What we see today in Ukraine may well be considered the result of long-term, purposeful and well-planned work. Work on the introduction from the mid-1950s, and even earlier, of nationalists in the highest, middle and lower leadership levels, first in Western Ukraine, and then in the entire Ukrainian SSR. With their help, the anti-Soviet, and, in fact, Russophobic "soil" was carefully prepared and multiplied in Western Ukraine, which then, as the USSR weakened and, accordingly, the control functions of the Center began to spread in other Ukrainian regions.
Moreover, the introduction of nationalists into the Ukrainian Communist Party and their further career advancement began in the 1920s.
So, according to the report of the head of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR Sudoplatov, the deputy head of the 3rd Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR Ilyushin on December 5, 1942 (No. 7 / s / 97), “… after the defeat of the Petliurism … the active Petliurists went deep underground and only in 1921 were legalized, entered the UKP and used legal opportunities to intensify nationalist work … With the arrival of the German occupiers in Ukraine, these persons ended up in the service of the Germans. " It is obvious that in the last Stalinist decade (1944-1953) it was not easy for the "Westerners" to penetrate the party and state bodies of Ukraine, to put it mildly. But then …
The rehabilitation in 1955, at the initiative of Khrushchev, of persons who collaborated with the fascist occupiers during the war years, according to many experts, opened the valves for the “political naturalization” of former OUN members who returned to Ukraine, who later in a significant number changed into Komsomol and Communists.
But they were returning from emigration by no means "pro-Soviet." According to a number of North American and West German sources (including the Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR and Eastern Europe, which existed in 1950 - early 1970), no less than a third of Ukrainian nationalists and members of their families rehabilitated in the middle - second half of 1950, By the mid-1970s, became the heads of district committees, regional committees, regional and / or district executive committees in Western, Central and South-Western Ukraine. And also - leaders of various ranks in many Ukrainian ministries, departments, enterprises, Komsomol and public organizations, including the regional level.
According to the same estimates, as well as archival documents of local party bodies, in the early 1980s. in the general contingent of the regional party committee and district committees of the Lviv region, the share of persons of Ukrainian nationality, rehabilitated in 1955-1959, and repatriates exceeded 30%; for the party organizations of the Volyn, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil regions, this indicator ranged from 35% to 50%.
A parallel process also developed from the outside, since from the middle of 1955, Ukrainians were returning from abroad as well. Moreover, already in 1955-1958. returned, in general, at least 50 thousand people, in the next 10-15 years - about 50 thousand more.
And what is interesting: the exiled OUN members in the 1940s and early 1950s managed, for the most part, to find jobs in the gold mines in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East. Therefore, they returned to Ukraine with large sums of money.
Repatriates from other countries were not poor at all. And almost immediately upon their return, most of the exiled and repatriates bought houses with land plots or built their own, or "built in" in expensive for those times housing and construction cooperatives.
Obviously, after Khrushchev's rehabilitation in 1955, the leadership of the OUN and other nationalist Zakordon structures took over in 1955-1956. decisions on the gradual introduction into the party and state structures of the Ukrainian SSR. It was noted that there will be no insurmountable obstacles on the part of local authorities. In a word, the nationalists changed their tactics, began in every possible way to support the "pro-Western" anti-Soviet dissidents in Ukraine, skillfully introduce chauvinistic assessments and appeals into the public consciousness through the publishing houses and mass media of the Ukrainian SSR. According to the historian and political scientist Klim Dmitruk, these events were overseen by Western intelligence services. In addition, the USSR did not dare to strongly "put pressure" on the Eastern European countries, through whose territories (with the possible exception of Romania) both ex-OUN members and a new, more prepared outgrowth of nationalists continued to penetrate into Ukraine from abroad.
The Ukrainian leadership, we repeat, directly or indirectly encouraged these trends. For example, at a meeting of the Politburo on October 21, 1965, a project of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, initiated by the head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Pyotr Shelest, on granting Ukraine the right to independently participate in foreign economic activity, was discussed. No other union republic allowed itself this. The very appearance of such an odious project shows that the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR actually promoted "promising" ideas of conspiratorial nationalists.
According to some estimates, if this project succeeded, it would be followed by similar demands from the Baltic and Transcaucasian republics.
Therefore, Moscow did not consider it necessary to meet the request of Kiev, although this proposal was supported by a native of Poltava, the head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR N. V. Podgorny. Moreover, according to the memoirs of A. I. Mikoyan, it was then that Shelest was not just "put in his place", but also deleted from the list of "Brezhnev's friends." However, even after that, the influence of the "Ukrainian group" in the Kremlin remained significant, and Shelest was dismissed only after six years, and Podgorny - after 11.
Meanwhile, back in September 1965, the CPSU Central Committee received an anonymous letter: “… In Ukraine, the atmosphere on the basis of the national question is growing more and more, in connection with the desire of some in Kiev to carry out the so-called Ukrainization of schools and universities … it is clear that the violation of any status quo, and even more so in this issue in Ukraine, will cause hostile relations between Russians and Ukrainians, will excite many base passions for the sake and demand of Canadian Ukrainians?..”. But the analysis of even this "signal", we note, did not lead to the resignation of P. Shelest.
In addition, the “returnees” were not hindered from joining the Komsomol or the party. True, some had to change their surnames for this, but that was, of course, a low price for moving up the career ladder.
At the initiative of Shelest, in the late 1960s, a compulsory exam in the Ukrainian language was secretly introduced in Ukrainian humanitarian and many technical universities, which, by the way, was welcomed by many media outlets of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, Germany, Australia, Argentina. They believed that this order would suspend the "Russification" and Sovietization of Ukraine. Subsequently, this decision was "let on the brakes", but even after that many teachers demanded that applicants, students and applicants for scientific degrees, especially in Western Ukraine, take exams in the Ukrainian language.
And from about the mid-1970s, due to the further strengthening of the positions of the Ukrainian (especially the Brezhnev-Dnepropetrovsk) clan in the top leadership of the USSR and the CPSU, the naturalization of nationalists became almost uncontrolled. This was again facilitated by the generally mild attitude of the Ukrainian leadership during, let us emphasize, the entire post-Stalin period to the growth of nationalist tendencies in the republic. And the replacement of Shelest by Shcherbitsky led only to a more veiled development of nationalism, moreover, in very sophisticated, one might even say, Jesuit methods.
Well, what would seem to be bad in the fact that, in particular, the number of schools with the Russian language of instruction began to grow, the number of mass media increased, incl. radio and television programs in Russian? That the circulation of literature in Russian began to grow rapidly? However, this caused latent discontent in the nationalist-minded circles of Ukraine, and contributed to the strengthening of such sentiments in society.
At the same time, according to the research group of the CIS Internet portal, Ukraine still remained in a privileged position in comparison with the RSFSR, which did not even have its own Academy of Sciences, unlike the Ukrainian and other Union republics.
Under P. Shelest, who headed the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1963, more Ukrainian-language literature and periodicals began to be published, and this process began in 1955. At official and other events, government officials advised speakers to speak Ukrainian. At the same time, the number of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1960-1970 grew at a record - in comparison with the growth in the number of members of the Communist Parties of other union republics - by almost 1 million people.
The pro-Western-minded nationalist dissidence in Ukraine also developed actively, at least a third of whose leaders were, again, former OUN members. In the Lvov and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, in the late 1950s, underground groups such as the Ukrainian Workers 'and Peasants' Union, the Group of Lawyers and Historians, and Nezalezhnosti appeared. They discussed options for de-Sovietization of Ukraine and its secession from the USSR. And in February 1963, at a conference on culture and the Ukrainian language at Kiev University, some participants proposed to give the Ukrainian language the status of the state language. Appropriate measures have not been taken against such groups in Ukraine. It turns out that the leaders of the KGB of the USSR also had adherents to the advancement of Ukraine towards "independence".
In this regard, it is noteworthy that the leader of the Melnikovites (by the name of the leader of one of the OUN groups - A. Melnik) A. Kaminsky in 1970 published in the USA and Canada a voluminous book "For the modern concept of the Ukrainian revolution." It could be obtained through second-hand booksellers in many cities of Ukraine, at bookstores, in book-lovers' societies, and from foreign correspondents. As A. Kaminsky stated, “a national revolution in Ukraine is quite possible, and it needs to be prepared. Moreover, for this purpose there is no need (no longer needed! - IL) underground structures … To unite the people against the Soviet regime, there are enough evolutionary possibilities. " And the line on such a revolution should be based on the preservation of one's own language, culture, national identity, love for the native people, traditions. And if "skillfully use the international and domestic situation, you can count on success …".
Therefore, since about the mid-1960s, the Melnikovites and Banderaites have abandoned their previously main underground struggle, reorienting, according to expert assessments of the CIS Internet portal and a number of other sources, in tactical considerations to support Ukrainian dissidence in all its forms and manifestations. Especially - to support the "protection of human rights in the USSR" inspired by the West, which very skillfully included nationalist overtones. In any case, a mediocre creative worker in Ukraine, and not only there, often became a widely advertised “prisoner of conscience” or received no less spectacular Western “labels” of the same kind.
The development of these tendencies was facilitated by the fact that the ideas of Russophobic "independence", albeit not publicly at that time, were shared by a considerable number of Ukrainian party government officials.
Throughout the Soviet period in Ukraine, there was practically a successful link between the nationalist movement and the party state apparatus.
And since a large number of its representatives grew out of the OUN movement, this secret alliance ultimately proved to be successful. For nationalists and their Western patrons, of course. In this regard, the creation in the 1970s and early 1980s is also noteworthy. Soviet export gas pipelines mainly on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. Many media outlets of the Ukrainian diaspora at that time and later noted that with the acquisition of "independence" by Ukraine, it would be able to dictate its terms to Russia and would keep it on a firm "hook". Today, another similar attempt is being made, but, as before, it is unlikely that the "nezalezhna" will succeed in doing anything worthwhile from this …
