Authors

Stanislav Serhienko¹;  ¹ Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany

Discussion

Research on Ukrainian Soviet dissidents continues to be dominated by a binary approach, and few researchers have shown the embeddedness of Ukrainian dissidents, their practices and ideas in the Soviet cultural environment. However, these studies do not deal specifically with left-wing dissidents. Focusing on three Ukrainian left-wing dissidents - Ivan Dziuba (1931-2022), Yuriy Badzio (1936-2018) and Yuriy Lytvyn (1934-1984) - I examine what forms criticism of the Soviet system took from the periphery, how Marxist language and the language of ethnicity interact in the writings of Ukrainian left-wing dissidents.

They were born in different places - Donetsk oblast, Transcarpathia and Kyiv oblast - but all were well integrated into the Soviet system in the early stages of their lives. It was only in the mid-50s and 60s that they began to criticize the party dictatorship. If their explanatory model in the 1960s can be described as Leninist, by the 1970s they were already gradually moving away from it and attempting to critically revise Lenin's legacy and even elements of Marxism. However, the sedimentation of Sovietism in them goes much deeper.Dzjuba is more cautious, but Badzio and Lytvyn tried to bring class back into focus, but their language of ethnicity and the language of class analysis hardly overlapped. All three shared a primordialist, ethnic view of the nation widespread under Stalinism. They invoked the pantheons of heroes that eventually emerged under Stalin. Although they used Marxist language and invoked true Marxism against the "demagogic" use of Marxism by those in power, they rejected the historicity of the nation that characterized it and accepted it as quasi-natural and transhistorical. This language seemed better suited to opposing the nationality politics of the time. "Non-nationality" or "hybrid" identities do not feature in their world view or are condemned as consequences of colonialism.