Forums of Dissidence: Ukrainian and Jewish Thinkers in Kyiv and Lviv, 1960s-1980s
This dissertation will focus on the Ukrainian and Jewish “60ers,” or shistdesiatnyky dissident and artistic movement between the late 1950s and the mid 1980s in Kyiv and Lviv. It will look at the stages on which dissident thought emerged, asking why a small group of intellectuals, in broad strokes, moved from a vehement defense of legalistic Leninist principles to a broad advocacy for “universal human rights.” By focusing on a few thinkers– Leonid Plyushch, Semen Gluzman, Viktor Nekrasov, Oksana Meshko, Emmanuel Diamant and the more famous Vyacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Dziuba, Valentin Moroz, and Alla Horska, in whose milieus these dissidents found themselves, this dissertation will reconstruct the places, both physical and more ephemeral, in other words: the forums where their thought developed. Many of these forums are deeply connected to text, language, and a construction of the past: either historical or in memory. At meetings in commemoration of historical tragedies, during poetry reading evenings in apartments in the cities, on the constantly-changing stage of cheaply reproduced underground literature called samvydav in Ukrainian, at criminal trials and in cruel imprisonment, dissidents met other thinkers, other Soviet citizens and created a world of thought which changed and developed over time. Often marginalized in broader stories of European intellectual history of the 20th century, and comprehensive histories of late socialism, this dissertation will situate these Ukrainian and Jewish thinkers in two cities in Soveit Ukraine in broader histories of nationalism (Ukrainian, Zionist, national-communist), Soviet power, Ukrainian history, the development and use of language, and legal thinking, telling a story that is as much Jewish as it is Ukrainian, as much Soviet as it is European, and insofar as dissidents themselves considered it: universal as well.