Russian Active Measures. Группа авторов
and beat-music.26
Besides such cases of racism, the idealization of fascist leaders, and antisemitism, the KGB noted the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism among college students in other eastern Ukrainian cities. In some Russian-speaking cities of eastern Ukraine, such as Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, the KGB officers recorded frequent cases of Ukrainian nationalism. They attributed the rise of nationalism in Dnipropetrovsk, for instance, to demographic and political developments, following the 1956 sensational Twentieth Party Congress. According to a KGB decision, former political prisoners who had been indicted for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and had served their prison terms in the Gulag were released. However, they were not allowed to return to their homes in western Ukraine. These prisoners, identified as banderovtsy in official documents, were either members or supporters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and/or members of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (Uniate or the Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholic Church) from the Trans-Carpathian and Galician regions of western Ukraine.27 After 1945, when the Soviet Army suppressed these patriotic and anti-Soviet movements, thousands of adherents were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. KGB officials tried to prevent any contacts between these former political prisoners and their homeland in western Ukraine. By the mid-sixties, many of these ex-prisoners settled in eastern, more Russified regions of Ukraine. The KGB tried to regiment the movements of Ukrainian nationalists and dilute them by more diverse, and less Ukrainian, people of the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts. By 1967, 1,041 former political prisoners who were labeled “Ukrainian nationalists” from western Ukraine had settled in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast alone.28
This posed a danger to ideological and political control of eastern Ukraine because ex-prisoners resided in strategically important cities and their vicinity, such as Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. The amalgamation of several factors, including a cultural influx of college students from western Ukraine to the Dnipropetrovsk oblast and ex-prisoners’ influences, provoked a serious international scandal, involving a group of local young patriotic Ukrainian-speaking poets. They complained about the official politics of Russification in eastern Ukraine. They sent copies of their “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” in which they documented the KGB’s suppression of Ukrainian patriots and massive Russification of Soviet Ukraine, to various offices of the Communist Party, the Komsomol, and Soviet organizations and colleges in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk in the period from August to December of 1968.29 Ultimately, the letter reached Ukrainian émigré centers abroad. The following spring, foreign radio stations, such as Liberty, included the text of this letter in their broadcasts.30 In 1969–1970, the KGB managed to supress this group of young Ukrainian patriots.31
Until 1990, criminal cases focused on Ukrainian nationalism had always been connected to the activities of college students in Soviet Ukraine. Their “Americanization” was a serious concern for KGB officers, a process that was shaped by new forms of daily consumption of Western (in many cases, American) cultural products, especially popular music. The KGB associated this process with the emergence of hippies in Soviet Ukraine, considering the imposition of American influences on Soviet youth a political threat to the Soviet system.32
In Ukraine, the KGB concentrated on the hippie movement as early as 1968. The first official KGB report about this movement was submitted to the party leadership in Kyiv on 20 May 1969, stating that the followers of this movement were discovered in Kyiv, Simferopol, Luhansk, Odesa, Lviv, Rivne and other Ukrainian cities. They were predominantly teenagers and young adults, students of high schools and college students. According to this document, those hippies emulated Western lifestyles to the last detail: “Some of them, using various excuses, try to avoid military service, criticize the Soviet order, lead immoral lives, use drugs, systematically establish contacts with foreigners, and are involved in black market transactions (fartsovka). […] Gatherings of hippies are held in private apartments and, as a rule, are accompanied by parties with alcohol and listening to new releases of foreign jazz music that are frequently ended in orgies.”33 The transgressor established contacts with like-minded people in Ukraine and outside the republic. To better explain the hippie phenomenon to party leaders, KGB analysts interjected excerpts from an analytical article on American hippies, written by an American social psychologist from Yale University, Kenneth Keniston, and published in Russian translation in the American magazine Amerika.34 The Soviet leadership immediately ordered the KGB to design active measures regarding this new cultural phenomenon popular among the Soviet youth.
As a response, on 16 February 1971, KGB officials submitted another, more detailed, report to party leaders with a description of active measures to curtail this movement.35 The KGB intended to conduct these operations in the cities where this movement originated—in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Donetsk, Voroshylovhrad, Zaporizhzhia, Simferopol, Rivne, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Sumy, and Chernivtsy. The members of hippie groups were divided into two social groups: 1) fartsovshchiks (black marketers) and 2) bitlomans, the fans of “beat-music” (Anglo-American rock-n-roll).36 The KGB’s main concern, however, laid in the sphere of ideology: “While the hippies in the West protest against bourgeois society’s rules, their emulators in our country advocate the revision of moral and ethical norms of the socialist way of life, striving to create their own moral norms.”37 Despite the fact that the majority of the movement’s members were college students (including college dropouts), the leaders were more mature individuals, who explained the emergence of hippies in the USSR by political motives. According to the KGB, they positioned themselves as the articulators of oppositionist ideas and formulators of a program of activities. To illustrate the political danger of these people, KGB operatives quoted “one of the authorities” among the Kharkiv hippies, A. L. Kleshcheiev who explained to the KGB officer:
… We advocate democracy, the free choice of moral norms (svoboda nravov), free speech, freedom of creativity, freedom to propagandize our own ideas, freedom to demonstrate, free love, and behavior unlimited by moral constraint. A society should not interfere in the [development of] personality: if I do not impose on other people, I do what I want to do—I can sit or lie down where I want; if there is the possibility to live without working—I avoid working, because our needs are minimal; I want to be dressed in what I’d like or go naked; I want to spend the night where I’d like, and travel where I like. Because these [options] are unavailable to us, my friends and I believe that our [Soviet] authorities do wrong things […] we have no full freedom and democracy; and people who have power to change [this situation] are narrow-minded and do not understand our demands. We conclude that at this stage, under this political system [in the USSR], it is unlikely that we can achieve our goals […] the West seems to us more progressive and democratic than our [political] regime …38
In their reports to Ukraine’s party boss Petro Shelest, KGB officials suggested that the hippies’ behavior in public was unacceptable. Drinking, gambling, drug abuse, black market transactions (fartsovka), and sexual perversions became habitual for the hippies. Their gatherings at restaurants, cafes, and city parks began to attract public attention because of their obscene language, improper appearance, and offensive behavior. The KGB also informed Shelest that these individuals attempted to avoid the military draft and any type of socially useful work, lived the lives of vagabonds, and engaged in seditious conversations.