Anti-Soviet encyclopedia
A book has come off the presses in Ukraine, destined to attract all those interested in Ukraine’s 20th-century history. Its Ukrainian title reads Opposition Movement in Ukraine, 1960-90. It is a product of Smoloskyp Publishers, a company with experience in dissident publications, with staff members on KGB records for samizdat exploits, and which helped spread anti-Soviet writings in the West, reports The Day.
This book boasts 804 pages and contains brief alphabetically-ordered references to anti-Soviet activities, focusing on the people who risked their lives because of those actions. The foreword conveniently categorizes them into three groups: (a) the Sixtiers (those who started voicing their anti-Soviet views, mainly through creative efforts, after the death of Stalin and during Khrushchev’s “thaw”; (b) dissidents who protested a variety of social, ethnic, and cultural injustices by disseminating samizdat literature; (c) human rights champions (after the Kremlin had to sign a series of pertinent international agreements) who demanded fair trials for the Soviet prisoners of conscience, their release from prison camps, an end to the persecution of dissidents, and so on. This book contains adequate data relating to Viacheslav Chornovil, Valerii Marchenko and many other individuals that few, if any, remember in today’s Ukraine. Surprisingly, in some cases this data is presented in an unexpectedly pompous manner. The important thing, however, is that this publication is about both the outspoken, uncompromising oppositionists and those who, for various reasons, kept a low profile but kept contributing to the Resistance Movement in Ukraine.
This book contains articles about samizdat almanacs, journals, and other dissident publications. Of course, there were publications in the West that illustrated public activities in Soviet Ukraine, contrary to the Kremlin regulations. More often than not these publications were financed by the Ukrainian Diaspora. Translations were made, so this data could be shared with the North American media.
Remarkably, this book has data about anti-Soviet rallies. Many will be surprised to read about the attempts to organize massive [anti-Soviet] rallies, back in the 1960s and find detailed accounts of Soviet show trials; about legal and illegal organizations, ranging from the Helsinki Group to underground [political] parties. The NGOs at the time were a motley crowd, with a variety of action plans, many of which could be hardly described as political; some wanted to profess their religion, others wanted cosmetic socialist reform, believing that “Lenin’s sound course has been tampered with and must be corrected,” still others wanted national independence. This book shows a concerted professional effort to categorize all this data. Most articles have bibliography references. In a word, this Opposition Movement in Ukraine, 1960-90. stands every chance of becoming a handbook for those interested in 20th-century history, and for casual readers, who want to look up Yevhen Popovych, for example.
