In the Labyrinth of the KGB

This book focuses on the writers who lived through the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization during the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Ukraine. The author argues that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multiethnic community of writers.

This book focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s–1970s. 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–1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, “active measures” designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: “The Revolution of Poets” and Re-Stalinization

Chapter Two: Petro Shelest, the Literati, and the “Jewish Question”

Chapter Three: The Writers, the Dissent, and the Human Rights Movement in the West

Chapter Four: The Labyrinths of Silence and Psychiatric Abuse

Chapter Five: The Writers and the Chekists’ Discourse about the Holodomor

Chapter Six: The Years of Timelessness

Conclusion

Bibliography

About the Author