прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение

национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польшаA New україна самовизначенняFaith? Rights прав человека Agitation, прав наций на самоопределение National национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав нацийAspirations на самоопределение национализм and Self еврей- польшаDetermination україна самовизначення правin человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша українаthe самовизначення Soviet Periphery, прав человека прав наций 1965 на самоопределение-1985 национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человекаправ наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польшаA thesis україна submitted самовизначення in partial прав fulfilment человека of правthe requirements наций на самоопределение for the degree национализм of еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человекаBachelor прав of Artsнаций (Honours) на самоопределение in History, University национализм of Sydneyеврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций

на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение Nathan Stormont национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человекаправ наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша українаOctober, самовизначення 2013 прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення правправ наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав человека прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей польша україна самовизначення прав наций на самоопределение национализм еврей University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Abstract

This thesis investigates the intersection of human rights-talk, national aspirations and their respective origins on the peripheries of the Soviet Empire, 1965-1985. In particular, it challenges the so-called

‘Helsinki Effect’, that a Western discourse of liberalism and human rights was responsible for the demise of the Soviet Empire. Instead, I argue that distinct and organic conceptualisations of human rights existed under developed socialism. These alternative discourses were conceptually divorced from international human rights norms, instead grounded in socialist legality, historical experience, or in regional ideology.

With specific reference to the national concerns and political demands of Ukrainians, Poles and Soviet

Jews, I trace the ideological and historical lineages of home-grown understandings of the right of self- determination, contextualising dissident thought in these nationalities’ own experiences of identity, independence and subjugation.

Image Credits

The front cover depicts a Ukrainian independence rally in 1991. The poster readers: “Ukraine exits the USSR.” Image Source: Kyiv Post: http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/many-still-nostalgic-for- soviet-union-111679.html (Accessed Sept 6, 2013).

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University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Acknowledgements

To my supervisors, Marco and Judith, for your guidance, dedication, inspiration and constructive criticism over the last year—thank you; your input has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Nick for convening, and Julie for her feedback during the coursework phase of this degree.

Special mention must be made to Dr Marika Kalyuga and Mr. Andrzej Siedlecki, Heads of Russian and

Polish Studies at Macquarie University respectively, without whom this thesis could not have been completed. In particular, I am immeasurably grateful to Marika for always providing assistance when it was needed most.

I would like to thank my army of proof-readers: Josh, Anna, Alex, and Michelle, and of course, my parents, for their love, input, tolerance and support.

Thank you to Iryna, for correcting my translations, and for everything. Thank you to my uni ‘comrades’

Annemarie, Claire, Hannah, Henry, Jeremy and Roslyn, and to Efrem, Ilya, Reme and Rose.

The staff at Fisher, Macquarie and Monash University Matheson libraries were all incredibly helpful and patient with my requests and queries; thank you for overlooking the excessive photocopying.

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University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Table of Contents

A Note on Translation and Transliteration Page 5

Introduction Page 6

Chapter One Righting Wrongs and ‘Lefting’ Rights: Polish and Ukrainian Dissent in the Aftermath of the Helsinki Final Act, 1976-1980 Page 13

Chapter Two The Socialist Right of Self-Determination: Theory and Practice in Soviet Ukraine, 1965-1975 Page 34

Chapter 3 “Let My People Go!” Polish and Soviet Jewish Answers to the National Question, 1970-1985 Page 52

Conclusion Disappointed Love Page 65

Appendix Page 68

Bibliography Page 69

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University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

A Note on Translation and Transliteration

In this thesis, I have adopted a simplified method of transliterating the Cyrillic Alphabet. Due to minor differences between the Russian and Ukrainian variants of Cyrillic, sources and names have been transcribed according to the following table:

Ukrainian Russian А Б В Г Ґ Д Е Є Ж З И А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й A B V H G D E Ye Zh Z Y A B V G D E Yo Zh Z I Y

І Ї Й К Л М Н О П Р С К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф I Yi J K L M N O P R S K L M N O P R S T U F

Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ь Ю Я Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я T U F Kh Ts Ch Sh Shch ‘ Yu Ya Kh Ts Ch Sh Shch ‘ Y ‘ E Yu Ya

Polish, which uses the Latin alphabet, has been reproduced accurately with the necessary diacritics.

All translations from Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, unless otherwise stated, are my own. I have endeavoured, as often as possible, to retain references in the original language; when referred to in-text, I will generally use the English translation.

The region of Central-Eastern Europe, until the Second World War, was characterised by its ethnic diversity; as such, the names of towns and cities often have a number of variants. Keeping with the underlying focus of this thesis, I have adopted, primarily, the Ukrainian names of Ukrainian places, and the Polish names of Polish places, with the exception of cities which have an established English name. Therefore I use Kyiv, not Kiev; Kharkiv, not Kharkov; Gdansk, not Danzig, but Moscow, not Moskva, and Warsaw, not Warszawa.

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University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self-Determination in

the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Introduction

I don’t regret, no, that I was a Marxist –

In life I have sought a new faith.

And without faith, who are we?

Only beasts,

With brains feeble, undeveloped.1

These words were penned by the Ukrainian poet and dissident Mykola Rudenko on January 29th, 1976 as the opening lines of his samizdat (self-published) poem The Cross. Rudenko’s verse was revolutionary, but not simply for its rejection of Marxist doctrine, nor its religious undertones or the fact that it was self- published by an author outside the oppressive stylistic influence of the Writers’ Union of the Ukrainian

Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). Rather, this verse was radical insofar as it advocated an alternative to

Soviet socialism, a ‘new faith’—although Rudenko remained elusive as to what this new faith entailed.

Rudenko was not the first to employ the allegory of a ‘new faith’ in the political life of Central-Eastern

Europe. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, for example, had used the phrase to describe the clandestine spread of communism in inter- and post-bellum Europe, drawing parallels between socialist agitators in

France and the early apostles and proponents of Christianity in the pagan Roman Empire.2

1 Mykola Rudenko, Khrest (Baltimore: Smokoskyp Publishers, 1977), p.1 2 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, Jane Zielonko (trans.), (London: Secker and Warburg, 1953), p.xi and throughout. “In the peoples’ democracies, the communists speak of the “New Faith,” and compare its growth to that of Christianity in the Roman Empire. There has been instituted in France a group of worker-priests, who do regular work in the factories and bring the Gospel to the labouring masses while sharing fully in their living conditions. A large proportion of these men have abandoned Catholicism and been converted to communism.” 6 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

In the decade preceding Rudenko’s poem, a ‘new faith’ had indeed been gaining ground in dissident circles both in the Soviet Union and its socialist satellite states. Imbued with the weight of Moscow’s ratified international covenants, and particularly with the Helsinki Accords, human rights advocacy possessed a strong ‘magnetic influence’ on intellectuals.3 Like socialism, or Christianity before it, this ‘new faith’ offered an ideal considered to be utopian; like socialism in opposition to bourgeois capitalism, or

Christianity to Roman paganism, rights-agitation was met with repression in the Eastern Bloc, yet managed to become a broad transnational movement. Rudenko had previously been involved with Amnesty

International in the Soviet Union, and within eleven months of writing these lines became a major evangelist in the dissemination of this new faith in his native Ukraine.

On November 9th, 1976, in a leafy suburb on the outskirts of Kyiv, Rudenko, along with nine other like- minded colleagues, signed into existence the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the

Helsinki Accords (Українська Громадська Група Сприяння Виконанню Гельсінських Угод). His fellow dissidents were primarily intellectuals and former political prisoners. One, Pyotr Grigorenko, to whom The Cross was dedicated, served as a General in the Red Army. Others, like Levko Lukyanenko and

Ivan Kandyba, had served long periods in the gulag. The Ukrainian Helsinki Group was the second such collective, after a Helsinki committee in Moscow, to be formed in the Soviet Union; and in the following weeks other such groups were established in the provincial republics. A Lithuanian Helsinki Group was declared on November 25, 1976, followed in January, 1977, by a Georgian monitoring group.4 By mid-

1977, Helsinki Watch Groups were operating in the Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Georgian and

Armenian Soviet Republics.5 Although no sustained collective dedicated by name to monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Final Act appeared in Poland until after September 1979, students and workers formed numerous committees in 1976 with the aim of safeguarding civil, political and economic rights in the Polish People’s Republic. The most enduring, from whence spawned the Polish Helsinki

Watch, was the Workers’ Defence League (Komitet Obrony Robotników) (KOR). Each group was

3 Miłosz, The Captive Mind, p.xi 4 Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights and the Demise of Communism (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.163-164 5 Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, p.164 7 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 committed to ensuring state compliance with these international norms, and to the protection of civil and political rights within a certain geopolitical entity. These alternative networks distributed declarations, reports and memoranda in the language of their respective republics. Furthermore, the Helsinki Monitoring groups were staffed by known ‘nationalist’ agitators, and, despite their transnational character, often promoted a national-based view of human rights: particularly the assertion of the denied right to national- cultural autonomy and the need for self-determination to defend minority rights from Soviet persecution. A decade after their conception members of the Helsinki committees across the Soviet Union would be instrumental in the push for independence in Kyiv, Tbilisi, Yerevan and Vilnius.6

But how new was this faith? Until recently, the historiography of the human rights discourse in socialist

Europe has been dominated by the misunderstanding that dissidents were wholly influenced by Western liberalism: that an enlightened West liberated the barbaric East through a discourse of democracy and civil and political rights. Istvan Pogany exemplifies such an approach: “The collapse of Communist regimes through Central and Eastern Europe,” in Pogany’s opinion was a “moral triumph; a victory of the values of liberalism, human rights and market economics over an alien and collectivist ideology.”7 More recent surveys, such as Daniel C. Thomas’s The Helsinki Effect (2001) and Sarah Snyder’s Human Rights

Activism and the End of the Cold War (2011) attribute the demise of developed socialism to the impact of international human rights norms and an overhaul in state-individual relations. Both ignore, however, the rich tradition of rights-talk in socialist Europe before Helsinki. Instead they emphasise the role of the

Conference of Security and Co-Operation in Europe’s (CSCE) Helsinki Accords as a catalyst for human rights-based dissent.

Such a view in my mind is inadequate. In this thesis my aim is to investigate alternatives to the ‘Helsinki

Effect’, as Daniel Thomas called it. Although undoubtedly influential on the emergence of a coherent

6 Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, pp.163-164 Thomas notes that six of the nine members of the Ukrainian Public Group had been imprisoned for ‘underground nationalist activities’ (p.163); he also notes that Georgian Helsinki Watch Group founder Zviad Gamsakhurdia was a prominent nationalist agitator throughout the 1980s and very prominent in Georgia’s post-Soviet independence. 7 Istvan Pogany, Righting Wrongs in Eastern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p.1 8 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 opposition movement in the Eastern Bloc, international human rights norms were not the sole catalyst of action under developed socialism. Nor is it correct to assume that an organic human rights discourse did not exist in dissident and official circles within the Soviet Union and its satellite states. The three case studies that I offer in the following chapters each address a different aspect, or alternative basis, for rights talk in the peripheries of the Soviet Empire, as examples that synthesise human rights talk and social dissent. As I demonstrate, these alternatives were largely grounded in socialist legality or in local historical and ideological experience, and were conceptually divorced from the norms of international human rights.

Although, in his poetry, Rudenko personally rejected Marxism, the movement he led represents a continuum from an earlier generation of dissent. Membership in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group included a number of dedicated Marxists, and their tactics and conceptualisations evoked socialism and socialist legality more often than international human rights norms. The underpinning theme of this thesis relies on the notion of national rights, but more specifically on the right of nations to self-determination.

The three case studies I have chosen exist on the cultural and geographical peripheries of the Soviet

Empire, and represent the most vocal, pre-glasnost generation of dissent in developed socialism: covering roughly the period 1965-1985. Particularly, Ukrainian, Polish and Soviet Jewish understandings of self- determination, and national rights more broadly, will be investigated. Central to this thesis is the question: how did dissidents conceive the right of self-determination, and the related facets of national-cultural autonomy, in a developed socialism in which the state had failed to ‘wither away’? Considering that many of the dissidents discussed—from Levko Lukyanenko, to Adam Michnik and Natan Shcharansky—would later have significant political influence in the ‘new states’ of Ukraine and Poland, as well as in Israel, this question has much relevance. While aspects of an organic conceptualisation of human rights in socialist societies have recently been examined by Paul Betts, Benjamin Nathans, and Mark Smith, scholarship has remained virtually silent on the intersection of these understandings and the right of self-determination.

When the relationship between human rights, developed socialism and self-determination has been approached, as it has been briefly in immediate aftermath of Helsinki by Arie Bloed and Fried van Hoof,

Dina Zisserman-Brodsky, and most recently (2013) in an edited volume compiled by Friederike Kind-

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University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Kovács and Jessie Labov, this treatment has been cursory at best.8 Likewise, while the historical lineage of

Soviet dissent has been thoroughly documented by Jay Bergman, with comparisons drawn to the pre- revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, no study has adequately addressed the historical influences on the emergence of the Helsinki monitoring groups and their ideological contexts.9 My study attempts to close this gap by contributing an analysis of the ideological and historical lineages of dissidents’ conceptions of the right to self-determination, and national rights more broadly, on the Soviet periphery.

Poland and Ukraine have been chosen, aside from the practicalities of my linguistic abilities, because they provide a perfect microcosm of the complexities of national consciousness and historical experience in

Eastern Europe. As examples within the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, respectively, Ukraine and Poland could easily represent, for example, the Belorussian SSR and Hungary, or more broadly speaking, any

European Soviet Republic and any nation subjugated to Soviet rule at the close of the Second World War.

Furthermore, the vast differences in their relations with Europe, and in their own experiences of independence and identity—still strikingly relevant, for example, in post-Soviet Ukrainian politics— provide fertile ground for a comparative analysis of the origins and conception of a national consciousness in the movement which toppled the Soviet Empire. The experiences of Soviet Jewry and their alternative conception of self-determination-through-emigration will also be examined, using examples from across the Soviet Union; the volatile position of Jews in the USSR provides a suitable example of a clearly defined minority’s position on these rights.

This thesis is orientated around three chapters that form a loosely connected, thematic narrative. Each chapter represents a particular theme or case study. The first deals with the nature of rights agitation in the aftermath of the Helsinki Final Act, with a particular focus on Poland and Ukraine. In this chapter, I reject

8 Cf. Arie Bloed & Fried van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, Essays on Human Rights in the Helsinki Process, A. Bloed and P. Van Dijk (eds.) (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985); Dina Zisserman- Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union: Samizdat, Deprivation and the Right of Ethnic Nationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov (eds.), Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism, (New York: Berghahn, 2013). 9 Jay Bergman, ‘Soviet Dissidents on the Russian Intelligentsia, 1956-1985: The Search for a Usable Past’, Russian Review, Vol.51, No. 1 (1992), pp.16-35 10 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 the ‘Helsinki Effect’, placing post-Helsinki rights agitation in its appropriate context, and establishing a continuum with regard to rights conceptualisations, tactics and even membership between the Helsinki movement and earlier generations of socialist dissent. In this chapter too I introduce the first alternative discourse of human rights: ‘second world’ rights, characterised by a belief in socialist legality, and existing parallel to international norms. This theory is extended in the second chapter, where I investigate the notion of a socialist right to self-determination, firmly conceived in socialist legality, in order to trace its ideological impact on Ukrainian dissent in the decade immediately preceding the Helsinki Accords. The final chapter will analyse the alternative rights discourses that were present in Polish and Soviet Jewish dissent, examining the influence of history and identity on rights conceptualisations in these cultural and geographical fringes of the Soviet sphere.

The thesis utilises a number of terms and phrases that require some preliminary qualification. ‘Dissident’ is one such term. As Jacques Rupnik notes, in the context of the Eastern Bloc the word ‘dissident’ is a

Western invention. Its use does not adequately convey that many so-called ‘dissidents’ were not inherently opposed to the socialist system.10 Although I agree with the sentiment, I will employ the term for convenience’s sake. The content of this word also requires definition. Dissent in the Soviet bloc came in many forms. National minorities, religious zealots, Russian chauvinists and democratic socialists could all be counted among the dissident ranks throughout the period in question. However, in line with the national focus of this thesis, I will limit my analysis of dissent only to the political realm. Although often courting religious influence or using religious imagery, the Polish and Ukrainian independence movements were political movements, with clearly conceived political demands. Likewise, although their advocacy often overlapped with the movement for religious freedom in the Soviet Union, I will approach Jews as an ethno- religious group, that is, as a national minority. As the third chapter will demonstrate, Jews primarily considered their right to emigrate as a right of self-determination. The term ‘socialist’ also needs definition.

Throughout the following chapters I will frequently make reference to ‘socialist legality’, ‘socialist rights’, and ‘socialist ideology’, to list a few examples. For the most part, this term refers to the practical

10 Jacques Rupnik, ‘The Legacies of Dissent: Charter 77, the Helsinki Effect and the Emergence of a European Public Space’, in Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov (eds.) Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond, p.316 11 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 application of Marxist ideology in the Soviet Union and its satellites, rather than in reference to socialist ideology on a broader level. In most instances, the word ‘Soviet’ denotes the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics (USSR). However, the term is also used to indicate the ‘Soviet Empire’, the USSR’s broad sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. The ‘Soviet periphery’, therefore, relates to the fringes of the Soviet Union’s influence. Throughout this thesis I analyse national rights and secessionist movements; the decision to avoid the word ‘nationalist’, however, is deliberate. With the exception of the groups discussed in the third chapter, many dissidents—particularly in Ukraine—were reluctant to self- identify as nationalists.

I hope to draw several conclusions from my research. Perhaps most importantly, I seek to dispel the traditional narrative of human rights and dissent in Eastern Europe as being solely the product of the

Western European liberal tradition. Instead, I place Polish and Ukrainian human dissident thought with a particular focus on national self-determination within the context of those countries’ histories. I argue that, rather than being an import from the West, these alternative conceptions were organic and domestic in their origin. Although passing reference will be made to the increasing importance of Western ideals on both

Soviet law and the language of human rights in the Eastern Bloc, I will demonstrate that this influence was comparatively recent. The universal utopianism of socialist ideology, embodying an unshakable belief in the concrete legitimacy of rights enshrined in the Soviet constitution and the historical impact of identity and independence, left a mark on the discourse of human rights, particularly pertaining to national rights, in the Soviet periphery. This impact should be seen as highly influential in dissidents’ conceptualisation of human rights and identity in this region as was the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

12 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Chapter One

Righting Wrongs and ‘Lefting’ Rights: Polish and Ukrainian Dissent in the Aftermath of the

Helsinki Final Act, 1976-1980

Externally, the Soviet Union is the most enthusiastic supporter of the Declaration

of Human Rights, while inside the USSR citizens are still so disfranchised that they

dare not even demand those rights; furthermore, the Declaration has never been

printed in Ukrainian. Externally, the Soviet Union speaks out against colonialism

and for the right of nations to self-determination, while inside the USSR it

smothers any effort of non-Russian nations toward separation from Russia and

toward the creation of independent states. In fact, the actions of the government of

the USSR contradict the very laws of the USSR.

Hyrhoriy Prykhodko.1

In The Helsinki Effect, Daniel C. Thomas has proposed that a transformation in the relationship between state and society, East and West, and spurred by the Helsinki Final Act, was instrumental in the demise of communism in Eastern Europe. Indeed, Thomas notes that this transformation was more important in the collapse of state socialism than both the economic stagnation characteristic of East European life in the

1970s and Gorbachev’s perestroika.2 Although the rights compliance groups that sprang up following the

Helsinki Accords were undoubtedly influenced by the international documents which provided their catalyst, their programmes, existence and aims cannot be separated from the broader spectrum of rights- agitation in the Eastern Bloc. While their manifestos, memoranda and petitions frequently evoked these

1 Hryhoriy Prykhodko, quoted in Lesya Verba & Bohdan Yasen (ed.), The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine: Documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, 1976-1980 (Baltimore: Smokoskyp Publishers, 1980), p.39. This volume is a collection of the publications of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. All references to this collection will hereafter be attributed to the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) and documented according to each article’s name. 2 Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, p.7 13 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 international norms, their content reflected a stronger state of rights that was quite distinct from those enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act. Particularly, post-Helsinki, rights-agitators advocated a brand of rights formally protected by the Soviet legal system, which in turn was grounded in the ideology of Marxist-

Leninism. This notion of ‘second world’ rights was characterised by a belief in the legitimacy of Soviet (or socialist) law, and a conceptual divorce from international norms. In protesting for state compliance with international treaties, post-Helsinki rights-defenders were simply transferring a tried method of rights- agitation, identified by Benjamin Nathans as ‘civil obedience’, from the rights enshrined in local Soviet (or socialist) constitutional legislation to those guaranteed by the ratification of international treaties.3 The inadequacy of Thomas’s model to reconcile post-Helsinki rights-agitation with its pre-Helsinki forebears provides a useful framework for this chapter, and indeed this thesis as a whole. Rather, I will argue that socialist legality provided the paradigm through which dissidents on either side of the Helsinki Final Act could conceptualise rights. This alternative concept of rights existed parallel—and not in opposition—to international norms. Using the Polish and Ukrainian monitoring groups as case studies, this chapter will investigate both how rights-defenders conceived human rights, and how they advocated for them. In line with the overarching theme of the thesis, I place emphasis on dissident understandings of the right of nations to self-determination, and on civil and cultural rights directly pertaining to minority populations.

The aims of this chapter are threefold. Firstly, I will position post-Helsinki rights-agitation in the context of both Soviet rights-talk and post-Stalinist dissent. Rather than denoting an internationally influenced transformation, as Thomas among others has asserted, the dissidents involved in the Helsinki monitoring groups represent a continuum in the long tradition of Soviet and domestic dissent. They utilised similar methods, aims and often even courted membership from the dissident elite. Secondly, I will identify an element of national consciousness from the Polish and Ukrainian Helsinki monitoring groups, in order to argue that, despite being facets in a broader transnational movement, much of post-Helsinki rights agitation was framed around national concerns. These were manifested through the political demands, organisational structure and agitators’ use of language as a political tool. Finally, I will analyse the political demands and

3 Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights under “Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No.4 (2007), p.630 14 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 transnational character of the post-Helsinki rights groups as an example of Marxist-Leninist inspired internationalism. As noted in the introduction, the spread of Helsinki agitation was uneven: three years separated the emergence of monitoring groups in the Soviet republics and the formation of the Polish

Watch Committee. As a consequence, I extend the material parameters of my analysis in this chapter to

Polish dissent contemporaneous with the emergence of the Soviet monitoring groups—to include public letters, petitions and other such documentation disseminated in the Polish People’s Republic between late

1975 and mid 1977. The material basis of the Ukrainian element of this chapter is structured around the official documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Although I deal more broadly with questions of an alternative, socialist conception of human rights, the decision to avoid particular emphasis on the publications of the Moscow Helsinki Group is deliberate. While the Moscow Helsinki Group was the most vocal proponent of human rights in the Soviet Union, attracting much attention from the West, my decision to exclude the Moscow Helsinki Group from analysis is entirely due to this thesis’ focus on national issues, or more particularly, on how dissidents on the periphery of the Soviet ‘Centre’ (to appropriate Miłosz’s term) understood national-cultural concerns through the lens of an alternative discourse of rights.

Helsinki Advocacy in the Context of Soviet Rights-Talk and Post-Stalinist Dissent

Central to the prevailing scholarship on the role of human rights in the collapse of communism is the assumption, championed by Daniel Thomas and later Sarah Snyder, that human rights cannot be divorced from international norms. Under this model, with the publication of the Helsinki Final Act dissidents in

Eastern Europe were imbued virtually overnight with the spiritual weight of international obligations, and were inspired to a new form of action characterised by transnational organisations and Western liberal conceptions of human rights. This new form of action was not “riding a pre-existing wave of opposition activity,” but instead invoked international norms in order to court a disengaged population at home, and garner attention and influence from abroad.4 The influence that international norms had in the formation of

Helsinki monitoring groups cannot be understated. The primary declaration of the Ukrainian Public Group,

 Miłosz employed this term to refer to Moscow (and the Soviet Union more broadly) when discussing Russia’s militaristic and ideological domination of Central-Eastern Europe. Cf. Miłosz, The Captive Mind 4 Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, p.119 15 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 for example, was prefaced with an extract from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

(UDHR), and, in addition, invoked it throughout the text.5 Likewise, the earliest Helsinki advocate groups in Poland—notably the Youth Committee for the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement—framed their publications around communist Poland’s obligation to uphold the international treaties to which it was signatory.6 However, Thomas’s thesis should not be overstated either. International norms, expressed and reaffirmed in international legislation, were not readily accessible to citizens behind the Iron Curtain. The

UDHR, for example, had not been translated into Ukrainian; likewise, as Thomas concedes, a Polish and

Czech translation of the Helsinki Final Act had been withdrawn from circulation at Moscow’s behest.7

Conversely, when it was distributed—as it had been in the mid-1950s—the UDHR was framed by the

Soviet regime as a vindication of socialist legality.8 While the UDHR did have an impact on dissident rights conceptualisations, an interpretation of post-Helsinki rights agitation is incomplete without acknowledging the intellectual debt of socialist legality. To attach any weight, as Sarah Snyder has, to the

UDHR or any other international document as being the catalyst for a new brand of rights-agitation in the

Eastern Bloc is to misrepresent the legacy of dissent under developed socialism.9 Rather than constituting a new political movement, post-Helsinki rights agitation represented a continuum in the tactics and conceptualisations that had characterised previous generations of rights agitators in the Soviet bloc.

Socialist legality provided the paradigm by which political demands were voiced; these second world rights were the basis of dissident understandings on either side of the Helsinki Accords. This subsection will investigate the methodology and conceptualisations of rights agitation post-Helsinki, as well as establishing tangible individual links between the Helsinki monitoring groups and previous generations of dissent.

5Ukrainian Helsinki Group, ‘Declaration of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.19 6 For example, see: Youth Committee for the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement, ‘Open Letter to the Participants of the Warsaw Youth Conference – June 19-24, 1976’, in Dissent in Poland: Reports and Documents in Translation, December 1975-July 1977, A. Ostoja Ostaszewski (ed.), (London: Veritas Foundation Press, 1977), p.47 7 Hyrhoriy Prykhodko, quoted in The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.39; Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, p.98 8 Jennifer Amos, ‘The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948-1958’ in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), p.159 9 Ignorant of the previously discussed tradition of rights-talk in the Soviet Union, Sarah Snyder went as far as to call a December, 1965 demonstration supporting the UDHR as the “birth” of the civil rights movement in the Soviet Union. Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.53 16 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Tactics

Post-Helsinki rights-agitators in Poland and the Ukrainian SSR advocated state compliance with the international human rights norms to which socialist governments were signatory. The demand for a fulfilment of the duties imposed by the Helsinki Final Act formed a primary goal for all Helsinki committees. The Declaration of the Ukrainian Public Group, for example, states that its primary task was to accept, compile and disseminate, locally and internationally, reports of breaches of the Helsinki Final Act and the UDHR.10 In actively promoting compliance with international norms, the Helsinki monitoring groups exist within a broader context of Soviet dissent characterised by one key method: ‘civil obedience’.

In opposition to civil disobedience, with its inherent public defiance of specific laws and policies, ‘civil obedience’ was a Soviet practice insisting on, or engaging in, activities, laws or policies formally protected, but actively repressed, by the authorities.11 The eccentric Moscow mathematician Aleksandr Vol’pin was among the first to insist that the Soviet regime take ‘socialist legality’ literally, or, in the words of a contemporary, the first to “demand that the authorities observe their own laws.”12 Indeed, demanding state observance of socialist law provided the pattern of dissent: the very existence of these groups conforms to the notion of ‘civil obedience’. While international documents loomed large in post-Helsinki agitation, it is important to note that the monitoring groups continued to insist on state compliance with socialist legality—using the notion of socialist rights as a justification for their existence. For example, in a petition to the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, the Ukrainian Helsinki group insisted on the legality of its existence, citing Article 51 of the Constitution of the USSR as the legal justification for the formation of the group.13 This agitation for official compliance with the constitutional assurances enshrined in socialist legality extended into dissident methods beyond the Soviet Union. The Polish Helsinki Watch Committee highlighted a discrepancy between the right of association guaranteed by Article 3 of the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic, and actual practice, where the unprovoked refusal by the authorities to

10UHG, ‘Declaration’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.21 11 Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason’, p.630 12 Andrei Amal’rik, quoted in Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason’, p.631 13 UHG, ‘A Petition’, in The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, pp.24ff. 17 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 register trade unions such as ‘Patronat’ in 1977 resulted in the ‘illegal’ association of these groups.14

Operating within the context of ‘civil obedience’, the Helsinki monitoring groups simply transferred the focus on compliance from constitutional legislation to their governments’ international treaty obligations.

While the language that they employed may have changed, the fundamental tactics of the Helsinki monitoring groups had not; as a consequence, the presence and activities of these groups cannot be separated from those of their dissident forebears.

Conceptualisations: Socialist Rights

The Helsinki Final Act provided a convenient and universal rights language, through which agitators could freely and uniformly vocalise their demands. However, it was not the sole influence on dissent in the

Eastern Bloc. Indeed, both socialist theory and legality possessed a very rich tradition of rights talk, existing parallel to international norms. The status and compatibility of human rights in the socialist mindset should be viewed through the twin lens of theory and practice.

At its broadest level, socialist ideology had a clear understanding of the status and compatibility of human rights. Central to this issue is the question, posed by Benjamin Nathans, of how a discourse of human rights—“the lingua franca of liberalism”, was employed in an illiberal society—or, broader still, in an ideology innately positioned in opposition to liberalism.15 Indeed, owing to the inherent opposition between socialism and liberalism, several aspects of the liberal rights rhetoric were rejected by socialist ideologues.

One such example is the idea of pre-social rights, that is, the belief that men inherently have some rights in a state of nature preceding the emergence of a society.16 Tainted by the experience of practice, a lingering supposition in the Western world has seen the relationship between socialism and human rights sidelined to the status of lip-service: such a view fails to recognise the importance placed, in socialist theory, of the role of human rights in the socialist ideal. If we consider this ideal to be utopian—that is, an attempt to create a

14 Polish Helsinki Watch, Prologue to Gdansk: A Report on Human Rights by the Polish Helsinki Watch Committee, (New York: U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1980), p.19 15 Benjamin Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, Stefan- Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (2010), p.168 16 Tom Campbell, The Left and Rights: A Conceptual Analysis of the Idea of Socialist Rights, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p.106 18 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 perfect world—human rights attained a vanguard status in the coming socialist revolution. Indeed, human rights in the socialist mindset was strongly linked with the promotion of world peace—as opposed to the

Western view of human rights as a safeguard for the freedom and well-being of the individual, socialism placed emphasis instead on the role of human rights in the collective good.17 Soviet Premier Leonid

Brezhnev, in a 1973 speech, declared socialism a liberating force.18 Similarly, the Soviet lawyer Vladimir

Kartashkin argued that human rights and socialism were not simply compatible, but instead a necessary union:

Only in the countries where socialism has triumphed their citizens are genuinely guaranteed human rights and freedoms

through the elimination of the exploitation of man by man and the development of socialism democracy. These rights are

not merely proclaimed in the socialist countries’ constitutions or other legislative acts, but are guaranteed and

implemented. This has been achieved through the creation of the appropriate material conditions and the availability to

citizens of the concrete means of their realization.19

Likewise, faced by a growing dissident movement, and being signatory to the same human rights documents as the West, the socialist East had to justify its position on an international stage. This was attempted through emphasis on the ‘moral-unity’ of socialism and by stressing to domestic and international opponents, as Kartashkin did, that the only real human rights were socialist rights.20 The emphasis on both economic rights and the collective good are defining features of the theoretical socialist conception of human rights. Economic concerns underpinned socialist understandings, both in the Soviet

Union and its satellites states. The so-called ‘Stalin’ Constitution, issued in 1936, was revolutionary insofar as it framed economic rights (that is, the guarantee of material welfare) in the same language used to provide traditional civil and political rights.21 Importantly, the provision of welfare as a basic economic right underscored official understandings: “no right could have practical value without an explicit

17 Bloed & van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, p.31 18 Bloed & van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, p.31 19 Vladimir Kartashkin, ‘International Relations and Human Rights’, International Affairs (Moscow, 1977), quoted in Arie Bloed & Fried van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, p.32 20 Mark B. Smith, ‘Socialist Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev’, Humanity, Vol. 3 (Winter, 2012), p.391 21 Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, p.171 19 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 commitment from the state to ensure the material prerequisites of its realization.”22 In other words, the right to freedom of opinion was useless to an author who lacked the material conditions necessary to sustain himself. A preoccupation with economic rights was utilised by the socialist states as an ideological tool to expose Western poverty as a violation of fundamental human rights.23 The ‘collective good’ was defined broadly in socialist theory along economic lines. As Tom Campbell, in The Left and Rights, notes, socialism is frequently charged with sacrificing the ‘absoluteness’ of individuals’ human rights for the societal progress or general welfare: “Socialists, it is said, override free speech in the interests of political change, sacrifice the lives of those who represent the old order in times of social transition and, in general, withdraw human rights from those who oppose the policies of socialist governments.”24 Such a view,

Campbell argues, is ungrounded, the product of “empirical generalisations about what happens in so-called socialist states”, rather than from a detailed analysis of socialist theory.25 Campbell notes that the provisional denial of an individual’s rights on the basis of social or political cohesion can be found in the

West: for example, in the fact that a person’s right to life and capital punishment for a serious crime are not considered to be mutually exclusive.26 Such a clear lack of consensus manifested predominantly on an official level in developed socialism. This could be seen, for example, in the denial of an officially prescribed constitutional right for the benefit of social cohesion—like the retention of territorial integrity at the expense of a peoples’ right to self-determination, or safeguarding political stability at the cost of one dissident’s right to freedom of expression. Socialist theory, therefore, was not incompatible with human rights discourse, but instead appropriated it along economic lines in promotion of the perceived common good, cast in terms of the lesser interests of the majority over the major interests of the minority.27

With regards to the practical expression of human rights, socialist legality—the legal system of socialist states—was publicized by both dissidents and the authorities to be the ultimate expression of human rights.

22 Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, p.172 23 Paul Betts, ‘Socialism, Social Rights and Human Rights: The Case of East Germany’, Humanity, Vol. 3, (Winter 2012), p.410; Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, p.171 24 Campbell, The Left and Rights, p.114 25 Campbell, The Left and Rights, p.114 26 Campbell, The Left and Rights, p.115 27 Campbell, The Left and Rights, p.118 20 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

The Soviet Constitution, in particular, afforded a series of rights to all citizens of the USSR. Unlike their

Western European counterparts, however, socialist rights were conditionally enfranchised. In the twenties and thirties, constitutional rights had been restricted to members of a certain socioeconomic class (namely workers and peasants), or been provided on the basis of completion of certain constitutional duties—for example, the important duty of labour.28 Although this ‘rights-duties nexus’ continued to pervade socialist understandings of basic rights for decades, by the 1970s it had been superseded by the notion that socialist rights were enfranchised to all peoples on the basis of citizenship.29 This transition was apparent not in the official legislative language, but in popular opinion. The major constitutional amendments of 1936 and

1977 were accompanied by broad public discussions on the fundamental rights (and duties) of all citizens.

In the post-Stalinist period, popular conceptions of the enfranchisement of rights shifted from being determined by one’s socioeconomic status or the fulfilment of duties, to being universally guaranteed by citizenship. While this change was certainly in part influenced by post-war international norms, it was already well-established by 1975. The dissident movement, as will be examined in the second chapter of this thesis, was firmly convinced of the legitimacy of socialist legality as the provider and protector of basic rights, and interpreted these enshrined rights literally: the very method of ‘civil obedience’ confirms this.

Persecution of dissidents for exercising formally protected rights only strengthened their resolve. Rights agitators believed that they were truthfully upholding the Leninist principles afforded to them by law, indeed often being charged—as was Valeriy Marchenko, amongst others—with anti-Soviet propaganda.30

The Helsinki monitoring groups emerged, therefore, into the context of a discourse characterised by a shifting lack of consensus regarding the content, enfranchisement and enforcement of basic human rights.

This context will be further examined with specific reference to Ukrainian understandings of the right to self-determination in the following chapter.

28 Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, p.171 29 Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, p.171 30 UHG, ‘Memorandum No. 1’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.38 21 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Membership

The founders and individuals who participated in the Helsinki monitoring groups were predominantly members of the disorganised movements of dissent that appeared in the aftermath of 1968. Consequently, post-Helsinki rights-agitators should not be viewed as a ‘new generation’ of dissent, but rather a new expression of it. The personal, or individual, links between these Helsinki advocates and an earlier generation of dissenters is visible in the membership of these committees. Certainly, dissidents involved in the post-Helsinki rights monitoring groups came from a variety of backgrounds, but primarily they were members of the intelligentsia: writers, poets, lawyers and academics. It is also not surprising that many of them were experienced dissidents, well versed in the production and distribution of samizdat literature.31 In

Poland, in the wake of Helsinki, public figures such as the prominent writer Jerzy Andrzejewski spoke out in defence of workers’ rights. His former collaboration with the communist regime in Poland had seen

Andrzejewski derided by Miłosz as a ‘respectable prostitute’, but he went on to become a vocal founding member of KOR, the organisational progenitor of the Polish Helsinki Watch Committee.32 In the Ukrainian

SSR, the monitoring group was founded by Rudenko, the renowned poet. Another prominent founding member was the lawyer and former political prisoner Ivan Kandyba. He had been a founding member of the illegal Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union, established in 1959 by a group of Western Ukrainian law students. The primary aim of the group was to agitate for the secession of the Ukrainian SSR from the

Soviet Union through constitutional means—namely in taking advantage of Article 17, which granted the

Union republics the right to freely secede.33 Lev Lukyanenko was another founding member of both the

Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union and the Helsinki Public Group; his death sentence for anti-Soviet

31 The occupations of the founding members of KOR in Poland were as follows: two writers, a poet, a historian, a chemist, a barrister-at-law, a teacher and a former politician. The occupations of the founding members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group were: a teacher, a microbiologist, a poet (Mykola Rudenko), an electrical engineer, a historian, a former political prisoner, two lawyers, a former Red Army General (Pyotr Grigorenko) and an author of science fiction novels. Respectively, ‘Founding Document of KOR’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.83; UGH, ‘Memorandum No. 1’, in The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.31 32 Jerzy Andrzejewski, ‘To the Persecuted Participants of Workers’ Protest’, in Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.75. Andrzejewski features as ‘Alpha’ in Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. See the chapter ‘Alpha’, in The Captive Mind. From the late 1950s Andrzejewski would be prominent in dissident circles in Poland, and was first signatory to the founding document of KOR (Dissent in Poland, p.80ff.) 33 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.112 22 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 agitation had been commuted to fifteen years’ imprisonment, which he had served in full in Mordova.34

Other members of the dissident elite, namely the poet Vasyl’ Stus would later join the Ukrainian Helsinki

Group soon after its inception.35 In founding or joining these monitoring groups, post-Helsinki rights agitators established a personal continuity with an earlier generation of dissenters: they had previously been published in samizdat journals, or were highly respected ideologues in their own right.36 Furthermore, across the Eastern Bloc those responsible for the Helsinki monitoring groups actively attempted to court support from members of the dissident-elite. The Moscow Helsinki Group, for example, had approached

Andrei Sakharov to act as its leader.37 In Ukraine, this role was taken by the public figure Pyotr

Grigorenko, who was well known in the West and acted as the group’s representative in Moscow.38 Keenly aware of national concerns, Grigorenko was an active defender of the rights of national minorities, and had campaigned for the cultural autonomy of the displaced Crimean Tartars.39 In light of all of these networks of generational and regional connections, Helsinki monitoring cannot be divorced from this individual context. Rather than constituting a new movement, or a ‘new faith’, these groups were intrinsically linked to both pre-existing dissident circles and pre-existing understandings of human rights in a socialist context.

The Helsinki Monitoring Groups and National Consciousness

Although a wide transnational movement, rights-agitation in the period following the Helsinki Accords was often orientated around national issues, with the Helsinki monitoring groups regularly displaying a clear national consciousness. This national-based view of rights was directly informed by the socialist understanding of the centrality of self-determination in the human rights discourse. As the second chapter will expand upon, self-determination was an integral feature of socialist rights. It was considered the basic prerequisite through which all other rights were exercised—even economic rights. Discerning a national

34UHG, ‘Memorandum No. 1’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.31 35 UHG, Member Profiles, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.264 36Rudenko and Stus were both frequent contributors to the dissident publication Ukrains’kii Visnyk (Ukrainian Herald), for example. 37 Snyder, Human Rights Activism, p.59 38 UHG, ‘Notice of the Formation of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.23 39 See the selected speeches on the national rights of Crimean Tartars in Pyotr Grigorenko, The Grigorenko Papers, (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1973) 23 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 consciousness from these groups is a necessary step in establishing post-Helsinki rights agitation as a continuation of, rather than a schism with, socialist conceptualisations of human rights. This consciousness was expressed through the Helsinki groups’ organisational structure, use of language, and their political demands.

Organisational Structure and Language

I have already discussed the ways in which the Helsinki monitoring groups in Poland and Ukraine were staffed or supported by prominent dissidents, many of whom had a history of persecution for their so-called deviant views on national rights. Naturally, the organisation of these groups would come to reflect an element of ‘national exclusivity’, that is, a preoccupation with national and cultural rights—the right to self-determination, cultural autonomy or their use of native language. With the exception of Moscow, the attention placed on these national rights precludes an interpretation of organisational structure orientated around mere practicalities. Groups did not appear in specific republics or under the name of their respective

Union Republics on the sole basis of political geography. With Poland as a natural exception, for Helsinki advocates in the Soviet Union, where Russian was the lingua franca, the dissemination of documents in the local language of the republic was a political act. This is supported by those groups’ actions: Helsinki advocacy in Georgia, Armenia and Lithuania was accompanied by nationalist agitation.40

Although the Helsinki Final Act and other international treaties provided a convenient language with which to vocalise their demands, Helsinki monitoring groups actively echoed past national traditions. Before citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Polish Helsinki Youth Committee evoked “a tradition of tolerance, freedom of speech and convictions” cherished by Poland for centuries.41 Likewise, the Letter of the Fourteen, signed by fourteen members of Poland’s intellectual elite (including future KOR founders Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuroń), protesting the proposed constitutional amendments of 1975

40 Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect, p.164 41 Polish Youth Committee for the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement, ‘Open Letter to the Participants of the Warsaw Youth Conference’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977 p.47 24 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 contentiously cited Poland’s century-long struggle for independence under the partitions and even the legacy of the Second Polish Republic and its March 1921 Constitution.42

The various declarations and memoranda of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group were littered with references to the national traditions of Ukraine. Memorandum No. 5, issued in February 1977, is a clear example. “The voice of Mother Ukraine thunders in our heart,” the document declared, before echoing the deeds of nineteenth century intellectual heroes such as the poets Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka. The

Memorandum proclaimed: “We prefer to die the way the glorious knights of the Zaporozhian Sich died, the way Taras, Lesya and the Stone Cutter died, having carried out Ukraine’s will, as it had made itself known within their hearts.”43 Likewise, the group’s vitriolic Memorandum No. 5 specifically referred to Taras

Shevchenko as ‘Our Bard’ and freely quoted his anti-Russian poetry.44 Ukrainian Public Group founder

Mykola Rudenko frequently solicited national themes in his poetry. In a verse written behind prison bars and published abroad (tamizdat) the following year, Rudenko addressed the poet Shevchenko, finding solace in his words: “Like a paternoster I repeat to myself your lines, which come from behind prison bars

[...] And suddenly prison seems numbed, and stops for a time...”45 Due to the collective memory strongly associated with Taras Shevchenko, allusions to the poet were a decidedly political act. Despite being a canonical Ukrainian writer in the Soviet mindset, Shevchenko had been used as a rallying point for

Ukrainian nationalists since the 1860s; unofficial gatherings and poetry recitals were frequently dispersed by the Soviet regime, and the poet’s memory elicited a powerful symbolic meaning for both the Soviet administration and Ukrainian nationalist agitators.46

42 Letter of the Fourteen’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977 , pp.16-17 43UHG, ‘Memoranda No. 5’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, pp.71-72. It is worth noting that the UHG’s passion is perhaps not entirely accurate; rather than dying a hero’s death, Lesya Ukrainka died in a health resort in Georgia. 44 UHG, ‘Memorandum No. 5’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.74  The word tamizdat (Russian: тамиздат) literally means ‘published over there’, and refers to documents written by dissidents and originally published abroad. Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, is one such example. After being rejected for publication in the Soviet Union, it was smuggled abroad and published in Italy in 1957. 45 Mykola Rudenko, Khrest; “Siday, Tarase. V Nas Yedyna Maty”, Z Poeziyi „Z Gratamy”, (Baltimore: Suchanist’, 1980) 46 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, pp.113-114 25 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Demands and Advocacy

Existing national concerns directly informed post-Helsinki rights-agitation. Although Polish rights talk was characterised by a predominant focus on civil and political rights, these rights were underscored by a keen awareness of their role in maintaining a distinct cultural identity. A manifesto, signed by 59 prominent intellectuals, including Adam Michnik and Ludwik Cohn, highlighted the importance of these rights:

We believe that the disregard of civil rights may lead to the destruction of general resourcefulness, to the

dissolution of social bonds, to the gradual loss of national identity, and finally to a discontinuation of national

tradition. Indeed, it constitutes a threat to the nation’s very existence.47

The political reality of Poland in 1975-1976 reflected this concern. Proposed constitutional changes, which would codify both Poland’s alliance with the Soviet Union and the legality of imposed socialism, spurred fierce protest from all areas of Polish political and spiritual life. These proposed changes would limit Polish sovereignty, and perhaps had a more immediate effect on Polish dissent than the contemporaneous Helsinki

Accords. Numerous petitions were published by the Polish intelligentsia, each demanding that Poland’s national sovereignty be protected through a disregard of “superfluous” constitutional changes.48 The targeted dissent that followed the proposed constitutional amendments both echoed and evoked previous insurrection. In particular, the political crisis of Poland in 1975-76 mirrored the so-called ‘March Days’ of

1968, both in the spectrum of dissent and in the perceived interference of the state in the national-cultural life of the country. In March 1968, against the backdrop of wider unrest in the Eastern Bloc, the socialist authorities in Poland had moved to ban a performance of national poet Adam Mickiewicz’s play Dziady

(Forefathers’ Eve) on the basis of its anti-socialist and anti-Russian content.49 In both instances the intelligentsia responded with vitriol against these perceived attacks on Poland’s political and cultural sovereignty. The ‘Letter of the 14’, signed by members of Poland’s intellectual elite, declared:

47 ‘The Manifesto of the 59’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.14 48 ‘Letter of the Fourteen’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, pp.16-17 49 Robert Zuzowski, Political Dissent and Opposition in Poland: KOR, ( London: Praeger, 1992), pp.37-38 26 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

The proposed changes to the Constitution are in blatant contradiction to this current of our times. A

unilaterally established constitutional principle providing for the inviolability of an alliance with a

neighbouring state, in the form of a binding internal statute, would reduce the Polish People’s Republic to the

status of formally limited sovereignty. Enactment of this anachronistic notion of political law would threaten

our country with degradation of its political significance.50

In the Ukrainian SSR, where the Stalinist deviation from Marxist-Leninist internationalism was more keenly felt, a national exclusivity of rights was expressed by the Ukrainian Helsinki Group both through whom it aimed to represent, and what it aimed to achieve. The Ukrainian Helsinki Group was much less concerned with the universality of rights, than with those rights’ specific application to the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainian monitoring group appeared, in part, as an answer to the Moscow Helsinki Group’s request for the creation of rights advocacy groups in the Union Republics; and therefore contained a specific national outlook.51 Rather than existing to monitor human rights abuses solely in a geopolitical location, the group declared that it represented the Ukrainian nation, not the Ukrainian SSR, acting beyond its borders to study “the facts of violations of Human Rights with regard to Ukrainians living in other republics.”52 This is a clear example of the question of enfranchisement, discussed earlier in this chapter.

Although such advocacy later extended to cover human rights abuses in other national minorities, the

Ukrainian Helsinki Group limited its scope—and thus, implicitly, the role of protecting the rights enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act—to their compatriots.53 Ilya Prizel has noted that this preoccupation with national issues created an ‘other’ in Russophone Eastern Ukraine, where rights advocates tended to concern themselves with very broad issues of human rights and social justice.54 National rights underpinned the demands of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group; the demand for self-determination, for equal representation at international conferences and the desire to publicise the perceived ‘ethnocide’ of Ukrainians under Soviet

50 ‘Letter of the Fourteen’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.16 51 ‘Ob obrazovanii Ukrainskoy obshchestvennoy gruppy sodeystviya vypolneniyu Khel’sinkskikh soglasheniy’, Document No. 19, Moscow Helsinki Group 52 UHG, ‘Declaration’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, p.21 53 Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.355 54 Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, p.347 27 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 repression prominently featured in their declarations, memoranda and manifestos.55 The use of the word

‘ethnocide” is a direct borrowing from the seventh and eighth volume of the samizdat journal Ukrainian

Herald, published in 1974. This journal was instrumental in the dissemination of dissident thought in the decade preceding the Helsinki Final Act. The most nationally vitriolic publication of the Ukrainian

Helsinki Group, Memorandum No. 5, issued in 1977, clearly outlined the national position of the organisation. It was couched in the language of Marxist internationalism, and was expressed in bizarrely cosmic terms. Using mankind’s recent explorations of deep space as a springboard, the Ukrainian Helsinki

Group discussed their traditional political demands alongside more absurd language. The document declared:

Man is a wondrous Flower of Evolution. His mission – to unite a world fragmented since creation, into a

Magic Wreath of Beauty and Harmony. In the way of the realization of this idea stands the spirit of

militarism, of present-day imperialism, of chauvinism. In these menacing times, when the ecological,

demographic, energetic and economic balance of the Planet has been catastrophically disturbed, we cannot

do without the amicable, selfless, sincere actions of all peoples and individuals.

State structures which do not understand or which do not want to understand the horror of the situation, or

which, through understanding, criminally ignore it – such structures are enemies of Evolution, and, as such,

of all Humankind.

Therefore, the violations of the RIGHT OF NATIONS to self-determination, to a sovereign spiritual life, as

well as the violations of the Human Right to sovereign expression of one’s will, are VIOLATIONS OF

COSMIC LAW.56

This internationalist outlook is telling. It directly informed the transnational character of the Helsinki monitoring groups, and underpinned their political demands.

55 Ukrainian participation at the Belgrade Conference is one example: “At the Belgrade Conference countries whose populations are two to three times smaller than were Ukraine’s losses in the last world war will be represented, and even those whom the war had passed by. Such wide representation, of course, can only be heartening. But will long- suffering Ukraine, which has made innumerable sacrifices in the name of peace among nations, be represented?” UHG, ‘Memorandum No. 2: Concerning the Participation of Ukraine in the Belgrade Conference, 1977’ Issued Jan. 20, 1977, and published in The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, pp.59-64. 56UHG, ‘Memorandum No. 5’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, pp.78-79 28 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Helsinki Rights Agitation, Trans-nationalism and Internationalism

Although, as the previous subsection shows, the various national Helsinki monitoring groups displayed a strong element of national consciousness, there is no denying that post-Helsinki rights agitation in the

Eastern Bloc was a transnational movement. Both within and beyond the Soviet sphere of influence, various rights-groups gathered under the “Helsinki” banner. Groups such as the Helsinki Watch, sympathetic to, and influenced by, the Soviet dissident movement, appeared in the United States. Likewise, an International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) was formed in 1982, acting as an umbrella group for rights-agitators and dissidents on both sides of the Iron Curtain.57 Within the Soviet sphere, dissidents from different republics frequently communicated with each other, and the movement which began in Moscow had within several months spread to the peripheries of the Soviet empire. Sarah Snyder has identified four primary causes for the growth of this movement: “information politics”, “symbolic politics”, “leverage politics”; and “accountability politics”.58 I do not disagree with Snyder’s conclusions in this regard, but instead suggest an alternative interpretation of their impetus. An appropriated interpretation of Marxist-Leninist internationalism provided a parallel basis for the transnational character of the post-

Helsinki rights groups. Although not as clearly defined in the context of socialist legality, internationalism was central to Marxist-Leninism, and was a suitable lens through which the national-political demands of post-Helsinki rights agitators were formulated. This subsection, therefore, is not so much a discussion of the influence of socialist legality as it is of socialist ideology; a detailed examination of ideological interpretations of the right to self-determination will be included in the following chapter. Rather, I will analyse the transnational character of the Helsinki movement within the Eastern Bloc, arguing that Marxist-

Leninist internationalism exercised a subtle influence on how the Helsinki Groups interacted and

57 Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, pp.127-128 58 Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, pp.78-79. Snyder defined these terms as the following. Information politics is defined as the collection and distribution of information relevant to the movement; symbolic politics relates to the use of symbols (such as evocative stories) in order to make the movement’s demands both more palatable and appear more immediate; leverage politics is the use of an influential figure to champion the movement’s demands: the examples cited previously in this text include Andrei Sakharov in the Moscow Helsinki Group, and Pyotr Grigorenko in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Finally, Snyder describes accountability politics as ‘holding leaders responsible for upholding policies to which they commit themselves’ (p.79), or, in other words, the internationally-appropriated form of ‘civil obedience’. 29 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 articulated their demands. Particular emphasis is given, in this subsection, to the monitoring groups within the USSR, namely the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups.

Marxist-Leninist Proletarian Internationalism

Central to Marxist-Leninist internationalism was the “withering away of the state”: that state interference in social life, and eventually government itself, is not abolished, but “dies out”.59 The withering of the state, and the implicit coercive influence of the state apparatus, were tied to a belief in the coming world revolution. For Lenin, the withering of the state was to be a gradual process. As opposed to anarchism, which demanded the immediate abolition of the state, Lenin was in favour of retaining a central state apparatus under a dictatorship of the proletariat.60 In supporting this view, he cited Friedrich Engels’ words directly:

[...] With the introduction of the socialist order of society the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. As therefore the

‘state’ is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down one’s

adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’ so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it

does not use it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to

speak of freedom, the state, as such, ceases to exist. We would, therefore, propose to replace the word ‘state’ everywhere

by the word Gemeinwesen [community], a good old German word, which can very well represent the French word

commune.61

The future communist utopia was to be a community, not a state, governed by the Marxist principle of

‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ In the context of the socialist transitional period, however, an element of national-cultural autonomy centred on proletarian (as opposed to bourgeois) national culture was not simply to be permitted, but encouraged: this interpretation of self-determination underlined socialist understandings of the right, particularly in Ukraine, and will be addressed in full in the following chapter. The retention of a central state apparatus and the failure of the international revolution

59 Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), p.389. Emphasis in original. 60 Lenin’s ideals are fully explained in his wordy treatise, ‘The State and Revolution’, Essential Works of Lenin, Henry M. Christman (ed.) (New York: Dover Publications, 1929), pp.271-364 61 Friedrich Engels to Bebel, quoted in V. I. Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution’, Essential Works of Lenin, p.319 30 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 was a great embarrassment to the Soviet government, and became a significant factor in that it both fuelled the political demands for self-determination and gave additional grounds for commonality between these groups.

Intergroup and International Relationships

I have already demonstrated the national character of the Helsinki monitoring groups in Ukraine and

Poland through both the membership of these organisations and through their political demands. While much of the dissent that emerged in the months and years following the Helsinki Final Act gravitated around national issues, it would be inaccurate to describe these groups as ultranationalist; rather, particularly in the Soviet Union, the Helsinki Monitoring Groups displayed a relatively transnational outlook. This is best evidenced by their intergroup and international relationships. While in both the centre and the peripheries of the Soviet Union the Helsinki Watch groups were staffed predominantly by alleged nationalist agitators (although, as this chapter has shown, such a charge was often arbitrary on the part of the authorities), this is not to say that such groups were exclusively nationalistic. The eleven founding members of the Moscow Helsinki Group counted among their ranks rights activists, Jewish ‘refuseniks’ such as Natan Shcharansky, and members of the various national minorities of the Soviet Union.62

Likewise, the Ukrainian Public Group later would come to be composed of Estonians, Lithuanians,

Russians and Jews.63 In the words of prominent Moscow Helsinki Group activist Ludmila Alekseeva, the

Helsinki process allowed for the “unification of the human rights movement with religious and national movements” in the Soviet Union.64 Beyond membership, the Moscow and Ukrainian monitoring groups in the Soviet Union often collaborated, sharing membership and frequently contributing reports on the status of rights abuses. Pyotr Grigorenko was a signatory member of the founding document of the Moscow

Helsinki Group; similarly Mykola Rudenko contributed a document to the Moscow chapter detailing the

62 Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, p.58 63 Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, p.354 64 Ludmila Alekseeva, cited in Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, p.58 31 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 foundation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.65 Ludmila Alekseeva travelled to Lithuania to investigate alleged violations of national and religious rights there, while the Moscow Helsinki Group, as well as various samizdat journals in the Soviet centre, actively reported on national issues throughout the Soviet

Union.66 On an international level, the groups maintained correspondence with members of the Soviet diaspora as well as foreign journalists and sympathisers. Following her deportation from the Soviet Union,

Alekseeva communicated with her dissident compatriots, serving as their spokeswoman in the West.67

Likewise, the Moscow Helsinki Group attracted attention from numerous powerful supporters in the West; it is worth noting, however, that the passionate emphasis the Ukrainian Helsinki Group placed on the collective right of self-determination (as opposed to individual civil and political rights) damaged its prestige in the West.68

Political Demands

Although self-determination through secession was often proclaimed as the ultimate goal of rights-agitation by dissidents in Ukraine, the political demands of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group reveal a more internationalist outlook. Memorandum No. 5 expressed this position clearly:

We are not raising the issue of Ukraine’s ‘separation’. We don’t have anyone to separate from. The planet is one.

Humankind is one. Fraternal peoples are our neighbours. From whom should we be separate? On the contrary, we raise

the issue of ANNEXATION, the ANNEXATION of UKRAINE, RUSSIA, GEORGIA, LATVIA and other Fraternal

Nations to the One Spirit of Humankind. [...] We are for an Association whose name is the Union of Soviet Socialist

Republics, and which will in time be transformed into a Brotherhood of Free Peoples of the Earth. But “EVERY

NATION should be a FREE AGENT within this association and independent in its creative spirit. […] In short, a people

should be masters of their land, their tradition, their creative inheritance, their futurological aspirations, their will to build

a better life for each, for all. [...] The most radical demand for the spirit of the Ukrainian Nation, for itself and for

fraternal peoples, is FULL SOVEREIGNTY OF CREATIVE MANIFESTATION in all areas of spiritual and economic

65 ‘Ob obrazovannii obshchestvennoy gruppy sodeystviya vypolneniyu Khel’sinkckikh soglasheniy v SSR’, Document Number 1, Moscow Helsinki Group; ‘Ob obrazovanii Ukrainskoy obshchestvennoy gruppy sodeystviya vypolneniyu Khel’sinkskikh soglasheniy’, Document Number 19, Moscow Helsinki Group. 66 Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, p.62; Ukrainian Herald, ‘Editorial’, Chronicle of Current Events, No.22 (New York: Amnesty International, 1972), pp.44-47 67 Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War, p.119 68 Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, p.355 32 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

life. Nothing on earth can prevent the embodiment of this idea into visible forms of historical reality, for this is the will of

EVOLUTION.69

Within Poland in the years following Helsinki, Marxist internationalism was substituted for an appropriated interpretation of the pre-war doctrine of ‘Prometheism’ advocated by Marshal Piłsudski. An analysis of this alternative interpretation of national rights forms the basis for the third chapter of this thesis.

Conclusions

By the 1960s dissidents were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the notion of the Revolution as the paradigm for human progress.70 While the international norms enshrined in various pieces of legislation, such as the CSCE Helsinki Final Act, and the twin United Nations covenants of 1966, provided dissidents in the Soviet bloc with a convenient rights language, such norms do not provide the sole impetus for rights- agitation in the period following 1976. Rather, the dissident movement in Poland and Ukraine was not, as

Daniel Thomas and Sarah Snyder have argued, the result of the rights rhetoric of Western liberalism enlightening a barbaric and totalitarian East. Instead, it was the product of a rich tradition of socialist rights-talk. The influence of so-called ‘socialist rights’ on post-Helsinki rights agitation can be seen in three broad areas. Firstly, in their methods, rights conceptualisations and even their membership, the Helsinki monitoring groups existed as a continuum of dissent characterised by demands for compliance with socialist legality and advocacy of a brand of rights conceptually divorced from international norms.

Secondly, the groups displayed a ‘national exclusivity’ that reflected the central position of self- determination in socialist rights-talk. This exclusivity was, at times, incompatible with the universality of

Western conceptions of human rights—focusing, as the Ukrainian Helsinki Group did, on the rights of citizens based on their ethnicity rather than their innate humanity. Finally, the subtle but pervasive influence of Marxist-Leninist internationalism underscored the transnational character of the Soviet monitoring groups, providing an alternative basis to the theory of a Western inspired transnational movement.

69 UHG, ‘Memorandum No. 5’, The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine, pp.75-76. Capitalisations are in the original. 70 Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason’, p.635 33 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Chapter 2

The Socialist Right of Self-Determination: Theory and Practice in Soviet Ukraine, 1965-1975

All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they

freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic,

social and cultural development.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (December,

1960)1

To every Union Republic is the right freely to secede from the U.S.S.R.

Article 17, Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

(December, 1936)2

In the previous chapter I challenged a prevailing assumption about both the origins and understanding of human rights talk, particularly pertaining to national aspirations, in Poland and Ukraine in the half-decade following the Helsinki Final Act. Specifically, I advanced the concept of socialist rights—that is, an alternative, socialist interpretation of human rights expounded by dissidents both in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, characterised by a demand for state compliance with socialist legality, and conceptually divorced from international norms. In this chapter, I will extend the concept of socialist rights to perhaps the most contentious, ill-defined and far-reaching human right enshrined in international law: that of the self-determination of peoples. Particularly, I will examine how dissidents in the Ukrainian SSR understood the right of self-determination, and the related facets of national and cultural autonomy, in the decade immediately preceding the Helsinki Final Act (roughly equivalent to 1965-1974), tracing the ideological and historical lineage of this thought. While there has been much debate among scholars in the

1 Article 2, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514: Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples 2 Article 17, Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, reproduced in full in J. Stalin, On the National Question, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), p.32 34 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

West concerning the status of self-determination as a legal right, I propose that dissidents in Soviet bloc firmly conceived self-determination to be a human right within the context of socialist legality and proletarian internationalism. However, despite its enshrined status as a right, the same lack of consensus regarding the definition of ‘self’ and ‘people’, represented by a gulf between theoretical and practical application that plagued the international conceptualisation of self-determination, was similarly transferred into the socialist conception of the right. These themes—a lack of consensus, and a deviation between theory and practice—underpinned socialist understandings and concerns, and were, I propose, the product of ideological and historical experience.

I set three main aims for this chapter. Firstly, I will devise a working definition of self-determination and establish its status as a right in the context of socialist legality. Secondly, I will examine the ideological lineage of socialist self-determination, expanding on the definition of Marxist-Leninist internationalism provided in the first chapter, and examining both Marxist-Leninist understandings of the state and nation, and how these were appropriated by the dissident movement. Finally, I will investigate the role of historical experience in the intellectual formulation of socialist self-determination, with particular emphasis on the nationalities policies of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, arguing that a perceived deviation from Leninist norms with regard to the national question provided the paradigm through which socialist dissidents in the peripheries of the Soviet empire processed their political demands. I identify these norms as those enshrined in the Soviet policy of ‘national communism’ practised in the Ukrainian SSR between 1921 and

1929. In fulfilling these aims, I will engage directly with dissident samizdat publications, focusing on the issues they deemed important, concerns over the future of their nation, and their use of language. While this chapter will examine the Ukrainian SSR as a sole case study, its underlying themes and methodology will be extended to alternative discourses of human rights analysed in the third chapter. These alternatives are the lingering impact of nationalism and ‘Prometheism’ in the Polish People’s Republic, and Jewish

‘refusenik’ Zionism throughout the Eastern Bloc.

35 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Self-Determination: A Human Right, or a Legal Principle?

Self-determination is an enigma. Despite being evoked by revolutionaries, it is conversely an uninspired and remarkably conservative concept. Likewise, although enshrined in various international documents as a basic human right and thus something everybody is entitled to, when considered from other perspectives it is exclusionary and often fed by nationalist and isolationist agendas and a fear of the ‘other’.3 While on the one hand self-determination is grounded in and frequently evokes our sense of equality and justice, its practical, secessionist application inherently entails the fragmentation of states, and often as a consequence creates conflict climates conducive to the violation of human rights.4 When, in the winter of 1918,

President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference advocated a radical division of Europe based on the principle of self-determination, it was with good reason that his Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, remarked that the phrase was “simply loaded with dynamite”.5 The enigmatic nature of self-determination is further complicated when we consider that legal theory has split this right into a variety of categories, pivoted around the binary of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ self-determination, and that, despite prolonged debate, no clear consensus has been reached concerning the intrinsic definitions of ‘self’, ‘determination’ and ‘peoples’. I will not be advancing, beyond a provisional level, my own theory of the right of self- determination. Instead, I will briefly unpack the international legal debate concerning its nature, before providing a more acceptable definition of the term by which to assess the national aspirations of dissidents in communist societies. This working definition is for the convenience of analysis only, and is not necessarily reflective of Ukrainian dissidents’ own conceptualisations and understandings. In line with the notion of both ‘civil obedience’ and an alternate theory of human rights divorced from international norms discussed in the previous chapter, I will dedicate the third part of this section to establishing self- determination as a right (as opposed to a principle, or idea) in the context of socialist legality.

3 Allen Buchanan, Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination: A Moral Foundation for International Law, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p.4; Jan Klabbers, ‘The Right to be Taken Seriously: Self-Determination in International Law’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 28 (2006), p.187 4 Richard Falk, ‘Self-Determination Under International Law: The Coherence of Doctrine Versus the Incoherence of Experience’, Wolfgang Danspeckgruber (ed.), The Self-Determination of Peoples: Community, Nation and State in an Independent World, (London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2002), p.31 5 Cited in Klabbers, ‘The Right to be Taken Seriously: Self-Determination in International Law’, p.187 36 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Self-Determination in International Law

The Helsinki Final Act obliged participating states to respect “the equal rights of peoples and their right to self-determination.” Self-determination was by definition of the Final Act, and echoed in the two international covenants of the mid-1960s, the right of all peoples, “in full freedom, to determine, when and as they wish, their internal and external political status, without external interference, and to pursue as they wish their political, economic, social and cultural development.”6 Self-determination cannot cleanly be described as a right to, or a desire for, secession, or even complete political autonomy. While undoubtedly linked with, and evoked by, secessionist movements throughout the last century, a definition of the right to self-determination based solely on the principle of secession from a larger territorial (or political) entity is misleading. This lingering supposition calls directly into question the definition of ‘determination’ in the context of international law. Other layers of meaning, particularly pertaining to cultural autonomy, have gradually replaced the traditional understanding, established in the period of decolonisation, of self- determination constituting a right to political and territorial independence.7 This shift is characterised by a schism, in legal theory, between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ self-determination. ‘External’ self-determination roughly translates to the notion that a group of people have a right to political independence; a right to secession is implicit in this understanding.8 Embedded in external self-determination is the notion of a right to sovereignty, the ability to forge, whether through secession or other means, a sovereign state.

Conversely, ‘internal’ self-determination means a right to self-government – the right of a people to freely choose its authentic political and economic status.9 Internal self-determination is generally considered to cover disconnected ethnic groups, to linguistic minorities, to religious believers and, where applicable,

6 Article 1 (VIII), Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe Final Act, Section VIII, Helsinki: 1975 (p.7); cf. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights/International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICESCR/ICCPR): “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Quoted from Part I, Article I, ICESCR. 7 Klabbers, ‘The Right to be Taken Seriously: Self-Determination in International Law’, p.187ff. 8 Emilo J. Cardenas and Maria Fernanda Canas, ‘The Limits of Self-Determination’, Wolfgang Danspeckgruber (ed.), The Self-Determination of Peoples: Community, Nation and State in an Independent World, (London: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2002), p.102 9 Antonio Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples: A Legal Reappraisal, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.101 37 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 indigenous peoples.10 Therefore, a right to cultural autonomy, that is, the right of a cultural group to freely determine its future, is implied by internal self-determination. In order to maintain territorial integrity, international law has tended to interpret the right of self-determination as the right of internal autonomy.

This shift, beginning in the 1970s, was motivated primarily by the desire to avoid secessionist conflict rather than through any internationalist agenda.11

Just as the definition of determination is blurred by changing legal standards and layered meanings, so too are the definitions of ‘self’ and ‘peoples’. These contradictions have wielded a significant impact on the status of self-determination in international law: According to Cardenas and Canas, “Since 1945 probably no other issue has been more divisive among legal scholars than the question whether there is—or is not—a legal right to self-determination.”12 This indecision is reflected in the changing language of United Nations’ resolutions and advisory opinions. Major documents, such as the twin covenants of 1966 and that of the

December, 1960, Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples continued to speak of self-determination as a right in abstract terms. However, the practical organs of the

United Nations—notably the International Court of Justice—had by the 1970s altered its language to reflect the notion of self-determination as a legal principle, rather than a legal right. 13 A right, as Jan Klabbers notes, demands a direct human response; a principle, conversely, does not: “the need for a specific human response is decidedly less clear.”14 In other words, if designated as a principle, self-determination is a goal to be strived towards, not an inalienable right to which a person is entitled on the basis of their humanity.

10 Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples, p.102 11 Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples, p.105 This is reflected in United Nations resolutions 1487(XV) and 1661 (XVI), which encouraged autonomy along internal, and not external, lines for the German speaking majority of the Italian Province of Bozen. 12 Cardenas and Canas, ‘The Limits of Self-Determination’, p.101 13 Klabbers, ‘The Right to be Taken Seriously’, p.195. Although in its 1971 advisory opinion on Namibia the ICJ justified the process of decolonisation as being the exercise of a right self-determination, within four years the Court, in its decision regarding West Sahara, had avoided speaking about a ‘right’ to self-determination, instead choosing to use the word ‘principle’. 14 Klabbers, ‘The Right to be Taken Seriously’, p.195, note 39 38 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

A Provisional Definition

Regardless of its status as a human right or a legal principle, we can draw a series of conclusions about the meaning of the phrase the ‘self determination of peoples’. The reflexive pronoun ‘self’ contains autogenous connotations. As in the words ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘self-reliance’, it relates to action generated automatically, from within a particular social or cultural group. Likewise, ‘determination’ entails the ability to resolve one’s future political, cultural and economic status independently of external interference.

Furthermore, ‘determination’ suggests autonomous development, whether it is political, national or cultural, exercised within the boundaries of a territorial entity or exorcised from them. International law has limited the exercise of this right to ‘nations’—a group of people constituting a cultural and linguistic entity, although it has been extended to various ethno-religious groups (such as the Jews). If we consider these features, a serviceable definition of the notion of self-determination becomes discernible. Self- determination, therefore, relates to the (perceived) entitlement, held by a distinct cultural entity, to a degree of political, social or economic autonomy. This definition can be employed, as in Dina Zisserman-

Brodsky’s application, to assess the political demands of dissident groups in communist societies. While

Zisserman-Brodsky has identified relative deprivation as a major motivator in ethno-political demands, I will argue that Ukrainian and, to a lesser extent, Polish and Jewish dissidents expressed their desire for self- determination through alternative channels. These included socialist legality and internationalism, the weight of history, and the right to emigrate. It is important to note that the Russian, Ukrainian and Polish words relating to this notion (самоопределение, самовизначення and samostanowienie, respectively) share the same conceptual meaning as the English ‘self-determination’ or the German

Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker: the reflexive adverb samo/само is adjoined to the noun determination to form a compound word. This was the phrase employed by Lenin, who spoke about the прав наций на

самоопределение – the right of nations to self-determination.

Self-Determination as a Socialist Right

Although Western understandings were plagued by a lack of consensus, self-determination was clearly conceived as a right in socialist legality. At an official level, state socialism considered the right of nations

39 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 to self-determination as being the most important human right: it provided the necessary requirements for the exercise of all other rights, including economic rights.15 This view was reflected in an East German handbook on international law, which claimed that “the protection of the right to self-determination to be the basic prerequisite for the protection of all other basic rights.”16 By this official comprehension, human rights were to be a state affair—intrinsically linked with the broader socialist preoccupation with economic rights as already discussed in Chapter 1. This understanding permeated all levels of socialist legality, domestically and internationally, and would be influential on dissident notions of self-determination’s inherent status as an essential human right. Internationally, socialist states were often the most vocal about inserting a provision for self-determination into international legislation, on the basis of its perceived importance.17 Domestically, Lenin had frequently referred to the right (прав) of nations to self- determination; likewise, the 1936 Soviet Constitution contained a series of clauses relating to political status and right to cultural autonomy of the various Soviet nationalities. Articles 33 and 37, for example, created a separate Soviet of Nationalities to politically represent the union republics. Similarly, the territorial integrity of the Union and Autonomous Republics were protected by Article 18, while national equality was enshrined in Article 123. Furthermore, both the 1936 Soviet Constitution and the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, in Articles 17 and 14 respectively, formally provided the right of Union Republics to freely secede.18 Subsequent amendments charged the right to secession with legitimacy, providing the framework for a legal and democratic course by which the Soviet Republics could separate from the

Union—although, as Antonio Cassese has noted, this process was intensely and deliberately bureaucratic, making the exercise of this right incredibly difficult.19

Despite these procedural hurdles, Ukrainian dissidents firmly believed in the importance and authenticity of socialist legality as the provider and protector of basic human rights. Echoing the words of Lenin, Lev

Lukyanenko, a prominent early agitator for an independent Soviet Ukraine, considered compliance with

15 Arie Bloed & Fried van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, ,p.37 16 East-German Handbook on International Law, quoted in A. Bloed & F. Van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, p.37 17 A. Bloed & F. Van Hoof, ‘Some Aspects on the Socialist View of Human Rights’, p.39 18 Please refer to the Appendix for the relative articles of the (1936) Soviet Constitution. 19 Antonio Cassese, Self-Determination of Peoples, p.265 40 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 socialist legality as the duty of every official and citizen, the “most important and unshakable democratic principle” guiding the Soviet state into the communist future.20 As discussed in Chapter 1, Lukyanenko, along with Ivan Kandyba and several other students, had created the secessionist Ukrainian Workers’ and

Peasants’ Union; both Lukyanenko and Kandyba would later be founding members of the Ukrainian

Helsinki Group. Despite being previously sentenced to death—and then condemned to fifteen years’ imprisonment in a penal colony in European Russia—for exercising what he believed to be his implicit constitutional right, Lukyanenko persisted in his belief in the legitimacy of socialist legality. Writing from prison in Mordova to the Soviet Councillor of Jurisprudence, Lukyanenko cited his legal training at

Moscow University, where he was taught that “in the Soviet State law is real, not fictitious. Everything permitted by law may therefore be put into practice.”21 In another letter, Lukyanenko championed common sense over the sophistry of the Soviet state in interpreting the right of secession:

Whatever tricks of sophistry [the authorities] might try to use to interpret Art. 17 and Art. 14 of the Constitution of the

USSR and the Ukrainian SSR as meaning that the right to self-determination is not there, common sense always

overcomes sophistry and persists in asserting that: The right of a Republic to secede from the USSR is a right, and not an

absence of right, and words that grant a right can never be changed into words that forbid it, just as the words ‘take’ and

‘don’t touch’ cannot be interchanged.22

Disregard for the rights protected formally by Soviet law was considered tantamount to a violation of

Marxist ideology. When one senior interrogator alleged that “Article 17 of the Constitution only exists for

[the delusion of] the outside world,” Lukyanenko’s co-accused, Stepan Virun, wrote an impassioned letter to the Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in defence of socialist legality. “To aim at taking advantage of a Soviet constitutional right,” Virun wrote, with reference to the right to secede “cannot be a

20 L. H. Lukyanenko, Letter to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, in Michael Browne (ed), Ferment in the Ukraine (London : Macmillan, 1971), p.78 21 Lev Hryhorovych Lukyanenko, Letter to the Procurator-General of the USSR, Councillor of Jurisprudence, in Michael Browne (ed), Ferment in the Ukraine (London : Macmillan, 1971), pp.36-37 22 L. H. Lukyanenko, Letter to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, p.90 41 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 crime, no more than Soviet law itself can be anti-Soviet.”23 Furthermore, dissidents considered constitutional rights to have implicit meanings. The exercise of Article 17 of the Constitution, for example, could not occur without a right to agitate for secession. As Lukyanenko noted:

The existence of a Republic’s right to secede from the USSR is simply unthinkable without the authorisation of activity

directed to that end. To assume the opposite – that the right of a Union Republic to secede from the USSR does not imply

the right to agitate for such secession – is tantamount to admitting that Articles 17 and 14 of the Constitution of the

USSR and the Ukrainian SSR [respectively] are legal fictions, empty words and nothing else. But I have never accepted

such an interpretation and have been firmly convinced that agitation for the secession of the Ukrainian SSR does not

contradict the Constitution of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR and therefore cannot be punishable under criminal

law.24

This view was shared by the literary critic Ivan Dzyuba, whose treatise, Internationalism, or Russification?, published in 1965, presented a critical indictment of the status of national issues in Soviet Ukraine. Dzyuba noted that a right to secede implied a right to agitate for secession, and accused those who disagreed with this to be “un-Leninist and un-Soviet.”25 Although as early as 1970 the language of international norms had begun to be reflected in the language of Soviet dissent, the Leninist ideal of self-determination in the context of internationalism continued to permeate dissident political demands for a further decade.26 In particular, the central role of self-determination as a prerequisite for all other basic rights was reflected in the national exclusivity of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Although damaging its prestige in a West more concerned with individual than collective rights, the Ukrainian Public Group’s sustained belief in the necessity of self-determination is a clear expression of this socialist discourse.27 The ideological roots of dissident conceptualisations of self-determination can be seen in Marxist-Leninist understandings of the state and nation.

23The reported words of a senior investigator named Denisov, to L. H. Lukyanenko, quoted in Stepan Martynovych Virun, Letter to Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, in Michael Browne (ed.), Ferment in the Ukraine (London: Macmillan, 1971) pp.49; 51 24 Lukyanenko, Letter to the Procurator General of the USSR, p.37 25 Ivan Dzyuba, Internationalism, or Russification? (New York: Monad Press, 1974), p.56 26 Sviatoslav Karavans’kyj, ‘Holovi Prezidiyi Verkhovnoyi Rady SRSR’, Ukrayins’kyj Visnyk, Vol. II, (Paris: Smoloskip, 1971); the language of internationalism and anti-secessionism can be found, for example, in Memorandum No. 5 of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (See Chapter 1) 27 Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, p.355 42 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

The Ideological Context: Marxist-Leninist Conceptions of the State and Nation

In August, 1963, the Ukrainian-Canadian Marxist John Kolasky boarded a Polish steamer bound for Kyiv.

Inspired by Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’, and half a decade before the Soviet reaction to the Prague

Spring dampened socialist hopes worldwide, Kolasky arrived in the Ukrainian SSR with high hopes. He imagined the romantic land of his forefathers: the “stories of legendary Cossacks, national traditions and folklore, miles of rolling, fertile steppes,” but also a socialist utopia, a veritable paradise on earth, “which had solved its economic and national problems and was triumphantly marching towards a new and just social order.”28 Kolasky’s expectations were unfulfilled; instead of fertile, rolling steppes, he was met with urban decay and collectivised farms; instead of Khmelnitsky, Mazepa, or the other great Cossack hetmany,

Kolasky found a heavily Russified elite and an imposed Soviet bureaucracy. Russian, not Ukrainian, was the language of all commercial, political and public social interaction: “If a person wishes to study German, he goes to Berlin; if he wishes to study French he goes to Paris,” Kolasky wrote, quoting a common joke.

“But where does he go if he wishes to study Ukrainian?”29

Kolasky’s appearance in Soviet Ukraine corresponded to growing opposition within intellectual circles. In

1959, future Helsinki Group founders Lukyanenko and Kandyba founded the Ukrainian Workers’ and

Peasants’ Union; although arrested, their political aims were expressed in public letters from prison.

Likewise, the political commentator Sviatoslav Karavansky actively opposed perceived Russification; his claims were echoed by Dzyuba’s Internationalism, or Russification?, which appeared in 1965, at the close of Kolasky’s period of study in the Ukrainian SSR.30 Although perhaps the most prominent, Dzyuba’s critical indictment of Soviet ‘internationalism’ did not exist in isolation. A number of proposals, open letters, and samizdat texts were distributed throughout the sixties and early 1970s. These predominantly contained national issues as their sole concern, and many expressed their demands in the language and ideology of Marxist-Leninism. In advancing programmes of independence and cultural autonomy, these

28 John Kolasky, Two Years in Soviet Ukraine, (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1970), p.1 29 Kolasky, Two Years in Soviet Ukraine, p.23 30 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.113 43 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 groups constituted a movement for self-determination that was very different from that advocated by

President Wilson half a century earlier. While Wilson’s brand of self-determination was carefully framed to avoid upsetting the colonial order, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was intent on destroying imperialism.31 Lenin was a vocal proponent of a particular form of self-determination, rooted in proletarian internationalism. The conceptions of the state and nation expounded by Lenin and his intellectual progenitors, Marx and Engels, explicitly underpinned the political demands of Soviet Ukrainian dissidents advocating self-determination.

This subsection will unpack these Marxist-Leninist conceptions and the impact they had on Ukrainians’ understandings of the right to self-determination.

Marxist Conceptions of the State and Nation

In the previous chapter I identified some of the important features of Marxist-Leninist internationalism.

Central to this ideology was the status and role of the state. For Lenin, the state was a temporary entity; under a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ it would gradually transition into a community—or, in Engels’ words, ‘wither away’. If we consider the traditional, Western legal understanding of self-determination as being the right of peoples to sovereignty, that is, independent authority over a particular territorial entity

(implicitly, a state apparatus), the question of the state’s role in developed socialism attains much weight.

Under such a model, the ultimate expression of self-determination is through the ‘external’ (secessionist) mode; the Leninist norms of self-determination, as understood by dissidents like Dzyuba and Lukyanenko, were not equivocal to this ideal. Lenin’s brand of self-determination was intrinsically linked to internationalism; for Lenin, supporting the cultural autonomy of nations was only permissible for a Marxist in the context of proletariat internationalism, and not bourgeois nationalism.32 This involved taking ‘from each national culture only its democratic and socialist elements; we take them only and absolutely in opposition to the bourgeois culture and the bourgeois nationalism of each nation.”33 The struggle with bourgeois nationalism was considered to be inevitable, and could only be overcome if all nations were treated equally. In his theoretical framework, ‘Great Russian’ chauvinism was merely an extension of

31 Cassese, Self Determination of Peoples, p.21 32 V. I. Lenin, ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, Collected Works, Vol. XX, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1964), p.33 33 Lenin, ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, Collected Works XX p.24 44 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 bourgeois nationalism, and was something to be deplored.34 In recognising the equality of nations, the right of political self-determination was considered by Lenin not as an aim, but a necessity, and failure to oblige to this necessity was equivocal to a betrayal of socialism.35 Joseph Stalin’s seminal published work,

Marxism and the National Question, first published in 1913, echoed Lenin’s position. According to Stalin, nationalities were permitted to operate schools, follow customs and traditions, exercise their rights and speak their mother tongue without forcible interference. Preferential treatment of certain nationalities— unnamed by Stalin but named by Lenin as ‘Great Russian bourgeois nationalism’—was to be abandoned, and a policy of national oppression was to be rendered impossible.36Such a position aligns closely, but imperfectly, with the notion of ‘internal’ self-determination, and best represents dissidents’ conceptualisations of the right. Georgian-born Stalin identified five key components to a national group:

“A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”37 Stalin’s paradigm was used by Dzyuba to express his concerns over the degradation of national-cultural life in Ukraine. The Ukrainian language,

Dzyuba argued, was “pushed into the background”; territorial integrity was being lost through forced resettlement; centralisation from Moscow impeded Ukrainian economic life; national culture was dispersed through emigration and perceived ‘inferior’ status; and finally a shared, Ukrainian history—“a common historic fate”—was being lost due to, amongst other things, Soviet educational policies.38 Many of the concerns expressed in Internationalism, or Russification? were based on a deviation from the Leninist policy of ‘national communism’, which sought to protect and nurture the cultural life of the various national groups in the Soviet Union. This concept of ‘national communism’ will be examined in greater detail below.

34 34 Lenin, ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’, Collected Works XX., p.413 35 V. I. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Jan-Feb 1916, Collected Works, Vol. XXII, (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1964), p.143 36 J. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question,, p.13 37 Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, p.7 38 Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification?, p.14 45 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

The Marxist Lineage of Socialist Self-Determination in Ukraine

The impact of Marxist-Leninism on dissident understandings of self-determination can be seen in their continued adherence to the socialist ideal and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet system. In Lukyanenko’s graphic description: “The persecution of people who wish to exercise the constitutional right of self- determination runs counter to Marxist theory, which has always included the right of nations to self- determination. And if an individual is a communist in practice and not just as a matter of form, he cannot oppose the Ukrainian nation’s right to self-determination.”39 Although critical of Soviet policy, it is significant to note that dissidents formulated their arguments in opposition to a perceived deviation from

Leninist norms, rather than against those norms themselves. Dzyuba remained a committed Marxist, and cited Lenin frequently:

I have always endeavoured to consider nationality problems – just as, in fact, all other problems – from the viewpoint of

the principles of scientific Communism and of the teaching of Marx, Engels and Lenin, perceiving the prospects of their

successful solution to lie along the road towards the fulfilment of Lenin’s legacy and Communist construction.40

Likewise, the founding members of the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ Union approached their demands from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Lukyanenko’s co-accused, Stepan Virun, noted that the organisation “examined the existing order in our country from a Marxist-Leninist point of view.”41

Although advocating the political secession of the Ukrainian SSR from the Soviet Union, a future Ukraine was to remain Soviet in its outlook. Lev Lukyanenko carefully stressed his continued belief in the socialist ideal:

I never made it my aim to replace the soviet of workers’ deputies – the political manifestation of the dictatorship of the

working class – by any other regime either before or after a secession of the Ukrainian SSR from the USSR. [...] We are

struggling for an independent Ukraine such that, while providing to a high degree for the material and spiritual needs of

her citizens on the basis of a socialised economy, she would develop towards communism. [...] The very document which

provided direct evidence in our case clearly states that we stood for a socialist economy, and, secondly, that even if the

39 Lukyanenko, ‘Letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR’, Ferment in the Ukraine, p.90 40 Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification? Dedication 41 Virun, ‘Letter to Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR’, Ferment in the Ukraine, p.46 46 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Ukraine was not part of the USSR, she would still move towards communism and therefore remain in the socialist camp.

[...] We had all been brought up in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism and therefore we unanimously agreed in the course of

our conversation that it was by Marxist-Leninist theory that we must be guided when working for the elimination of

illegal limitations on democratic liberties.42

This position was echoed by Virun: “Our ideal is the Soviet state system.”43 Although denouncing the

Soviet Union as a “fascist empire”, Maksym Sahaydak, editor of the Ukrainian Herald journal, was keen to emphasise the difference between socialist theory and Soviet practice: “The existing order in the U.S.S.R. has nothing in common with socialism.”44 The dissident movement, in agitating for self-determination, importantly drew a distinction between bourgeois nationalism and the right to a degree of cultural autonomy (i.e. ‘internal’ self-determination) in the context of proletarian internationalism. Importantly, these dissidents were reluctant to self-identify as nationalists. “Nobody in Ukraine advances the slogan of

‘independence’ today,” Dzyuba stated. “The ‘nationalists’ who are now under arrest were also far removed from it.”45 Lukyanenko, in a letter to the Councillor of Jurisprudence in the Soviet Union, noted “I knew nothing whatsoever about the OUN [Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists]. [...] The entire nationalist struggle in the Western Ukraine was summed up in my mind by the concept of Bandera-ism.”46 That

Lukyanenko equated nationalism with ‘Bandera-ism’ is telling. That term relates to Ukrainian nationalist agitator and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera who, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in

1941, declared an independent Ukraine. Dissidents’ summary rejection of this paradigm suggests they did not view self-determination through the lens of total secessionism. When secession was proposed, it was to be predominantly cultural, with an independent Ukraine to exist within the socialist sphere, but not as a member of the USSR. Marxist-Leninist conceptions of the state and nation, therefore, were influential in dissident understandings of the right of self-determination in Soviet Ukraine. This is demonstrated in their

42 Lukyanenko, Letter to the Procurator-General of the USSR, Councillor of Jurisprudence, Ferment in the Ukraine, pp.39-40 43 Virun, ‘Letter to Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR’, Ferment in the Ukraine, p.48 44 Makysm Sahaydak, ‘Partial Cooperation and Astute Democracy’, The Ethnocide of Ukrainians in the USSR, (trans.) Olena Saciuk & Bohdan Yasen, (Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1981), p.21 45 Dzyuba, Internationalism, or Russification? p.56 46 Lukyanenko, Letter to the Procurator-General of the USSR, Councillor of Jurisprudence, Ferment in the Ukraine, p.35 47 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 sustained commitment to the socialist ideal, and a rejection of political secessionism in favour of increased cultural autonomy.

The Historical Context: ‘National Communism’ as a Paradigm for Dissent

Soviet Ukrainian demands for self-determination were characterised by a demand for Ukrainisation, that is, the implementation of ‘national communism’ along Lenin’s theoretical grounds for self-determination in the context of proletarian (inter)nationalism.47 ‘National communism’ had been implemented in the

Ukrainian SSR in the decade immediately following the revolutionary period, and constituted the Leninist norms to which dissidents advocated a return. The unique experience of a distinct, Ukrainian communism was considered by dissidents to be the practical expression of their socialist right of self-determination, and consequently was a direct influence on their understandings of that right.

‘National Communism’ in the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR, 1921-1929

National communism constituted the practical expression of Leninist self-determination. To better understand this phenomenon, however, it is necessary to provide some historical context. Ukraine first experienced independence in the modern era only after the Russian Revolution. The collapse of a central authority in Petrograd led to the creation of a series of governments, reflecting a spectrum of political views, on the territory of the future Ukrainian SSR. The most successful of these, the Tsentral’na Rada

(Central Council), considered national independence (along socialist, but not Bolshevik, lines) as its primary political goal. This revolutionary parliament issued a series of proclamations over its brief lifetime, declaring Ukraine’s political and religious independence from Russia—first in the context of federalism but, following the October Revolution in Petrograd, culminating in Ukraine’s complete separation from the former empire.48 The Rada would eventually collapse to Bolshevism, and the Ukrainian SSR—one of the founding republics of the union—was established, with its capital in the central Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

47 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.113  Or ‘Central Soviet’. The Ukrainian word Rada (рада) is synonymous with Russian word ‘soviet’ (совет); both translate simply to ‘council’. Thus the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was known in Ukrainian as the ‘Ukrayins'ka Radyans'ka Sotsialistychna Respublika’ (Українська Радянська Соціалістична Республіка) 48 ‘Tretii Universal Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliki’, Voennaia Istoriia Grazhdanskoi Voiny v Rossii, 1918-1920 godov, Kakurin, N., Kovtun, N., Cukhov, V., (eds.), (Moscow: Evrolets, 2004), pp.285f., 48 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Ukrainian Bolshevism, in the words of Arthur Adams, “was bred from an arrogant Marxist Russian father and a patriotic Ukrainian mother.”49 Lenin was convinced that, for the success of the revolution in Ukraine, communism needed a Ukrainian face. The Bolshevik centre in Moscow, at the Twelfth Party Congress, supported indigenisation in the hope that official encouragement of national-cultural life would promote unity and be greeted with gratitude.50 This support was cultural, rather than political. Promoters of the new face of Russian domination in Ukraine sought to learn the local language and establish cultural institutions

(albeit, along the lines of Socialist Realism) in order to foster the cultural independence of a Ukrainian

Republic. Ukrainian was to be the language of Party, state and union activities, and this policy was to be implemented by January, 1926.51 The four aims of the Leninist norm of national communism were identified by Dzyuba as being: (1) the creation of a Soviet state sympathetic to the national life of its people; (2) to develop an administration, economy and government comprised of the local population and using the local language; (3) the fostering of a national culture; and (4) the reform of the education system.52 The Stalinist period, characterised by an expression of ‘Great Russian’ chauvinism and the collectivisation of the peasantry, spelled an end to Ukrainization. The clock was wound back: Ukrainian historical and literary works were banned, and the Russian language again attained the same prominence in

Kyiv as it had under the Tsars.53

National Agitation as ‘National Communism’

It is fair to argue, as has James E. Mace, that the practice of ‘national communism’ in Ukraine was intended by the Bolsheviks as a short-term solution to a Ukrainian nationalism charged with its first taste of independence. Dissidents, however, considered the policies of Lenin and his successors in Soviet Ukraine to be a legitimate exercise of socialist self-determination.54 From an economic and national perspective,

49 Arthur Adams, ‘Bolshevik Administrate in the Ukraine, 1918’, The Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1958), p.290 50 Jurij Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine: 1917-1923: The Communist Doctrine and Practice of National Self- Determination, (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1980), p.256; James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933, (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1983), p.87 51 Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, p.96 52 Dzyuba, Internationalism, or Russification? p.127 53 Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, p.302 54 Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation, p.2 49 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Moscow considered the retention of Ukraine in the Soviet Union necessary for the success of the revolution. ‘National communism’ provided a marginal degree of cultural autonomy at the expense of political independence; nonetheless, Ukrainian dissenters were true believers in this revoked policy. 55 To appropriate Marx’s phrasing, the spectre of national communism haunted the dissident opposition in

Ukraine, providing a convenient paradigm through which the movement could voice its nationally conscious demands. “It is not so secret that during recent years a growing number of people in Ukraine [...] have been coming to the conclusion that there is something amiss with the nationalities policy in Ukraine,” wrote Dzyuba in the preface to Internationalism, or Russification? “The actual national and political position of Ukraine does not correspond to its formal constitutional position as a state [and this results] from the perpetual, flagrant violations of Marxism-Leninism on the nationalities question, and the abandonment of scientific principles in communist national construction.”56 Dzyuba particularly highlighted Soviet reforms in the realm of education and administration as being part of an official policy of Russification, displacing the role of Ukrainian in the cultural life of the nation. Dzyuba lamented that the four objectives of Lenin’s national communism had never been accomplished.57 Echoing this, Lukyanenko argued that the Soviet nationalities policy in practice was worse than the colonising efforts of the

Romanovs, because “[when] the chauvinists try to carry out similar policies today, they act against the laws of the Soviet state, against Marxist-Leninist ideology, against the anti-colonial spirit of the present age.”58

Conclusions

In this second chapter I have further investigated the notion of socialist rights, particularly the right to self- determination, and how it was conceived by dissidents in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Although, in the West, the status of self-determination as a right has been frequently called into question, both in legal theory and by the practical organs of international organisations, socialist theory never challenged self-determination’s enshrined status as a basic human right. Rather, socialism embraced it, considering self-determination (along with economic rights) to be a prerequisite for the exercise of all other

55 Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine, p.4 56 Dzyuba, Internationalism, or Russification? p.5 57 Dzyuba, Internationalism, or Russification? p.127 58 Lukyanenko, ‘Letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR’, Ferment in the Ukraine, p.90 50 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 basic human rights. If we consider self-determination to be the (perceived) entitlement, held by a distinct cultural entity, to a degree of political, social or economic autonomy, dissent in Soviet Ukraine constituted a national movement, albeit one with a socialist flair. This movement was bolstered by a belief in the legitimacy of socialist legality as the provider and protector of express and implicit rights; furthermore, self-determination was believed to form the basis of Leninist norms, identified as ‘national communism’.

The unique experience of a distinct, Ukrainian communism practised in Soviet Ukraine’s first decade came to dominate conceptualisations of the right of self-determination in dissident circles. The gulf between socialist theory and Soviet practice, as expressed through a deviation from the Leninist policy of ‘national communism’, was frequently evoked by dissenters as a means to achieve and legitimise their political goals. Likewise, the Stalinist deviation from the national-communistic policy of ‘Ukrainization’ was the foundation for many dissidents’ political demands. As a result, there existed in Soviet Ukraine a uniquely

Ukrainian socialist understanding of the right of self-determination.

51 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985

Chapter 3

“Let My People Go!” Polish and Soviet Jewish Answers to the National Question, 1970-1985

The Poles seek Poland above all, not the Kingdom of God, and that is why they have no Poland. Pope Pius IX1

If I forget you, Jerusalem, May my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth If I do not remember you If I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy. Psalm 137; 5, 62

In Soviet Ukraine, a distinctly Ukrainian conception of the right of self-determination emerged as a direct result of ideological and historical experience. As the previous two chapters have demonstrated, developed socialism both before and after the Helsinki Final Act contained a clearly conceived discourse of human rights. These rights were grounded in socialist legality, expressed in the language of Marxist-Leninism, and conceptually divorced from international rights norms. With regard to self-determination, this understanding, expounded both in dissident circles and at an official level, was bolstered by the collective memory of practical application in the Ukrainian SSR. Namely, the Soviet policy of ‘national communism’, employed in the period 1921-1929, provided the paradigm of Leninist norms to which

Ukrainian dissidents advocated a return. That national concerns in Ukraine were viewed by dissidents through the lens of Marxist-Leninism is telling. Such conceptualisations of the right of self-determination were a unique product of Ukraine’s chequered past. Historical experiences of independence and autonomy, coupled with the ideological imperialism emanating from the Soviet centre, openly informed how rights

1 Pope Pius IX, quoted in Adam Piekarski, The Church in Poland, (Warsaw, Interpres Publishers, 1978), p.121 2 These particular verses, from Psalm 137 (136), were used by the editors of the journal Iskhod (Exodus) as the introduction of each volume. 52 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 agitators conceived the very nature of self-determination. These experiences and conceptualisations, however, were distinctly Ukrainian. Further from Moscow, but still in the cultural and geopolitical peripheries of the Soviet Empire, Polish and Soviet Jewish dissidents understood national rights in a manner which better suited their cultural and historical contexts. The silence of Western legal conceptualisations of self-determination with regard to the specific circumstances encapsulating Soviet

Jews and Polish conservatives resulted in the emergence of an alternative discourse of rights. This notion was relevant solely to the group from which it sprang, and was both produced by and reflected their unique experience. Polish and Soviet Jewish political demands for self-determination, expressed through a desire for independence and emigration, will be positioned in their appropriate historical and ideological contexts.

This chapter is orientated around two subsections, each addressing a different case study. In the first, I will examine the scope and nature of political dissent in the Polish People’s Republic, arguing that Polish dissidents on the right wing of the political spectrum advocated a brand of self-determination characterised by a particular focus on foreign policy. The practical exercise of this right, they believed, involved dismantling perceived Russian imperialism, and the creation of a federative network headed by a resurgent

Poland. This view of the right of self-determination, I argue, has direct precedent in Poland’s cycles of independence and subjugation. Particularly, the policies of federalism and anti-imperialism labelled

‘Prometheism’ and ‘Intermarium’, promoted by the Polish interwar leader Marshal Józef Piłsudski, formed the spiritual progenitor of Polish conservative dissent in the early 1980s. The second subsection will assess the political demands of so-called ‘refusenik’ (отказник) Jewish advocates, arguing that, for the Soviet

Jew, the right of self-determination was understood to be equivocal with the right to emigrate. In line with the overarching themes of this thesis, particular focus is given to national-cultural rights, rather than to economic, civil or political rights. This political-national focus precludes from analysis two prominent aspects of post-Helsinki Polish dissent: religious rights, as expressed by the ‘Polish Pope’, John Paul II, and civil and economic rights, as advocated by the trade union Solidarity (Solidarność). Likewise, this chapter will approach the question of Jewish self-determination through treating, in terms of categorisation, the

Jewish people in the same manner as did the Soviet authorities. Judaism, therefore, will be approached as

53 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 an ethno-national identity, rather than as a religious one. This distinction is important: Soviet passports, for example, listed one’s nationality—a categorisation which extended to Jews, but not to other religious groups.3 It is worth noting, too, that the conservative movement which appeared in Poland following the imposition of martial law in 1981 was conceptually different from the first generation of post-Helsinki dissenters. The political demands of centre-right Poles and Soviet Jews represent an alternative rights discourse spurred by an ambiguity, in Western legal understandings, of the nature of self-determination. In both instances, a conceptual silence concerning aspects of self-determination specifically pertaining to the national-cultural status of Jews and Poles saw dissidents turn to the past in order to resolve their future.

This theme pervades both Polish and Soviet Jewish understandings of national concerns, and is the focus of this chapter.

‘Prometheism’ and ‘Intermarium’: Self-Determination through Foreign Policy

In a samizdat (Polish: drugi obied, or ‘second circulation’) article, the Polish dissident Sejan chronicled the appearance of a conservative movement for independence following the imposition of martial law in

December, 1981.4 Unlike earlier post-Helsinki advocacy, which had tolerated the socialist regime while attempting to reform the system from within, this conservative opposition was vitriolic in its demand for

Polish independence from both socialist ideology and Russian occupation. Self-determination, of course, had an impact on the Polish diaspora’s political demands for decades. The Polish Government-in-Exile positioned, for example, political (internal) self-determination above all other demands. In their view, “the

‘sovereign’ people [of socialist Europe], acting under duress, have the obligation to elect, but they are denied the right to choose. In Moscow’s political dictionary self-determination is an empty word, devoid of meaning.”5 Discounting an aborted post-war attempt at liberation, national rights were relegated to second place by economic and civil concerns in Polish dissent. The earliest group within Poland proclaiming the

3 Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p.4; Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.144 4 Sejan, ‘Emerging from the Mist’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/8A Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty (RFE-RL) Polish Samizdat Unit, p.1 5 Polish Government-in-Exile, In Defence of Poland’s Freedom: Facts and Documents, Polish Government-in-Exile, London: 1977, p.13 Emphasis in original. 54 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 independence as its ultimate goal was the Polish League of Independence, which issued a manifesto in the wake of the political unrest of 1975-76. In it, the group declared a twenty-six point plan, addressing issues as diverse as freedom of opinion and basic economic rights.6 The Polish League of Independence adopted the principle of state sovereignty as its inalienable basis, and included amongst its most prominent demands a number of themes that would later characterise conservative Polish understandings of the right of self- determination. In particular, the League advocated an overhaul of relations with Russia, and the liberation of Poland’s immediate eastern neighbours. “Russia is not our neighbour,” read the Programme. “Our neighbours to the East are Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania [...] The Ukrainian, Byelorussian,

Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian nations are not independent today and are subjected to a more severe political, ideological and religious discipline than Poland.”7

This emphasis on the plight of Poland’s subjugated neighbours is important. Due to the geopolitical position of Poland at the crossroads of East and West, the conceptions of self-determination by conservative Polish dissidents came to reflect an idealised notion of Poland as being at the heart of a loose, transnational federation of liberated, equal countries. Such a federation existed with one purpose: dismantling Russian, and, to a lesser extent, German, political influence in the region, in order to create regional and global security. “The most vital factor governing Polish foreign policy is that of relations with

Russia,” the League’s programme continued. “A genuine friendship between Poland and Russia could be achieved in the future but only if mutual relations are based on sincerity, on an open acknowledgement of the wrongs inflicted on Poland and on de facto genuine sovereign equality of rights.”8 The paradigm of self-determination through foreign policy pervaded dissident understandings of the Right in Poland, and was by no means a new idea. Indeed, it reflected the grandiose political agenda of Poland’s pre-war strong- man, Marshall Józef Piłsudski, as espoused in his political theory that came to be embodied in

‘Prometheism’. This subsection will analyse the political demands of Poland’s post-Helsinki conservative

6 ‘Programme of the Polish League of Independence’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.169 7 Programme of the Polish League of Independence’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.169 8 Programme of the Polish League of Independence’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977, p.168 55 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 dissent, before tracing the ideological influence of ‘Prometheism’ on the formulation of conservative understandings of self-determination.

Conservative Political Demands in the Polish Peoples’ Republic

A conservative and distinctly Polish understanding of the right of self-determination emerged due to a silence, in Western legal conceptualisations, about the role of foreign policy in the exercise of that right.

The language of the Helsinki Final Act defined self-determination, in part, as being development “without external interference”. 9 No guarantee was provided, or proposal presented, on how to safeguard against such unwanted influence. This silence encouraged Polish dissidents to turn to the past when imagining their future. The most comprehensive vision of Poland’s future liberation was detailed in an essay by the author

Wojtek Wojskowy, published in the samizdat journal Independence (Niepodległość). For Wojskowy, self- determination was intrinsically linked to foreign policy. Setting the emancipation of Poland as his ultimate goal, Wojskowy charged that independence could not be achieved without a clearly conceived foreign programme.10 “It is impossible to conduct any activity in the political sphere without a precise outline of the foreign aspects of that policy,” he noted. “Without this there can be no question of observing civil rights, of civil influence on the system of government, of self-management, [and] of increasing the wealth of the nation.”11

Wojskowy supported this claim by suggesting that Poland’s independent existence was the only assurance of lasting regional peace, but, that conversely a free Poland required the support of neighbouring nations.

“A Poland left alone in the centre of Europe,” he noted, “will always be a tasty morsel for its mightier neighbours.”12 This fate was to be avoided through the creation of a federation of independent states, to be achieved through the successful promotion of a unified political programme. This federation was to be “an alliance of the captive nations of Central and Eastern Europe,” established while still under Soviet

9Article 1 (VIII), Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe Final Act, Section VIII, Helsinki: 1975 10 Wojtek Wojkowsky, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, RFE-RL Polish Samizdat Unit, p.1 11 Wojkowsky, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, p.1 12 Wojkowsky, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, p.3 56 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 occupation, and later blossoming into a loose league with a shared economy and a common passport.13 It would exist in a central position in Europe, as a third political, economic and military power standing between East and West. Although conceding that Polonisation was not one of their aims, Wojskowy nonetheless implied that such a federation would exist under Poland’s hegemony.14 Wojskowy’s conclusions were echoed by Mieszek Orfeusz:

In analysing our geopolitical situation, we came to the conclusion (not a particularly original one) that any

kind of stability in Central and Eastern Europe can only be ensured by independent and cooperative states

formed from all the nations living in this area. Only united state organisms, united by common interest, will

have a chance of settling on the basis of partnership their relations with a future Russia.15

It is telling that Orfeusz equated stability with a future relationship with Russia. Underpinning many of the conservative dissidents’ programmes was the perceived need of a bulwark against Soviet (and Russian) imperialism. Without this, self-determination was not an exercisable right, but merely a meaningless phrase. Importantly, too, this understanding positioned Soviet communism as the ‘Other’, a dogma to be both hated and rejected. The samizdat journal The Voice (Głos) echoed this concern, pitting West against

East: “The rebuilding of Central Europe and the regaining of independence by the countries of this region are the conditions for lasting peace in Europe. The West European community should become our ally, as it too is threatened by the USSR.”16 Disarming this Russian threat was to be achieved through federalism, but also by promoting Polish culture over its ‘Great Russian’ alternatives.

Numerous samizdat articles were dedicated to bettering the relationship between Poland and its Eastern neighbours. Many of these, geared particularly towards the Byelorussian and Ukrainian nations, evoked

13 Wojkowsky, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, p.3 14 Wojkowsky, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, p.3 15 Mieszek Orfeusz, ‘About Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/2F RFE-RL Polish Samizdat Unit, p.2 16 Quoted in Sejan, ‘Emerging from the Mist’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/8A, p.4 57 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 their shared history with Poland as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.17 In particular, the heterogeneous nature of Russian culture, characterised by ‘Byzantinism’ and ‘Mogolism’ (or despotism and a cult of strength) was considered a threat by the conservative Polish opposition.18 Dissidents like

Orfeusz warned Poland’s easterly neighbours of the assimilatory policies of Russian imperialism, offering

Poland and Polish culture as better options. “Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and the Baltic peoples are today in danger from Russian influence,” he noted, in an article encouraging cross-cultural interactions in an attempt to promote federalism as a viable foreign policy.19Appealing to a shared national and religious history, the drugi obied journal Baza referenced the memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

(Rzeczpospolita), a historical state existing between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and ostensibly under Poland’s political and cultural leadership, as the paradigm for the future.20 It was hoped that, through fostering friendly relations, the former member-nations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would be better disposed to Polish cultural influence.”21 Two broad themes, therefore, came to characterise the political demands of Poland’s conservative opposition with regard to national concerns. The first was federalism: the creation of a federative league of states designed to safeguard both Poland’s political independence and the security of Central Eastern Europe. The second theme was a measure of anti- imperialism, aimed at dismantling Russian imperial influence in the region through both aforementioned federalism and the promotion of Polish culture as a more suitable alternative. These align strongly to two dominant Polish foreign policies formulated by interwar strong-man Józef Piłsudski: ‘Prometheism’, or the dismantling of Russian imperial influence, and the ‘Intermarium’ (Międzymorze).

Prometheism and Intermarium: the Ideological Lineage of Conservative Independence Movements

Half a century before the Helsinki Final Act, Józef Piłsudski attempted to implement two far-reaching policies for the peace and security of Central Europe: Prometheism, and the ‘Intermarium’. The ultimate

17 Cf., for example, ‘Brothers, Fans, or Enemies?’ RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/5G, RFE-RL Polish Samizdat Unit; ‘Byelorussia—Good Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1F, RFE-RL Polish Samizdat Unit; Orfeusz, ‘About Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/2F, etc. 18 Orfeusz, ‘About Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/2F, p.2 19 Orfeusz, ‘About Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/2F, p.2 20 ‘Brothers, Fans, or Enemies?’ RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/5G, RFE-RL Polish Samizdat Unit, p.7 21 Orfeusz, ‘About Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/2F, p.2 58 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 aim of both these policies, initially formulated before the First World War, was peace through the creation of a federation ‘between the seas’ (Latin: intermarium; Polish: ‘Międzymorze’) and the dismantlement of

Russian imperial influence. The ‘Intermarium’ was to comprise the former colonial peoples of Central-

Eastern Europe, but primarily those nations occupying the territory of the former Rzeczpospolita:

Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, and Poles.22 Historians, like M. K. Dzienwanowski, have interpreted the Międzymorze, and Piłsudski’s politics more broadly, as an attempt to recreate an aspect of

Poland’s glorious history.23 Piłsudski, nominally a socialist, frequently evoked the Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth in his writings. Resurrecting this romanticised past would eventually dominate his policies and those of his successors.24 Like his later compatriots’ opposition to Soviet domination, Piłsudski stood against Tsarist Russia in the belief that Russian colonialism condemned that nation to autocracy. He was not, however, opposed to the Russian people.25 Orfeusz voiced similar conclusions:

What we have written above should not be taken to indicate that we are anti-Russian. Let us stress once

again: we are not enemies of Russian culture. We read Russian books, and not just the classics or the

opposition writers, but also contemporary authors.26

Wojskowy, likewise, pledged the support of the Independence journal behind “those Russians who devote their efforts towards the liberation of the Russian people from communist rule and toward the instilling into it of political, social and cultural rebirth.”27 Interestingly, both Piłsudski and the conservative opposition of the 1980s believed Russia was a prisoner of its political system.28 “We acknowledge the Russian nation as a nation enslaved by the Communists and deprived of its rights,” wrote Wojkowsky, voicing the position of

Independence.29 Numerous similarities existed between the political demands of Piłsudski and the

22 M. K. Dzienwanowski, Joseph Pilsudski: A European Federalist, 1918-1922 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1969), p.35 23 Dzienwanowski, Joseph Pilsudski, p.40 24 Cf. Georga Sakwa, ‘The Polish Ultimatum to Lithuania in March 1938’, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol.55, No. 2 (April, 1977) 25 Dzienwanowski, Joseph Pilsudski, p.35 26 Orfeusz, ‘About Russia’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/2F, p.3 Underline is in the original. 27 Wojskowy, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, p.4 28 Dzienwanowski, Joseph Pilsudski, p.35 29 Wojskowy, ‘The Europe of the Future’, RAD Polish Samizdat Extracts/1B, p.4 59 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 conservative opposition of the 1980s. These commonalities were not merely cosmetic. As examined in

Chapter 1, post-Helsinki Polish rights agitators frequently evoked the memory of the Polish Lithuanian

Commonwealth; this process transferred to the conservative opposition of the following decade.

Particularly, Polish dissidents displayed an awareness of the weight of history. For example, the March

Constitution of 1921, issued by the revolutionary Second Polish Republic, was frequently invoked by dissidents on both sides of the political spectrum.30 Likewise, the emphasis placed on dismantling Russian influence, on improving Poland’s regional and international standing, and on the creation of a federation in order to safeguard Poland’s independence suggests a continuum in the conceptualisation of self- determination between the Second Polish Republic and conservative dissenters in the 1980s. Self- determination through federalism was not an internationally inspired movement for human rights, but instead an attempt to construct a new future through resurrection the best elements of the past.

Conservative dissidents’ political goals reveal a distinctly Polish understanding of this right, grounded firmly in local ideology and tradition.

Self-Determination through Emigration: Jewish Answers to the National Question

The plight of Soviet Jews provides a perfect microcosm for the broader national concerns in the Soviet

Union. The prominent producer of Jewish samizdat, A. Voronel, identified three potential fates that the

Soviet Jewish community faced: assimilation, emigration or cultural autonomy.31 Of these, the latter two emerged to characterise a distinctly Jewish understanding of the right of self-determination. The first, and most vocal, was the demand for freedom to emigrate to Israel. The second, existing within the previously discussed tradition of socialist rights, was the petition for cultural autonomy. Much has been written about the influence of Zionism on Jewish national thought, and consequently this subsection does not offer, beyond a cursory overview, the impact or influence of Zionism on the refusenik movement in the Soviet

Union. Instead, it will examine Jewish political demands, discerning two distinctly Jewish understandings of self-determination from the samizdat literature. These are based on the principle of emigration, and on improvement of domestic cultural life, and represent clear examples of two alternative discources on

30 For example, see ‘Letter of the Fourteen’, Dissent in Poland, 1976-1977 , pp.16-17 31 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.144 60 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 national rights under developed socialism. Firstly, I will establish Judaism as a national group, based on both their own self-identification and the categorisation of the Soviet State. I will then analyse Jewish political demands, in order to discern these competing and uniquely Jewish notions of self-determination.

The Jewish People as a National Group

In both the official Soviet understanding, and according to their own self-identity, Jews comprised a distinct national group. This identification, both welcomed and imposed, would directly inform how Soviet

Jews interpreted the right of self-determination. As mentioned previously, Soviet identification cards denoted one’s nationality: this included the classification yevrey (еврей), or Jew.32 As Natan Shcharansky, who would serve in the gulag for his desire to emigrate, noted:

In those days my conscious association with the word “Jew” was limited to the bureaucratic phrase “fifth

line.” In the identity papers of my parents and most of our acquaintances, the word Yevrei, Jew, was filled in

under “Nationality” on the fifth line of the document. Above all, it meant your opportunities in Soviet society

were severely limited.33

While many Soviet Jews, like Natan Shcharansky, were critical of this clause, citing the potential for anti-

Semitic violence, it is worth noting that some fought to maintain it.34 When a Jew named Vladimir

Belotserkovskii suggested that the registration of nationality should be removed from identification documents, members of the community charged that such a reform would accelerate assimilation.35

Likewise, in advancing their political demands, many Soviet Jews described themselves as being of ‘Jewish nationality’ (eврейская националность). Primarily, this self-identification was provided in conjunction with acknowledgment of Soviet Citizenship, and a tacit respect for socialist legality. “We Jews living in the

Georgian SSR have, for a long time, pressed to emigrate to Israel,” declared one such letter. “We respect

Soviet laws, and demand that the humanistic principles which guarantee every freedom to choose where

32 Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen, p.4 33 Natan Sharansky, Fear No Evil (New York: Random House, 1988), p.xi 34 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.144 35 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.144 61 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 one lives and unlimited rights of movement, be extended to cover those of us who wish to emigrate to

Israel.”36

Jewish self-identification, and a fear of assimilation, came to dominate the political demands of Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. Namely, identifying as a Jew and identifying as an Israeli citizen would become synonymous in Soviet Jewish samizdat: “I can no longer continue to call myself a citizen of the

Soviet Union,” declared the Moscow Jew David Drabkin, in a letter to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. “PRESENTLY I DECLARE THAT I CONSIDER MYSELF A CITIZEN OF THE JEWISH

STATE OF ISRAEL.” 37 This is telling, as Drabkin had not yet received either citizenship in Israel or the right to exit the Soviet Union: he was self-identifying based on his ethnicity, and Israel’s position as the

Jewish state. Israel, as the spiritual home of the Jewish people, would come to characterise the first trend of

Soviet Jewish self-determination: emigration.

Self Determination through Emigration

In the decade 1970-1980, more than 250,000 Soviet Jews performed Aliyah, or emigration to Israel.38

Neither Western nor socialist self-determination could clearly be reconciled with the desire of Jewish

‘refuseniks’ to emigrate to Israel. In both socialist ideology and Western legal theory, territorial integrity and social cohesion were considered desirable, if not necessary, for exercising the right of self- determination. The Soviet Jewish community, whose samizdat publications included contributions from as far afield as Riga, Minsk and Tbilisi, lacked these basic requirements. What instead emerged was a political movement demanding the freedom to emigrate to Israel. Soviet ‘refuseniks’, so called because of the authorities’ refusal to issue an exit visa, confused traditional understandings of the right of self- determination, subverting the assumption that political autonomy was to exist within, rather than beyond, a territorial entity. Failing to fit traditional or socialist conceptualisations of the right of self-determination,

36 Mikhail Manasherov et. al, Pismo General’nomu Sekretaryu OON/Predsedtelyu Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, Iskhod, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.38 37 David Drabkin, ‘Zayavleniye’, Iskhod, Vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.18 Capitalisation in original. 38 Ludmila Alekseeva, Istoria Inakomysliya v SSSR (Vilnius: Vest’, 1983), pp.115ff. 62 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 these Jews formulated their own. “We consider the refusal of our right to emigrate to Israel to constitute a refusal of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their national state,” declared one public letter to the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir.39

Israel attained, in Zionist samizdat literature, spiritual connotations. “The decision to emigrate to Israel came to me in youth,” wrote the dissident Tina Brodetskaya in an open letter to the Council of Ministers of the USSR. “I consider Israel my spiritual and national Motherland.”40These words frequently manifested in public letters: a declaration by the Jew Girsh Feygin announced that Israel constituted his ‘national

Motherland, the historical Motherland of my people.”41 An association of the modern State of Israel with its ancient progenitor was accompanied by a use of biblical language to voice contemporary political demands. “I call on you to let my people go!” thundered Feygin, echoing Moses’ demand to the Pharaoh.42

As with conservative Polish understandings of self-determination, Jewish advocacy possessed an ‘Other’— a greater power, from which independence was desired. This freedom was not adequately described or provided in international legislation; nor too could it be found in socialist legality. Instead, Zionist elements of the Soviet Jewry turned to the past in order to create their future, namely through advancing the belief that the State of Israel aligned closely with their spiritual and national concerns. Soviet Communism, with its pro-Arab ‘campaign against Israel’, could not adequately protect or nurture their interests.43

Self-Determination as a Socialist-Jewish Right

Like all other opposition movements under developed socialism, Jewish dissent was highly varied in its demands. While the journal Exodus (Iskhod) published primarily Zionist documents advocating a return of the Jewish people to Israel, some Jewish dissidents, like M. Zubin, were strongly opposed to what they saw

39 Boris Brashteyn et. al., Pismo Prem’er-Ministru Gosudarstva Izrail’, gospozhe Golde Meir, Iskhod Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.39 40 Tina Brodetskaya, Predsedatelyu Soveta Ministrov SSSR, Iskhod, Vol 1 Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.19 41 Girsh Isakovich Feygin, ‘Zayavleniye’, Iskhod Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.53 42 Feygin, ‘Zayavleniye’, p.54 43 Vitaly Svechinskii et. al., Otkrytoe Pismo, Iskhod, Vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.7 63 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 as a vocal Zionist minority.44 Instead, these dissidents advocated a somewhat less Jewish form of self- determination, orientated again in the language of Marxist-Leninism. This rehashed understanding was opposed to Zionism, and suggested that Jewish cultural interests should be fostered domestically, in

Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, rather than facing cultural assimilation in Israel.45 Advocates of this cultural autonomy were openly critical of the proliferation of samizdat literature expressing Zionism as the ultimate

Jewish goal. A Jewish-penned article in the Russian newspaper Pravda addressed those people:

[W]ho have signed your correspondence as ‘Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality’ (which obviously means

that there is in your passport a graph with the national word ‘Jew’, and nothing more), not only can you not

speak on behalf of our people, but it is doubtful whether you can identify with the Jewish people in general.46

These calls were supported by demands for more cultural autonomy within the Soviet Union. Although supportive of Zionism, one Muscovite-Jewish letter lamented: “In the Soviet Union we have no national life: not one Jewish school, not one Jewish textbook.”47 Demands for cultural autonomy align closely with the understanding of socialist self-determination explained previously, and need not be repeated here. As

Zisserman-Brodsky has noted, Jewish samizdat would eventually come to synthesise demands for emigration with these more traditional requests for cultural autonomy along Marxist-Leninist lines.48

44 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.148 45 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.148 46 Lassal Kaminskiy et. al., Otkrytoe Pismo v Gazete ‘Pravde’, Iskhod, Vol. 1, (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.12 47 Pavel Abramovich et. al., Pismo General’nomu Sekretaryu OON, Iskhod, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Evrei i Evreyskiy Narod, 1974), p.41 48 Zisserman-Brodsky, Constructing Ethnopolitics in the Soviet Union, p.148 64 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

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Disappointed Love: A Conclusion

Writing from exile in Paris twenty-two years before the Helsinki Final Act, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz posed a critical question. “Well then,” he wrote, “what can the West offer us?”1 Miłosz had fled his native

Poland at the close of the Stalinist epoch, and had immediately begun work on his magnum opus, a psychological study of intellectual capitulation under totalitarian regimes. For Miłosz, and for many

Eastern intellectuals like him, the West had little to offer beyond “chauvinism, detective stories, and artistically worthless movies.”2 Although the West was unquestionably superior from a technological perspective, for the Eastern intellectual it was spiritually and culturally bereft. “The Eastern intellectual’s attitude to the West,” Miłosz argued, “is somewhat like disappointed love, and as we know, such deception often leaves a sediment of sarcasm.”3

Within fifteen years of the Helsinki Final Act communist governments across Central-Eastern Europe collapsed into democracy or dictatorship. While it may be tempting to view the transition to democracy as the direct product of Western liberalism, and the emergence of dictatorial regimes of the post-Soviet

Caucasus and Central Asia as the lingering relics of authoritarian socialism, the reality is much more complex. Although the influence of human rights discourse on this shift is unquestionable, its catalyst cannot be attributed to a single source. The realities of the post-Soviet experience, characterised by corruption and pseudo-democracy, undermine the notion of a triumph of Western liberalism or international rights norms. Perhaps, to use Miłosz’s phrase, the relationship between the Eastern and

Western rights discourse, as it was between East and West more broadly, could be surmised as

‘disappointed love’. While frequently evoked in memoranda, petitions and even poetry, Western norms were not received with entirely open arms; after all, it is not for nothing that Rudenko said he шукав

(searched for), rather than знайшов (found), a ‘New Faith’.

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In any event, in this thesis I have proposed an alternative to this theory—an alternative rights discourse, grounded in dissidents’ ideological, historical and cultural contexts. This thesis has demonstrated that rights-agitation in the period following the Helsinki Final Act did not appear spontaneously, nor in isolation, but instead represented a continuum in conceptualisations and tactics with earlier generations of dissenters. These methods and understandings were grounded in socialist legality, historical experience, or in regional ideology, and directly informed an organic and distinct discourse of human rights conceptually divorced from international norms. On the geographical and cultural fringes of the Soviet Empire, this discourse was expressed in numerous ways. For example, it is discernible in dissidents’ belief in the authenticity of socialist legality, and in the evocation of the past to legitimise the path to a future society.

This alternative discourse pervaded dissident understandings, particularly with regard to national concerns.

Although it did not exist in opposition to international norms, it paralleled and supplemented them, consequently providing a much more adequate filter through which to assess the political demands of dissidents under developed socialism. The three case studies examined above each encapsulates a different aspect of the alternative conceptualisations of that most contentious of rights, the right of nations to self- determination. The Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish struggles for national independence in the peripheries of

Soviet influence following the Helsinki Final Act did not constitute a ‘New Faith’, so much as an appropriation of older ones. In these three chapters, together forming a loose thematic narrative, I have attempted to replace this notion of a ‘new faith’ with a more adequate approach through tracing the ideological, historical, political and religious lineages of rights-talk in socialist Europe.

In the first chapter, I challenged historian Daniel Thomas’s conviction that Helsinki rights agitation represented a new movement. Specifically, I positioned the movement in its social and national context, arguing that tangible links existed between the Polish and Ukrainian Helsinki Groups and earlier generations of dissent. Such links can be seen, for example, in the tactic of ‘civil obedience’, in the national exclusivity, or even in the membership of these committees. In the first chapter I also proposed the first alternative discourse of human rights in the Soviet periphery, namely ‘socialist rights’. These rights were grounded in socialist legality, and were conceptually divorced from international norms through their focus

66 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

University of Sydney: A New Faith? Rights Agitation, National Aspirations and Self- Honours 2013 Determination in the Soviet Periphery, 1965-1985 on national-cultural, as opposed to civil and political, rights. This position was extended in the second chapter to the right of nations to self-determination. Examining the theoretical aspects of self- determination, and advancing a provisional definition, I argued that there was a clearly conceived right of self-determination in the mindset of Ukrainian dissidents, emerging from their belief in the authenticity of socialist legality as a provider and protector of basic human rights. In the Ukrainian SSR, self- determination, and national-cultural rights more broadly, was understood through the lens of Marxist-

Leninist internationalism, and often expressed in the language of deviation from the Leninist experiment of

‘Ukrainization’, a regional variant of national communism which transpired in the Ukrainian SSR between

1921 and 1929. In the final chapter, I examined two further alternatives to the Helsinki Effect, examining the weight of history and identity on the emergence of a unique Polish and Soviet Jewish conception of self-determination. In the case of the former, this was characterised by evoking the political memory of

Poland’s triumphant return to international politics during the second decade of the twentieth century. For the latter, this was channelled through both a desire to emigrate to the ‘spiritual and national Motherland’ of the Jewish people, or, alternatively, through attempts to improve the cultural and political status of

Soviet Jews domestically, along the lines of socialist self-determination.4

In any case, the various movements for self-determination in Central-Eastern Europe under developed socialism looked forwards, even when one eye looked to the past. In agitating for compliance with human rights norms, nationally-minded dissidents were not merely seeking liberation, as the Western liberal narrative suggests, but instead hoping to construct a better future for their people—regardless of its foundation. Observing the situation in his homeland from Parisian exile, Miłosz reached the following conclusion, which I think perfectly surmises my own findings on organic dissident understandings of human rights in the Soviet periphery. “Freedom from something is a great deal, yet not enough,” he wrote.

“It is much less than freedom for something.”5

4 Tina Brodetskaya, Predsedatelyu Soveta Ministrov SSSR, p.19 5 Miłosz, The Captive Mind, p.35 67 Nathan Stormont | 430430972 |

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Appendix I: Relevant Articles from the Constitution of the USSR

Article 16. Each Union Republic has its own Constitution, which takes into account the specific features of the Republic and is drawn up in full conformity with the Constitution of the USSR.

Article 17. To every Union Republic is reserved the right freely to secede from the USSR.

Article 18. The territory of the Union Republics may not be altered without their consent.

Article 33. The Supreme Soviet of the USSR consists of two chambers: the Soviet of the Union and the

Soviet of Nationalities.

Article 35. The Soviet of Nationalities is elected by citizens of the USSR according to Union and

Autonomous Republics, Autonomous Regions and national areas on the basis of twenty-five deputies from each Union Republic, eleven deputies from each Autonomous Republic, five deputies from each

Autonomous Region and one deputy from each national area.

Article 37. The two Chambers of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities, have equal rights.

Article 123. The equality of the rights of citizens of the USSR, irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law.

Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or conversely, the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as the advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law.

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