An Unlikely National Revival: Soviet Higher Learning and the Ukrainian “Sixtiers,” 1953–65

Abstract

T JL he Ukrainian novelist Volodymyr Drozd grew up in a village in Chernihiv province and attended a school in the heavily Russian-speaking provincial center. When Drozd took up work in a local newspaper in 1956, he tried with all [his] energies to speak in the cultured manner?in Russian, even though [his] Russian was broken. A few years later, after a graduate of Kyiv University took up work at his paper, Kyivan national passions wafted through the stuffy offices of his newspaper.1 Under the influence of the newcomer, Drozd discovered Ukrainian identity. He soon began to speak exclusively in Ukrainian, interrupting and rebuking anyone he heard around him speaking Russian. He also discovered his calling as a Ukrainian writer, and stopped writing in Russian. In his diary, he vowed to write only that which will benefit the [Ukrainian] people, his nation that had been left behind, spurned, ashamed. Drozd's national awakening belongs to the history of a postwar generation of free thinking writers and humanitarians that have been dubbed the shistdesiatnyky (people of the '60s or sixtiers), a name coined in the period from comparisons to the Russian radicals of the 1860s.2 Drozd and his cohort developed an influential movement for national cultural expression and later played a galvanizing role during national mobilization in the 1980s. Both Western literature and post-Soviet Ukrainian historians have lionized the sixtiers as legitimate and rightful defenders of the Ukrainian nation against state-led Russification and members of an unbroken tradition of national resistance against Russian