of paid or heavily subsidized vacation trips, awards, and access to scarce
consumer products and food offered by the Union (Garrard). The Union also
provided the writers with an opportunity to earn additional income by
reading their work at factories before large audiences. The Kharkiv chapter
could afford to send its members to Moscow or Kyiv, where the Union’s
congresses were typically held. Writers’ Union membership was often
employed as a tool of control and manipulation by the “obkom” and the KGB,
yet the writers welcomed these opportunities at the expense of their liberty
and integrity.
Like most of the Union’s chapters, the Kharkiv chapter was ethnically
diverse. Communication and the relationships among Ukrainians, Russians,
and Jews appeared to be peaceful and free of serious conflicts, in contrast to
the constant tensions that could be observed among Moscow literati
(Omel'chenko, Smutnye gody 388). An antisemite and Stalinist, the Russian
writer from Moscow Vladimir Bushin (b. 1924) was shocked by how freely
Viktor Koptylov (1930-2015), a Kyivite, and Andrii Chernyshov, a
Kharkivite, discussed the Jewish question in Koktebel (Crimea) in front of
Volodymyr Briuhhen (1932-2018), a literary critic from Kharkiv with
Jewish-German roots (Bushin).
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Olga Bertelsen
Figure 3. Volodymyr Briuhhen (left), Nina Polons'ka, and Radii
Polons'kyi (right) with the Polish writer Sat-Okh, 1978. Courtesy of the
Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of Ukraine, Kyiv,
Ukraine.26
Indeed, the Jewish question has never been a forbidden topic for Kharkiv
writers. As noted earlier, the KGB used it as a divisive tool and encouraged
the Union’s members who co-operated with the KGB to bring it occasionally
to the surface in their private conversations to identify the position of the
writers on this sensitive topic (interview with Briuhhen, 27 July 2011). As a
result of provocateurs’ attempts, the topic ceased to be difficult. Briuhhen
wondered: “If the KGB, the Communist party, and KGB people in the Union
raise this question daily, why cannot we do the same just for the hell of it? At
least, we can have fun and get humour out of the way” (interview with
Briuhhen, 27 July 2011). Yet, Briuhhen added that Jews were more sensitive
than Ukrainians or Russians to any type of jokes, suspecting antisemitism
(Bloknoty 48). But typically, ironic remarks that were often grounded in the
interplay of words and stereotypes were taken with ease by writers. For
instance, the satirical gift of Aleksandr Khazin (1912-76) helped him
produce a statement memorable among many Kharkiv literati. In his view,
the talented poet Boris Sukhorukov (?-1976) had a unique phenotype,
26
TsDAMLIMU, Fond 781, op. 1, spr. 72, ark. 2.
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possessing both Slavic and Jewish features. This somatic phenomenon
provoked Khazin’s joke: “From the front, Sukhorukov looks like the
organizer of the Jewish pogrom, and from behind—like its victim” (Rakhlin
94). Everyone was aware of Sukhorukov’s rejection of antisemitism. He, like
many of his Russian and Ukrainian colleagues, had a Jewish wife, the poet
Anna Fisheleva (1923-2001). Khazin’s joke was appreciated by Sukhorokov
and his Jewish friends, and has been reiterated by three generations of
Kharkiv literati.
In the 1960s, two Ukrainians and a Jew served as heads of the Writers’
Union: Viktor Kochevs'kyi (1923-2005), Iaroslav Hrymailo (1906-84), and
Muratov (Mel'nykiv 21; Pererva 19; interview with Pererva, 17 July 2017).
The Union’s administration included nine people—five ethnic Ukrainians,
two ethnic Russians, and two ethnic Jews (DAKhO, f.R-6165/1/134/116).
Among the 48 members of the Union, there were 17 ethnic Jews who wrote
mostly in Russian. Muratov and Briuhhen used both languages, Ukrainian
and Russian, and only two writers, Khana Levina (1900-69) and Oizer
Gol'des (1900-66), wrote in Yiddish. Three decades of Soviet russification
and assimilation practices resulted in a dramatic reduction of Yiddishspeakers. Levina’s and Gol'des’s colleagues called them “the last of the
Mohicans,” using the title of James Fenimore Cooper’s book, popular at the
time in the Soviet Union.
The Yiddish-language literary journal Sovetish Heymland, based in
Moscow, was the only outlet for Levina and Gol'des to publish their work.
The journal was quite popular among Yiddish-speakers, but over the years
that followed the 1967 Six-Day War, when the journal was populated with
texts of anti-Zionist propaganda, the number of its subscribers fell
dramatically. With a population of two million, Kharkiv received only 68
copies of the journal for retail sales through the Soiuzpechat' network
(Estraikh 128). With the death of Gol'des in 1966 and Levina in 1969, the
Writers’ Union in Kharkiv had no Yiddish-language writers.
Kharkiv, a crossroads of multiple cultures and languages, nurtured the
literary talents of Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews, but by 1970, its language
space had been narrowed to two languages—Russian and Ukrainian.
Zhabotinskii has argued that “to write in Russian does not exactly mean to
abandon Jewish literature . . . the ‘nationality’ of a literary product is not
defined by the language in which it was written.” He further suggested that
the ethnic origin of the writer means little, and that it is the writer’s attitude
and intended audience that is important. One who does not know Yiddish
but who writes for Jewish people and appeals to them, does not abandon the
Jewish literature. Similarly, Chichibabin has posited that “[t]he place of a Jew
is in a culture, in which he discovered himself” (“‘Da budet volia tvoia’”).
Regardless of the language in which Kharkiv writers wrote, they
contributed greatly to other cultures, writing for and about the peoples of
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Olga Bertelsen
these cultures. An ethnic Russian, Chichibabin was famous for his
Jewdophilia, discovering and falling in love with Israel and Jewish culture
(Stikhotvoreniia 254-57). A German Jew, Briuhhen wrote equally gracefully
and eloquently in Ukrainian and Russian, and translated from French, Polish,
and English. He was surprised when asked whether he gravitated more to
Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, or any other culture, and replied, “You are trying
to fill in the blanks, and there are no blanks in my life. They are all culturally
filled in a variety of linguistic and intellectual ways” (interview with
Briuhhen, 16 July 2015; Briuggen [Briuhhen], Bloknoty 295).
An ethnic Ukrainian, Cherevchenko graduated from the Moscow
Literary Institute and established himself as a subtle Russian poet. His
volume of poems Koleso (The Wheel) published in 1966 demonstrates the
emotional and intellectual depth that astonished his readers. Possibly, the
intimacy of his poetry and a lack of texts dedicated to Lenin or the
Communist Party provoked the KGB to give him an ultimatum: to mature
ideologically and stay in Kharkiv, or alternatively to move to the North “on
his own initiative” (Cherevchenko, “Trava zabveniia”). Cherevchenko
preferred Magadan to the Kharkiv prison. In the North, he reinvented
himself as a translator, translating poetry from Sami, Khanty, Evenki,
Yukaghir, and Nanai languages. Oddly, the years spent in Russia (and later in
Latvia) had transformed him into a Russian nationalist, yet he preserved
warm feelings toward the Kharkiv of the 1960s and his fellow writers,
especially toward his friend Robert Tret'iakov (Cherevchenko, “Trava
zabveniia”).27
An ethnic Russian, Tret'iakov wrote in Ukrainian, having become in the
late 1950s-early 1960s a legend among the youth because of his charismatic
character, poetic innovations, and the intellectualism of his poetry
(Hundorova; private correspondence with Briuhhen, 2010-18; interview
with Mykhailyn, 13 May 2015). He was born in Perm, Russia, but after World
War II, he, with his mother, moved to Ukraine. His Ukrainianness was
nurtured by the atmosphere of the small village of Smila in Kyiv oblast where
they narrowly survived the famine of 1946. In 1961 Tret'iakov published his
first volume of poetry entitled Zorianist' (The Galaxy), joining the ranks of
“shistdesiatnyky.” The Galaxy illuminated the birth of a unique poetic voice,
suppressed in the 1970s to be brought back to life in independent Ukraine
when he published a volume of his intimate lyrical poetry Tobi (To You). His
translations from Yiddish, Kazakh, and Russian astounded professionals by
27 In his most recent poems, “Liubite Rossiiu” (“Love Russia”) and “Gimn rusofobam”
(“The Anthem to Russophobes”), Cherevchenko called on readers to love Russia
precisely because it is being “zoologically hated” by Russophobes, arguing that at the
present time Russia is being rejuvenated as it was during the Peter the Great era. See
“Aleksandr Cherevchenko.”
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their precision and the thorough treatment of the original text. Tret'iakov
remains the only Ukrainian translator of Sergei Iesenin’s long poem “Anna
Snegina,” and his translations of Levina’s Yiddish works helped her reach out
to Ukrainian-speaking audiences (Levina). In 1958, Tret'iakov graduated as
a journalist from Kyiv State University, together with Borys Oliinyk, Valerii
Huzhva, Iurii Iarmysh, and Mykola Il'nyts'kyi. Having embraced the
Ukrainian language and culture, he identified himself as a Ukrainian poet.
Yet, interestingly, he refused to Ukrainianize his last name and to betray the
memory of his father, an ethnic Russian, who went missing in action during
World War II. Humble but emphatic, Tret'iakov wrote, “Do not remove the
soft sign from my last name” (“Ne vyluchaite z prizvyshcha moho toi znak
pom''iakshennia, shcho vam zdaiet'sia zaivym”), a poem that proclaimed his
deep love for Ukraine and asserted his loyalty to his ethnic roots.28
These four writers, Chichibabin, Briuhhen, Cherevchenko, and
Tret'iakov, are only a small sample of the remarkable talent assembled in the
Kharkiv of the 1960s—an ethnically diverse community of writers with
distinct and pronounced cultural and regional affinities, amalgamated and
overlapping multiple identities, intense intellectualism, and inimitable
poetic styles.
28
When Tret'iakov had received his new passport, a bureaucrat insisted that his last
name must be spelled without the soft sign in Ukrainian. The poet rejected the idea,
demanding a new passport.
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Figure 4. Radii Polons'kyi (left) and Robert Tret'iakov (standing right)
in the 1960s. Courtesy of the Central State Archive-Museum of
Literature and Art of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine.29
Most importantly, their friendship blossomed precisely out of this
diversity—differences in ethnic and social backgrounds, cultural
gravitations, bilingualism, and trilingualism. They were new and interesting
to each other, and their shared spatial ambivalence amplified the existential
feeling of togetherness that was so much needed in the space of terror and
state violence. Governed by antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian Communist Party
bosses, the Kharkiv of the “cursed seventies” taught them to appreciate
“literary brotherhood, talent, and professional competence” (interview with
Briuhhen, 16 July 2015). Affiliation with the Writers’ Union was not what
Briuhhen meant by brotherhood. The elitist club had many extremely gifted
writers who elevated the standards of literary product for others. Most
belonged to the Kharkiv post-war generation, and the calibre of their
intelligence and literary gift was indisputable. Their reputation, “organic
culture, intelligence, and talent” left minimal room for moral compromise,
and thus not ethnic solidarity but principles and respect for the literary gift
shaped the writers’ behaviour and the ways they voted at the Union’s
meetings (Filatov, “Khrani tebia gospod'”).
29
TsDAMLIMU, Fond 783, op. 1, spr. 24, ark. 6.
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The writers felt privileged to learn and to advance their skills in the
company of the best, regardless of their cultural backgrounds. They instantly
diagnosed graphomaniacs and developed a subtle understanding and
appreciation of rare talents. In 1962, the Ukrainian poet Vasyl' Mysyk
published a new volume of his poems entitled Borozny (The Grooves). It
became clear to all members that Mysyk’s book was an outstanding literary
phenomenon that deserved to be nominated for Ukraine’s highest literary
award—the Shevchenko Award. Hryhorii Hel'fandbein (1908-93)
enthusiastically supported the nomination, suggesting that Mysyk’s poetry
was innovative, powerfully metaphoric, humanistic, and subtle (DAKhO, R65/1/144/22). The Shevchenko Committee granted the 1963 award
posthumously to a former Kharkivite, the Lviv prose writer Hryhorii
Tiutiunnyk (1920-61) for his novel Vyr (Whirlpool),30 but the unanimous
support of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians for Mysyk’s nomination is telling.
The appreciation of literature rose above possible ethnic pride or cultural
affinities.
One exception worth mentioning is Vishnevskii’s case, reflected in the
minutes of the Writers’ Union meetings. A discussion of his new book 72-i
den' (The 72nd Day) turned into a four-hour battle at the prose section
meeting. The members were divided along ethnic lines on whether the book
deserved to be nominated for the Lenin Award, which was no less
prestigious than the Shevchenko Award. Writers of Jewish origin argued that
the novel was excellent while Ukrainian writers believed its literary value
was modest. Yet the majority was adamant: the book seemed weak and did
not deserve the nomination. Vishnevskii realized that he had overestimated
the value of his novel and withdrew his self-nomination for this award
(DAKhO, R-6165/1/144/27-28).
The writers, however, exhibited astonishing unity in their responses to
graphomaniacs, regardless of their cultural identity, who routinely showed
up at the Union’s headquarters to corner the members and read their work
to them. The members collectively hid from “prodigies,” and their schemes
of escape were strategically planned in advance. Assisted by his colleagues,
the chief editor of Prapor’s poetry department Tret'iakov habitually escaped
from a group of graphomaniacs who were determined to conquer this
invincible fortress, the Parnassus, and to persuade him to publish their
poetry (interview with Tret'iakov, 2 July 1986).
Despite the KGB’s persistent efforts to instill hostilities between
Ukrainians and Jews, the protocols of the Union reveal no signs of
antisemitism or discrimination against Jews. Along with Ukrainians and
Russians, they chaired various thematic commissions and committees and
30 Hryhorii Tiutiunnyk was Hryhir Tiutiunnyk’s brother. The second part of the novel
Vyr was published in 1962, after Hryhorii Tiutiunnyk’s death (Bondarenko).
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were provided opportunities to take advantage of finances available in the
Litfund for research purposes and for vacations that the writers typically
used for completing a new book (DAKhO, R-6165/1/144/11-12). The
writers were generously rewarded for reading poetry before large
audiences, including those at Kharkiv factories. From the Soviet point of
view, their compensation for one concert (7-8 rubles) was a rare
opportunity to earn additional income. Monetarily, two concerts often given
by writers in one day provided 15-20 percent of the monthly salary of a
Soviet white-collar worker. The writers created teams and preferred to
travel to factories in groups. Drained emotionally, they typically celebrated
together, relaxing after such concerts. The groups were ethnically mixed.
Personal affinities and friendships played a huge role in these arrangements,
and the Union’s secretary Olena Lukashova scheduled these trips according
to the writers’ requests. For instance, Aleksandr Kravtsov (1915-83)
enjoyed the company of Hel'fandbein, Tret'iakov preferred to join Kats and
Osmolovskii, and Iurii Barabash (b. 1931) travelled with Galkin (DAKhO, R6165/1/144/15).
Ethnic origin meant little in the hierarchy of the writers’ values. But the
absence of any literary gift or basic humanity provoked tensions in the
community, as Kravtsov’s case demonstrates. Kravtsov was despised by
many, and apparently Hel'fandbein was the only person who could
somewhat tolerate him. On several occasions, Kravtsov became the main
point of discussion at the Writers’ Union meetings. His graphomaniac poetry
was appreciated by few. Worse, Kravtsov, out of professional jealousy of his
talented colleagues, slandered many, spreading insinuations about antiSoviet and immoral poems allegedly written by some members of the Union.
Eventually, Kravtsov’s antisemitic rants put an end to the Union
administration’s patience. Kravtsov was reprimanded for his black deeds
and was obliged to publish an apology in the local press to all he had
offended (DAKhO, R-6165/1/134/). Moreover, Kravtsov’s case illuminated
the writers’ small victory over the KGB. According to some testimonies,
Kravtsov had close connections with this powerful agency, and the writers’
solid unity and intransigence toward Kravtsov’s boorishness and poetic
mediocrity was a personal insult to his supervisors. Kravtsov’s apologies
were accepted but his humiliation was forgotten neither by Kravtsov, nor by
the KGB (Starodub; interview with Tret'iakov, 17 July 1996).
Roman Levin (b. 1939) and Vadim Levin (b. 1933) exemplified the
writers’ gravitation toward and support for literary talent, cases where
considerations of ethnic solidarity were not part of the equation. Roman was
a writer with modest literary talent; Vadim established a reputation as an
extremely gifted poet and thinker, writing poems for children that read as
philosophical parables and were much appreciated by adults (Levin). Roman
was systematically criticized for his mediocre work and “long speeches
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about nothing” at Writers’ Union meetings (Mykhailyn, “Poet v optytsi svoho
chasu”). In contrast, Vadim was praised for his subtle ironic poetry and
protected by his talented colleagues from unsubstantiated attacks. For
instance, at the January 23, 1961 Writers’ Union meeting, Tret'iakov
appealed to some individuals in the older generation of Ukrainian writers
who doubted Vadim’s ability to grow into a serious writer. These members
even questioned Vadim’s maturity, and his ability to read his work before
large audiences, let alone his qualifications to be a member of the Union:
“What kind of poetry can a person write without life experience?” Tret'iakov
mocked this sort of logic, claiming that age never defined the artistic and
intellectual magnitude of poetry: “[Vadim] Levin is thirty years old … and it
would be incorrect to think that he cannot write something [that you want
him to write] because he is not yet fifty” (DAKhO, R-6165/1/134/48).31
Cherevchenko was a vivid example of Tret'iakov’s argument: in 1967,
endorsed by the Union for his literary talent, Cherevchenko received the
prestigious Lenin Komsomol Award, becoming a leading journalist
(“spetskor”) of the Kyiv newspaper Pravda Ukrainy (The Truth of Ukraine, its
Kharkiv chapter), an important outlet at the time. He was only twenty-six
years old (Limonov 102).
The official Communist Party position drastically differed from
backroom schemes and personal attitudes toward the Jews in the “obkom.”
Jews occupied important posts in the Writers’ Union. For instance, in the
1960s Galkin was the trusted assistant of the secretary of the Union’s
primary party cell, a nomenklatura appointment made by the Kharkiv
“obkom” (DAKhO, R-6165/1/144/16). Hel'fandbein led one of the largest
literary studios in Kharkiv despite his past. After World War II he was
chastised for “cosmopolitanism,” falling out of the Communist Party’s favour
because of his panegyrics to Leonid Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. His
literary studio was founded under the umbrella of the Writers’ Union and
located at the Kharkiv factory “Serp i molot” (“Hammer and Sickle”)
(Mykhailyn, “Poet v optytsi svoho chasu”). For decades, Hel'fandbein was
also the chief editor of the Kharkiv newspaper Krasnoe znamia (Red Banner).
Yet behind closed doors, state antisemitism and active measures designed
by the KGB to break alliances and friendships between Ukrainians and Jews
were routine practices of those in power.
High posts in the Writers’ Union came not only with privileges but with
great responsibilities of ideological flexibility, as the behaviour of Union
officials was regimented by the Kharkiv authorities. The political
manoeuvres of Boris Kotliarov (1911-89), who in the 1960s was the
secretary of the Union’s primary party cell, were shameful. At a meeting at
Some party functionaries and older writers identified Vadim Levin’s poems as
“muddy and double-meaning” work (CIA Archive, “A New Freeze” 22).
31
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one of the Kharkiv factories, he explained the Communist Party’s critique of
Ievtushenko’s poem “Babii Iar” (“Babyn Iar”) to the audience as follows:
“Friends, please understand, we all sympathize with Jews who were killed
by the fascists. But according to Ievtushenko, the fascists killed only them
[the Jews], and this is not true” (Rakhlin 70). Kotliarov knew that
Ievtushenko’s poem denounced a very specific kind of killing, genocide, and
a long-lasting tradition of state antisemitism that denied a monument to the
victims of this genocide at Babyn Iar. Yet Kotliarov chose to follow the party’s
talking points and accused Ievtushenko of political short-sightedness.
In the late 1960s, the KGB launched an anti-Zionist campaign,
complicating the lives of many Jews. According to an insider, KGB operatives
also tried to recruit Jews who were willing to penetrate dissident and
literary groups and denounce their members (Usol'tsev, qtd. in Nikash). The
KGB even had special departments whose staff specialized in the “Jewish
question.” They worked on multiple tasks, trying to curtail the Jewish
emigration movement and the dissident movement, and to disrupt the
rapprochement between Jews and Ukrainians domestically and abroad. KGB
active measures threatened the livelihoods of official and non-official
writers of various cultural backgrounds. They all faced a dilemma: to
denounce and conform; or to stay true to their principles and face the
consequences. Some developed close relationships with dissidents in
Kharkiv and beyond, solidifying the image of Ukraine’s writers as Ukrainian
nationalists and Zionists.
SUPRANATIONAL BROTHERHOOD AND THE DISSIDENT MOVEMENT
The beliefs, interests, and fates of many Kharkiv writers were closely
intertwined with those of Kharkiv dissidents. In fact, the writers in this
group could also be identified as dissidents for their civic gallantry and
support of individuals who were persecuted and prosecuted by the KGB. The
dissident movement in Kharkiv was represented by people of various ethnic
backgrounds, but Jews and Ukrainians stood out prominently among
dissidents throughout several decades of late socialism. The leading figure,
however, with whom this movement in Kharkiv is associated most
frequently, was Chichibabin, a former gulag prisoner and a member of the
Writers’ Union who had never become an official writer.
Importantly, the names of Iulii Daniel' (1925-88), Russian poet, Soviet
dissident, and son of a Jewish writer, and Daniel'’s first wife Larisa Bogoraz
(1929-2004), a graduate of the Kharkiv State University’s Department of
Philology, a linguist, and the daughter of a Jewish professor, embodied the
Soviet dissident movement that united Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews. In
fact, the 1965-66 trial of Iulii Daniel' and Andrei Siniavskii (1925-97), a
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Russian writer who, like Daniel', published his work abroad under a
pseudonym, galvanized the dissident movement by establishing new links
among dissidents and writers in Moscow and Kharkiv (Medvedeva).
Although Daniel' served his term in the gulag, he did not become an
active participant in the dissident movement after his return. He remained a
very private person, resisting the assertive environment created by Soviet
dissidents. Unlike many Jewish literati who emigrated from the USSR in the
1970s, he stayed in Russia. He stated: “I am indifferent to the call of blood.
Moreover, I cannot imagine myself in any environment other than [Russian]
. . . My pedigree is Russian, and it is no shorter or poorer than that of the
Golitsyns, the Murav'evs, and others . . . . This is my position, and everyone
has the right to decide for himself” (Medvedeva). Like Daniel', Chichibabin
lived the quiet life of an accountant, although actively communicating with
Kharkiv dissidents and poets of various ethnic backgrounds.
For many like Bogoraz, defending human rights and freedom of speech
became their life mission. Love for poetry and friendships, including
romantic engagements among Bogoraz, Daniel', Rakhlina, and Chichibabin,
created a nucleus and a social glue that bonded many Kharkiv literati. After
Bogoraz’s and Daniel'’s departure to Moscow in 1950, the group was further
shaped by “Chichibabin’s Wednesdays.” In the early 1960s, a diverse group
of poets and writers routinely visited Chichibabin’s seven-square-metre
apartment to chat and to read poetry. The Kharkiv informal literary club
initially included five members: Mark Bogoslavskii (1925-2015), Arkadii
Filatov (b. 1938), Leonid Pugachev (years of life are unknown), Aleksandra
Lesnikova (1927-2008), and Rakhlina (Filatov, “Vdogonku”; Omel'chenko,
“Tam zhili poety…” and Smutnye gody). Later, a graduate of the Department
of Philology, Iosif Gol'denberg (b. 1927), joined the club.32 Chichibabin’s
salon was significantly extended over the years and every gifted person was
a welcome addition to the company.
Beyond literature, intolerance to human rights violations in Soviet
society united these men and women, attracting other Kharkiv writers and
non-writers to their circle. In a sense, the Soviet dissident movement of the
1970s-80s grew out of this initially small group of people in Kharkiv, a fact
of which many scholars are unaware. Due to the members of the 1960s
generation Daniel' and Bogoraz, its centre moved to Moscow, but after
32
Gol'denberg survived the Holocaust but lost all his relatives in Belarus under the
Nazis. In the mid-1960s he departed for Novosibirsk in Russia, where he taught
Russian language and literature in “akademgorodok.” In 1968, after signing a letter
protesting the arrest of the dissidents Aleksandr Ginzburg (1936-2002), Iurii
Galanskov (1939-72), Aleksei Dobrovol'skii (1938-2013), and Vera Lashkova (b.
1944), he was fired and deprived of his teaching privileges (“Iosif Gol'denberg”;
Rakhlin 42).
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Daniel'’s and Siniavskii’s trial, the links among like-minded people, inspired
by Bogoraz’s political activism, extended far beyond Moscow and Kharkiv
(Zakharov).33
A Jewdophile and Ukrainophile, Chichibabin helped expand the
geography of the dissident movement, and its ethnic, linguistic, and political
boundaries. In the early 1970s, he became acquainted with dissidents in
Ukraine—the Kyivites Ivan Dziuba (b. 1931) and Mykola Rudenko (19202004), and the Kharkivites Henrikh Altunian (1933-2005) and Volodymyr
Pasichnyk (1935-2013). Like Chichibabin in 1973, Dziuba, the author of the
pamphlet “Internatsionalizm chy rusyfikatsiia?” (“Internationalism or
Russification?”) was excluded from the Writers’ Union in 1972. In 1975, the
Writers’ Union deprived Rudenko of his membership because of his
relationships with Moscow dissidents and his protests against violations of
human rights in Ukraine. Chichibabin admired Rudenko’s bravery when, at
the peak of Stalin’s antisemitic campaign in 1949, Rudenko refused to
negatively characterize Jewish writers who were about to be dismissed from
the Union.34 Chichibabin shared the views of Altunian, the Ukrainian
dissident of Armenian origin who signed a collective letter protesting against
the authorities’ persecution of General Petro Hryhorenko and demanding
the end of discrimination against the Crimean Tatars.35 Chichibabin also
supported the political activities of Pasichnyk, a Ukrainian poet and
dissident, who in 1964, being a last-year student at Kharkiv University’s
Department of Philology, was expelled for his poetry propagating “bourgeois
nationalist ideology” (Kalynychenko). These acquaintances grew into
friendships that shaped Chichibabin’s affinities toward Ukrainian national
aspirations.
Undoubtedly, these cross-ethnic and dissident affiliations were
extremely dangerous for people like Chichibabin, and further complicated
their professional careers and lives. Yet many members of Chichibabin’s
circle decided to stay in Kharkiv. They were emotionally attached to this
place, a feeling conditioned by their biographies. But there was a deeper and
Ievhen Zakharkov is Marlena Rakhlina’s son and the head of the Kharkiv human
rights group “Kharkivs'ka pravozakhysna hrupa.”
34 Rudenko was a Ukrainian writer, human rights activist, and the founder of the
Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHH). In February 1977 he was arrested for anti-Soviet
propaganda and agitation and sentenced to seven years in camps and three years of
exile. After his release in December 1987, Rudenko emigrated to Germany but later
returned to Ukraine in 1990. For more on Rudenko’s biography and his political
activism, see Rudenko.
35 Altunian, a human rights activist from Kharkiv, was one of the founders of the
Initiative Group on Human Rights in the USSR. He was a political prisoner in 1969-72
and 1981-87 (Altunian; Hel' 324-25; Rakhlin 131). See also Grigorenko.
33
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more subtle connection to the city, nurtured by their uneasy past and
Kharkiv’s multi-ethnic cultural space (interview with Briuhhen, 27 July
2011; interview with Buidin, 18 Dec. 2018). This space, enriched by Taras
Shevchenko, Nikolai Gogol' (Mykola Hohol'), and Sholem Aleichem, brought
them intellectual satisfaction and joy, but it also evoked feelings of
frustration and national humiliation. Because of their shared history and
collective trips to their past—to Skovorodynivka, a village near Kharkiv
where the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda was buried, and to
Drobyts'kyi Iar, where thousands of Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians were
murdered by the Nazis—many learned to appreciate the city and to live with
their ambivalence.36
These activities and communication among Kharkiv literati and
between Kharkiv literati and representatives of the dissident movement
were under constant surveillance by the KGB (HDA SBU, 16/1/985/260). In
June 1969, the KGB uncovered an illegal youth group of 100 individuals
organized by the Kharkiv Jewish intelligentsia. The group maintained
connections with dissidents in other Ukrainian and Russian cities and
allegedly planned an armed rebellion in Kharkiv to take over the Kharkiv
authorities’ buildings and infrastructure, and to arrest 23-30 people among
the Communist Party and KGB leadership. The rebels claimed that
antisemitism was a state policy and planned to execute 70 Soviet party
leaders and Soviet officials at the Union level. They strove to create a new
multi-party political system that would help shape a democratic
nationalities policy in the Soviet Union (HDA SBU, 16/1/985/263-69).
Although the surveillance and arrests of the transgressors were conducted
secretly, the Kharkiv community of writers were aware of the KGB
operation. Many were subjected to scrutiny and were invited to KGB
headquarters for questioning. KGB operatives were fishing for information
and encouraging Jews to denounce Russians and Ukrainians and vice versa.
At the same time, these conversations served two other purposes—possible
recruitment and intimidation. As a KGB officer has argued, it was remarkably
easy to recruit a Soviet citizen whose dependent status facilitated the task
(Usol'tsev, qtd. in Nikash; Kasha).
Typically, the KGB sent a written invitation to the writer’s home address.
The time of the appointment was not discussed; it was assigned. KGB officers
also informed writers by phone about the upcoming meeting. In special
cases, they appeared at the writer’s doorstep unannounced and took him or
36 For a discussion about the influence of Ukrainian culture and history on
Chichibabin, see Dziuba; Peleshenko; for a discussion on the Drobyts'kyi Iar, see
Skorobohatov 74-76; Kovba and Korohods'kyi 189-90. According to these authors,
approximately 12,000 Kharkiv Jews were exterminated there, although the precise
number killed is unknown.
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her immediately to Chernyshevs'kyi Street for questioning. Frequently, the
conversation began by accusing the writer of writing “anti-Soviet” poems
and defending dissidents. Open threats to sentence the writer to the gulag
was part of the routine. For instance, the Kharkiv KGB operative Babusenko,
who threatened to put Altunian in prison (Babusenko kept his word, of
course), employed the same strategies in conversation with Rakhlina and
Chichibabin (Rakhlin 140-41).
Sadly, many writers surrendered their friendships and bonds in the face
of the real danger of imprisonment, especially from 1972-73, a period of
vicious attacks against dissidents, Ukrainian nationalists, and Zionists. In
Kharkiv and at the national level, many men and women were imprisoned
and sent to detention camps. People like Rakhlina and Chichibabin were
intimidated and ostracized. On the KGB’s orders, they were denied
publications. A “New Freeze” began in literature (CIA Archive, “A New
Freeze” 48). In 1973, Chichibabin was expelled from the Writers’ Union for
distributing his poems through “samvydav” and for the public reading of his
poem about Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s (1910-71) secret funeral (“vorovskie
pokhorony”). What preceded the reading was an invitation from the poetry
section of the Writers’ Union, chaired by Kats, to Chichibabin to read his
poems. It would be difficult to establish whose idea it was to invite
Chichibabin. Perhaps the KGB offered Kats the opportunity to finally uncover
“antisovetchik” Chichibabin, who could not help himself—he always read the
most “dangerous” poems in front of any audience. On January 9, 1973
(Chichibabin’s 50th birthday), he read his seditious poems, which were
recorded. At the Union’s meeting, when its members discussed Chichibabin’s
behaviour, Kats was the most vocal accuser. The only writer who supported
Chichibabin was Lev Boleslavskii (1935-2013), but his voice was lost in the
chorus of perturbed literati (Rakhlin 128). The Kharkiv chapter voted almost
unanimously to excommunicate Chichibabin; there were two abstentions—
Tret'iakov and Boleslavskii. Privately, Hel'fandbein told Feliks Rakhlin,
Marlena Rakhlina’s brother, that Chichibabin was a fool: “Who would allow
this and forgive him these poems?” (Rakhlin 129).
On the same day, the Writers’ Union also got rid of another member, the
Ukrainian poet Vasyl' Borovyi (1923-2014). A former political prisoner, like
Chichibabin, Borovyi inspired no trust among KGB officers and the “obkom”
functionaries (Karas'-Chichibabina 137-38; Shelkovyi; Borovyi). Feliks
Krivin (1928-2016), a writer from Uzhhorod (later a citizen of Israel), has
noted with bitter irony that a new category of writers emerged in the
1970s—former members of the Writers’ Union who were expelled as
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dissidents all over Ukraine, an identification that became no less honourable
than membership in the Union (151).37
The KGB operations designed to curtail the nationalist and dissident
movements in Ukraine and to disrupt the unity of the diverse but cohesive
community of intellectuals were implemented until Gorbachev’s perestroika,
in some cases until the very end of the Soviet Union.38 KGB active measures
never managed to segregate the writers along ethnic or social lines, although
the psychological consequences of KGB pressure for some writers were
disastrous. State violence drove some of them into depression and anomie.39
EPILOGUE
Individual and collective reactions of writers to Kharkiv city politics in the
1960s-70s illuminated behaviours that contrast with what has been
described by urban sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Robert Park and
others, Edward Banfield and James Wilson (48-53), and Louis Wirth. For
these scholars, a large city, and especially its political space, was a hostile
environment that inevitably broke ties and bonds of even homogenous
communities. In the Kharkiv case, the KGB’s efforts were aimed at breaking
the ties among the writers along ethnic lines, a strategy that would ensure
state control over assertive nationalists in the Soviet republic. Studying
Kharkiv’s political space and how it shaped the writers’ everyday lives offers
Both Chichibabin and Borovyi have always existed outside the Writers’ Union as
nationally and internationally recognized poets, and their membership in the Union
has never enhanced their fame or influence as writers. Both left “official” literature
in 1973 without any intention to return, but during perestroika in 1987 and 1990,
respectively, their memberships in the Union were restored. The Union’s invitation
for Chichibabin to restore his membership was preceded by Ievtushenko’s phone call
to the Union’s leadership in Kyiv. Bulat Okudzhava, Grigorii Pozhenian, Sergei
Zalygin, and a group of writers from the editorial board of Novyi Mir sent telegrams
to the Kharkiv chapter of the Writers’ Union, demanding that its administration
restore Chichibabin’s membership. The Union’s meeting occurred on October 30,
1987, and those who had excluded Chichibabin 14 years ago voted for his return.
38 See photocopies of KGB reports to the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of Ukraine from 1987 to 1991 in Shevchenko 441-811; and texts of KGB reports to
the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1960 to 1990 in
Vasyl' Danylenko.
39 The French sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the term “anomie” to describe the
condition that prevails when a person’s belief system is ruined and his/her social
norms and values have disintegrated. Anomie leads to social uncertainty, instability,
and impersonality (a result of the pernicious impact of certain political, social, and
economic environments).
37
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Olga Bertelsen
an opportunity to generalize about Soviet political culture and the cultural
politics promoted by the Soviets in Ukraine during the period of reStalinization in the 1960s-70s. The social trends and communication
patterns among the literary elites that were shaped by Kharkiv city politics
are particularly interesting, as the members of this group were typically
associated with independent thinking and the possession of creative minds,
factors that complicated and challenged the tactics and strategies of those in
power.
As we have seen, these factors, augmented by the Khrushchev Thaw, led
to a conflict between the authorities and the intelligentsia, whose
approaches to differences in ethnicity, nationality, and identity varied
dramatically. For the local authorities, such differences served as a method
of control and regimentation; for the literati, these differences were
associated with diverse literary innovations and views that expanded the
national spaces in Kharkiv. Jewish space was extended through translations
of Yiddish texts into Ukrainian and Russian, and Russian-Ukrainian
intellectual exchanges were expanded through mutual translations, shared
intellectual affinities, and shared interests. The consistency and fluidity of
inter-ethnic rituals and practices aggravated KGB operatives who sought to
understand the logic behind the writers’ gatherings and the literary uses of
languages that, in the KGB’s view, were inconsistent with the writers’
cultural backgrounds. Ethnic Russians adopted Ukrainian as their literary
language and vice versa. Either scenario was regarded with suspicion by the
KGB (Kasha). The adoption of the Russian language by an ethnic Ukrainian
may have suggested a move for self-preservation and careerism, while the
adoption of the Ukrainian language by an ethnic Russian was seen as a sign
of a nationalistic identity and an affinity for Ukrainian national culture
(Adamovich 124-25).
The fluid identities and literary languages adopted by the writers were
shaped by the multi-ethnic spatial specificity of the place, but the most
interesting question is: how did the writers themselves conceptualize this
fluidity and how did it shape their behavioural patterns? Tret'iakov and
Muratov, for instance, knew full well that such fluidity was fraught with
danger, yet they translated works written by Levina in Yiddish, a language
that was doomed and banned in the Soviet Union. In the KGB’s view, this was
a political statement, as was the literary language Tret'iakov and Muratov,
an ethnic Russian and an ethnic Jew, chose. Their use of the Ukrainian
language provoked suspicion and harassment by the KGB in the atmosphere
of state struggle against Ukrainian nationalism in the UkrSSR (interview
with Tret'iakov, 17 June 1996; interview with Tret'iakova, 19 July 2005).
A subconscious freedom of self-expression, fostered by the Khrushchev
Thaw, encouraged Kharkiv writers to behave quite the opposite of what was
expected of them. They were unable to publish an uncensored text, and that
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Crossing Ethnic Barriers Enforced by the KGB
41
was the only realm in which the writers conformed. In every other aspect of
their daily lives, they transgressed, ignoring non-subtle suggestions of
Communist Party functionaries and KGB operatives to “stay away from the
Jews” or “to avoid Ukrainians” (Kasha). Often being drunk and expressing
too much of what was considered an anti-Soviet and nationalist heresy, the
writers were uncontrollable and inconvenient for the authorities
(Romanovs'kyi 62, 65). Dobrovol'skii and Tret'iakov, Bondar and Vadim
Levin, Chichibabin and Hel'fandbein—people of various cultural
backgrounds—wanted not to co-exist, as the KGB suggested, but to co-create
and share their experiences, thoughts, and poetry.
Traversing ethnic boundaries erected by the KGB did not appear to be a
political statement for them (they were quite aware of the consequences of
such behaviour), but rather an everyday practice performed for purely
aesthetic and humane reasons. Paradoxically, living apolitically in the realm
of poetry was nevertheless a political choice. It was their freedom of
aesthetic choice that became a political problem for the KGB because quite a
few of them, like Motrich, lived without noticing the existence of Soviet
power.
The majority of writers certainly suffered from intellectual constraints
enforced by censorship, having to accept the domination of state power over
their professional lives. Locked in silent combat with the state and
intoxicated with alcohol, the writers were captivated by shared practices
that helped them experience an apolitical Kharkiv, rituals that they repeated
almost daily that allowed them to escape from the space of violence
(Miloslavskii; Shatylov; Briuhhen [Briuggen], Bloknoty 73). Saturated with
literature, their communal and private lives belonged to them, or so they
thought.
As in any other Soviet institution or association, there were individuals
in the Writers’ Union who collaborated with the KGB, denouncing people like
Rakhlina, Chichibabin, and Bogoslavskii.40 It is difficult to say whether they
did it out of fear of the KGB, concern for their families, professional jealousy,
antisemitism, or to preserve or advance their careers; all these reasons seem
legitimate and possible. Non-collaborators were haunted by the thought that
their talents and minds might disintegrate under the pressure of the KGB or
that they would be forced to betray their fellow colleagues. As intellectuals,
they were obsessed not with survival per se but with the words that helped
them survive. They could easily become victims or beneficiaries of the
language they used publicly or in private settings. By 1972, they realized that
To many writers, Kotliarov seemed to be one of them. Kotliarov’s name was
codified in one of Chichibabin’s poems (quoted in Rakhlin 69). According to Leonid
Khait (1928-2017), another Kharkiv writer, Arkadii Shkol'nik, denounced and helped
the KGB arrest at least a dozen of his colleagues.
40
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Olga Bertelsen
privacy and constant ideological self-monitoring were unrealistic, and
probably unattainable.
More than thirty years ago, Jaroslaw Bilocerkowycz argued that of two
models of reaction to state violence among Ukraine’s intellectuals and
dissidents—the disillusionment model and the suspicions-confirmed
model—east Ukrainians were most prone to the former (191). Indeed, by
the early 1970s, Kharkiv writers were disillusioned, perceiving their
dependent status as a shared tragedy. This tragic perception generated
friendships, bonds, and literature that shaped their ways of life (“sposib
zhyttia”) until their last days (Briuhhen, “Ia rozumiiu”). Regardless of the
writers’ literary language and cultural backgrounds, they reached out to
each other in hope of professional advice, support, and protection. Mark
Cherniakov (years of life are unknown), Hel'fandbein, and Muratov instantly
sensed the birth of an extremely gifted poet in Rakhlina, and on several
occasions Muratov recommended the Writers’ Union grant Rakhlina
membership, which never happened (Rakhlin 9). Galkin and Kats
enthusiastically welcomed Tret'iakov to the Kharkiv chapter, who at the age
of twenty-two became a Kyiv celebrity, a journalist, and a member of the
1960s generation, willing to relocate to Kharkiv after graduating from Taras
Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (LTPA 1957). These examples of
support are numerous, revealing the emergence of a distinct community of
people, durable and resistant to the ethnic politics of the 1960s-70s.
Indeed, ethnic conflicts in the professional and private space of the
Kharkiv writers in this era were a rarity. As theatre director Starodub has
suggested, “we were raised as internationalists. I look at this woman, and see
not a Jew but a talented beauty.” Jews fell in love with Ukrainians and with
Russians, and vice versa. For instance, the Ukrainian poet Iurii Herasymenko
(1927-85) was infatuated with Rakhlina and, trying to win her heart, was
bringing her huge bouquets of fresh lilac flowers (Rakhlin 9). The muses of
Limonov, Chichibabin, and Dobrovol'skii were Jewish women, extremely
protective of their husbands’ literary talents. These personal relationships
help us recognize that the Kharkiv space was not only multi-ethnic and
multicultural, it was also multi-faceted and polyhedral, a space where Gaston
Bachelard’s metaphor “poetics of space” gains real, romantic, and historical
contours.
As many scholars have suggested, people’s attachments to a place, its
politics, and its myriad of emotionally charged ties and connections shape
their habits, practices, and identities. Similarly, they change this place
through their imaginations, practices, and rituals (Tuan; Musiiezdov 280;
Zaharchenko). As a result of these exchanges, the place becomes less opaque,
acquiring an identity of its own (Banfield and Wilson 60). In the 1960s and
1970s, after a brief period of de-Stalinization, Kharkiv once again became a
place of danger for various ethnic groups, especially for Ukrainians and Jews,
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43
and in this light it was an archetypical Ukrainian city with its formal and
informal practices and a dangerous “mix of integrative and disintegrative
forces” and “balanced pressures of conflict and attachment” (Banfield and
Wilson 60).
The KGB’s covert divide and conquer strategies encouraged the Kharkiv
literati to stick to the Leninist internationalist ideology that shaped their
regional supranational identities and beliefs. Negating ethnic stereotypes
forced on them, and seeking redemption in national culture, art, and
creativity, they adopted two other identities, Soviet and national,
establishing the foundations for post-Soviet modern Kharkiv that still
remains Soviet in many ways (Kravchenko, “Kharkiv: A Borderland City”
250; Westrate).
Ethnicity and politics are related, and their meanings are determined by
the place where they are observed. As one philosopher has argued, “place is
an organized world of meaning” (Tuan 179). At different times, the Soviet
politics in Ukraine impregnated the notion of ethnicity with various
meanings. Crucially, it made people aware of the consequences of these
manipulations. The writers estranged themselves from these manipulations
and focused on what they knew and loved the most—literature (interview
with Pererva, 17 July 2017; LTPA, 30 March, 1957).
Clearly, at no time, no matter what their ethnicity, were writers trusted
by the authorities. The 1960s and re-Stalinization brought the Jewish and
Ukrainian questions again to the surface. Jews imagined a new Holocaust
happening in Ukraine; Ukrainians experienced a new wave of state terror.
Possibly unconsciously, they created a community that might have
withstood state pressures. Moreover, through people like Bondar, who
shared his experiences in the Nazi camps with the younger generation of
poets, the continuity and distribution of historical knowledge occurred,
which made the writers acutely aware of the horrors of the Holocaust and
their shared history. These discussions provided a space for Kharkiv literati
where the process of healing from post-war tragedies and Soviet
divisiveness began.
Most importantly, despite their fear of the authorities, their
inadequacies, their behavioural inconsistencies, and their conformism, the
writers’ post-Khrushchev Thaw romanticism and optimism facilitated the
emergence of a new literature and a new literary community that placed
Kharkiv on the map of world literature, offering readers not its truncated
ethnic image but an image of a place where various ethnic groups could
reside and co-create without major conflicts and strife.
British philosopher Aldous Huxley posited that we can gather and
analyze information about people’s experiences, but never their actual
experiences. Even when people share with us their sensations, feelings, and
insights, they are far from being accurate, because sensations, feelings, and
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Olga Bertelsen
insights are incommunicable (Huxley 12). Huxley was convinced that “from
family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes,” where
suffering and joy are experienced in solitude (13). The case of intellectuals
is even more complicated because their minds are their own places, where
they reside, contemplating the surroundings: “the places inhabited by . . . the
exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and
women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as
a basis for understanding of fellow feeling. Words are uttered but fail to
enlighten” (Huxley 13). Keeping faith with Huxley’s suggestion, this
narrative offers only a glimpse into the Kharkiv writers’ lives during reStalinization, a period when they seemed to lose their interest in Kharkiv as
a place of opportunities and cultural and intellectual freedom, regaining faith
in its cultural potential only during perestroika and the post-Soviet era.
Under terror, they withdrew from political identification, trying to preserve
their humanity, integrity, and literary talent. They experienced a perpetual
crisis of identity, which Huxley would describe as “one continually changing
apocalypse” (21). Chronic intellectual abuse and assault on their national
culture and pride prepared most writers for living in a space of silence for
an indefinite duration. A sense of community, complementarity of interests,
and a shared attachment to Kharkiv and their past let people like Briuhhen
and Tret'iakov, Chichibabin and Rakhlina, rejuvenate their authentic voices
and continue to write.
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45
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Archives
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Boltryk, Serhii. 11 Nov. 1996. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Russian.
Briuhhen, Volodymyr. 2 July 2011; 27 July 2011; 16 July 2015. Kharkiv. Interviews conducted
in Ukrainian.
Buidin, Gennadii. 18 Dec. 2018. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Russian.
Ievtushenko, Ievgenii. 16 May 1988. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Russian.
Kasha, Aleksandr. 5 July 1985. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Russian.
Marchenko, Oleksa. 19 July 2004. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Ukrainian.
Mykhailyn, Ihor. 13 May 2015. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Ukrainian.
Pererva, Anatolii. 17 July 2017. Kharkiv. Interviews conducted in Ukrainian.
Polons'kyi, Radii. 16 May 1988. Kharkiv. Interviews conducted in Ukrainian.
Starodub, Anatolii. 12 Aug. 2008. Kharkiv. Interviews conducted in Ukrainian.
Tret'iakova, Lidiia. 19 July 2005. Kharkiv. Interview conducted in Russian.
Tret'iakov, Robert. 2 July 1986; 17 June 1996. Kharkiv. Interviews conducted in
Ukrainian.
© 2020 East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (ewjus.com) ISSN 2292-7956
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Olga Bertelsen
Private correspondence
Briuhhen, Volodymyr. 2010-2018. Correspondence via regular mail. Kharkiv,
Ukraine—Bloomsburg, PA, USA.
Brusilovskii, Anatolii. 1 Sept. 2017. Email correspondence.
Hundorova, Tamara. 29 July 2016. Email correspondence.
Muratova, Ol'ha. 13 Aug. 2017. Messenger (FB) correspondence.
© 2020 East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (ewjus.com) ISSN 2292-7956
Volume VII, No. 1 (2020)