LYPYN’SKY’S “RETURN” TO UKRAINE

Israel Kleiner was among the first scholars to draw attention to the preponderance of Jewish themes in the writings of Ukrainian dissidents.^[1] Among the indisputable merits of his research is that Kleiner identified the main figures engaged in active Jewish-Ukrainian dialogue such as Dziuba, Karavans’kyi, and Sverstiuk and analyzed the Jewish themes in their journalism. He correctly placed the Ukrainian dissident movement in the context of the Petro Shelest “thaw”^[2] and connected its demise to the early 1970s Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi’s “coup” within the Ukrainian communist party ruling cabinet. Yet, Kleiner’s approach is not without flaws. He seems to have ignored shifts and developments within the realm of Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue, portraying it within one and the same framework that he somewhat simplistically dubs “humanistic and democratic.” He overlooked the fact that the need to seriously discuss Jewish themes pulled Ukrainian dissidents out of their common Marxist or national-communist patterns of discourse and opened up for them brand-new socio-political horizons, whereas some Ukrainian scholars noticed this crucial shift.^[3] He failed to discuss the intellectual repercussions of the Zionist theme in the writings of Ukrainian intellectuals and he did not try to contextualize the dissident thought in the context of Ukrainian political thinking. In addition, recently published primary sources allow revisiting some major points made by Kleiner.
Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s left a profound imprint on Ukrainian Diaspora thought, first and foremost due to its autochthonous origin. Kwitkows’kyi wrote: “Neither Chornovil nor Dziuba, neither Zalyvakha nor anybody else from the young generation in Ukraine had any links with Ukrainian йmigrй organizations and did not draw their thoughts or their cultural and political views from the programs of these organizations…. National revival in Ukraine occurs above all in the spiritual realm of the Ukrainian people, in the sphere of a complete understanding of its national identity and individuality”.^[4] That Chornovil, Dziuba, and Karavans’kyi drew parallels between the fate of Jews and of Ukrainians was not lost on the leading Ukrainian thinkers. Some of them extensively quoted passages by Karavans’kyi and Dziuba in regard to the Jews.^[5] It was particularly astonishing that quite unexpectedly Ukrainian dissidents assumed the leadership in the debates related to the Ukrainian nation and state-building as well as the national minority policies, despite the fact that sometimes they had no idea which Diaspora thinker (all of whom were outlawed in Ukraine) they followed.
Sviatoslav Iosypovych Karavans’kyi (b. 1920), in the 1930s-1940s a committed Ukrainian nationalist with strong sympathies to OUN, in 1945 was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in the GULAG for his refusal to cooperate with the state security organs. Released long before the end of the term due to a mistake in the security organs paperwork, Karavans’kyi published poetry, translations of poems by Byron and Kipling, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and works on linguistics. Having spent a short period outside the GULAG, Karavans’kyi became so productive that he was eventually recognized among Ukrainian intellectuals as “the patriarch of Ukrainian lexicography”.^[6] In 1965, after a search in his house, Karavans’kyi filed a formal complaint to the state organs protesting the groundless search of his apartment and “the violation of Lenin’s norms of national policy in Ukraine”. On the initiative of the Prosecutor General, the court cancelled the previous rehabilitation and forced Karavans’kyi to spend the remaining eight years and seven months in a correction colony. In prison, Karavans’kyi unfolded an astounding activity, filing complaints and letters of protest against the violation of Lenin’s norms of national policies in the USSR.^[7] Karavans’kyi, who in the late 1930s owned a small bookstore in Odessa, had not heard about Lypyns’kyi and had not read him. Dontsov, though, he did know. But his innate pledge to justice substituted for him the Lypyns’kyi’s legacy and turned out to be more profound than his admiration for Dontsov hence his public defense of the oppressed and insulted. Long before the world learnt about the Katyn tragedy, Karavans’kyi had publicly claimed that the Soviets brutally murdered Polish officers in Katyn. In the Kolyma correction colony, he protected three Russian zeks from the excessive aggressiveness of their overwhelmingly Ukrainian inmates. And having observed the grassroots praxis of the Soviet national minority policy, he stood up in defense of the Jews.^[8]
On 10 April 1966, Karavans’kyi sent a formal complaint to the Head of the Council of Nationalities of the USSR Supreme Council.^[9] In his complaint, Karavans’kyi denounced the discriminatory admission procedures tacitly approved of in Ukrainian colleges and universities. Though Karavans’kyi fervently defended the rights of such national minorities as Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and Ukrainians, Jews occupied a disproportionately large place in his plea.^[10] The plea demonstrates Karavans’kyi’s liberal democratic utopia, characteristic of many dissidents of the 1960s. In particular, it underscores his belief that Jewish nationalism undermined the universality of the human rights movement in the USSR. If Jews were already despised and destitute victims of the regime and as such deserved sympathy, the awakening Zionist sensibilities from his viewpoint were still a negative phenomenon. But one should seriously consider the fervor with which Karavans’kyi defended the right of Ukrainian Jews for cultural renaissance as well as the significant proportion of the Jewish theme in his claim. It came as no surprise that in the list of formal demands to the government, as Kleiner soundly mentions, Karavans’kyi above all placed his requirement to halt anti-Jewish admission policy.^[11] Karavans’kyi’s arrest and sentence did not stop his bold attempts to defend the rights of Jews in the USSR.^[12] Despite the small impact of Karavans’kyi’s protests, they manifested a brand new development in Ukrainian political thinking and were immediately canonized as standard human rights texts in Ukrainian samizdat, above all in Chornovil’s publications.^[13] Assessing the immediate impact of the dissidents’ legal and literary production, Rakhmannyi correctly mentioned that such authors as Karavans’kyi “introduced the Ukrainian case into the wide world of humanism”.^[14]
Yet it was Ivan Dziuba who canonized the new Ukrainian stance on Jewish issues. He made it in his acclaimed speech on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the mass massacres in Baby Yar (September, 1967), which had a major impact on the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter and became a blueprint for any further Ukrainian-Jewish discourse.^[15] In the 1960s, Ivan Mykhailovych Dziuba (b. 1931) was one of the leading Ukrainian dissidents and the harbinger of the new Ukrainian attitudes towards Jews. For his human rights activities Dziuba was repeatedly detained and interrogated by the Ukrainian KGB, and in 1973 was formally arrested and sentenced for his anti-Soviet activities (the sentence was changed as a result of Dziuba’s public repentance).^[16] An outstanding intellectual, philologist, renowned historian of culture, in the 1960s, Dziuba was prohibited to work as a philologist and writer and had to earn his living as a proof editor of biochemistry and aircraft plant periodicals (1966-1969 and 1974-1982, respectfully). The Ukrainian western observers were quick to register the exploding pathos of such intellectual dissidents as Dziuba.^[17]
Dziuba considered the treatment of Jews a litmus test of the level of oppression of national minorities in the USSR. In 1966, in his renowned pamphlet “Internationalism or Russification?” Dziuba tended to separate between Marxist principles of national policy and Soviet anti-Marxist practices demonopolizing the official Soviet hermeneutics. In the pamphlet, among other things Dziuba mercilessly mocked the bigotry of the authorities who optimistically reaffirmed that antisemitism had no grounds under Socialism.^[18] A very secondary motif of Dziuba’s acclaimed pamphlet, the Jewish theme moved to the central place of his no less celebrated September 1967 oral presentation. The centrality of the Jewish theme made Dziuba (perhaps not deliberately) abandon the intellectually virgin terrain of national communism he explored in “Internationalism or Russification?” and adopt a new approach. In 1967, together with Viktor Nekrasov, Gelii Snehiriov (Snegirev), and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Dziuba appeared on the site of the infamous ravine Baby Yar in Kyiv where in September, 1941, the Nazis had slaughtered some 30,000 Jews, including the maternal family of the author. As Dziuba recollected later, on that day he saw thousands of people standing on the rims of the ravine in an overwhelming silence. Although Dziuba was not prepared for a formal speech, he met the challenge. A pure improvisation, the text of Dziuba’s speech was later used by the KGB to incriminate him.^[19] It has been reproduced in numerous publications yet it has not received close analysis. Given that some western publications of Dziuba’s “Internationalism or Russification?” appeared with the supplement containing a single essay, namely, his speech on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Baby Yar massacres, the text of the speech deserves attention.^[20]
In Baby Yar Dziuba spoke as a Ukrainian to the Jews, focusing predominantly on national and not so much communist-like international, or to put it better, Soviet-style humanistic issues. Though he made a number of references to “all-human” tasks such as the necessity to fight fascism (“the civilized form of homophobia”), Dziuba’s main point was the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter and his language was that of national-democracy. Dziuba was addressing not Ukrainian or Jewish working masses but two entire peoples. For Dziuba, the Baby Yar massacre was the tragedy of both people, Ukrainians and Jews. And it was incumbent on both to spiritually overcome the tragedy. Ukrainians had to fight their shameful antisemitism whereas Jews had to learn how to respect Ukrainian culture, shedding their anti-Ukrainian bias. And both had to counteract the common threat of assimilation that doomed Jewish and Ukrainian national cultures to annihilation. If the Soviet regime left no chance for Jews and Ukrainians but to begin speaking to one another in the framework of Realpolitik, than at least in the time and space of human creativity both people should seek the opportunity for rapprochement. Literary and intellectual rather then social and political encounter between Jews and Ukrainians was the key portion of his speech:

“The great sons of both peoples [Ukrainians and Jews] bequeathed to us mutual understanding and friendship. The life of three great Jewish writers such as Shalom Aleychem, Yitskhak Perets, and Mendele Moykher Sefarim is linked to Ukrainian land. They loved this land and taught others to do good on it. Vladimir Zhabotyns’kyi, an excellent Jewish journalist, supported the Ukrainian people in their struggle against Russian tsarism and called for Jewish intelligentsia to back the Ukrainian national movement and Ukrainian culture. One of Shevchenko’s last civic acts was a well-known protest against the judeophobic policy of the tsar’s government. Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, Borys Hrinchenko, Stepan Vasyl’chenko and other outstanding Ukrainian writers knew well and highly appreciated the greatness of Jewish history and Jewish spirit, and they wrote with sincere sympathy about the sufferings of the Jewish poor.”^[21]

Nowadays the philosemitic stance of the personalities cited by Dziuba seems only too well known. Yet in 1960s, they were far from common knowledge, particularly in the Ukrainian milieu.^[22] That in the mid-1960s Dziuba seemed to be perfectly aware of the philosemitic motifs of these Ukrainian writers and philo-Ukrainian stance of the Jewish literati forty years later should be assessed as an astonishing level of familiarity with the history of the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. There was hardly at that time a figure among Ukrainian Jews able to make Ukrainian and Jewish classics speak to one another so efficiently as did Dziuba.^[23] On the other hand, Dziuba’s speech extended his fame as a consistent national-democrat for another half a century, particularly because in it he emerged as a much bolder thinker than in his “legal Marxist” pamphlet against Russification. It is possible that Dziuba used the name of Zhabotinsky not only to remind his Jewish listeners of one of the greatest heroes of Zionism who against all odds supported Ukrainian independence, but also to remind himself of the same national democratic principles of Ukrainian-Jewish interaction that had been articulated by the then hardly known and therefore unnamed Ukrainian thinker.^[24] Thirty years later, prefacing the Ukrainian edition of Zhabotinsky, Dziuba called him the “Apostle of the Nation” and named that thinker whom he saw as the Ukrainian parallel to the reputed Zionist. It was nobody else but V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi.^[25]
Thus, in the 1970s – early 1980s, both in Diaspora and in Soviet Ukraine, political thought tended to abandon its irrational anti-Jewish bias, shifting to a more sober and indeed more sympathetic perception of the Jewish factor in Ukraine. The events in the GULAG were a major catalyst for this shift.

NATIONAL DEMOCRACY BEHIND BARS

It was at the height of the Ukrainian dissident movement that the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter gained momentum.^[26] It manifested predominantly in the writings, appeals, and public actions of the Ukrainian dissidents who, unlike their Russian counterparts, focused more on the issue of national cultural revival as part and parcel of socialist democracy rather than on denationalized universal liberalism. The Ukrainian dissident movement seemed to level the differences between Jewish and Ukrainian human rights activists and emphasized similarities that bound them together vis-а-vis the government and state security committee apparatus.^[27] For those Ukrainian dissidents who sought ways to revive national spirituality supplanted by the chauvinistic policy of Russification, Jewish issues acquired paramount importance. Unexpectedly, Ukrainian dissidents chose to present the Jewish problem as a key to any further discussion of the national question in general and the Ukrainian question in particular.
After Dziuba, it became an unwritten obligation for a mature Ukrainian thinker to speak up on a variety of forms of Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. On the other hand, the genre of Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue underwent a major transformation: from a relatively free and legal discourse in the liberal circles of Ukrainian-Jewish intelligentsia it moved to the correction colonies of the GULAG. Shcherbyts’kyi era communists did not tolerate national democratic discourse. Their worldview was incompatible with any type of nationalism other than all-encompassing Soviet patriotism. Between 1967 and 1974, mass persecutions and arrests of hundreds of Ukrainian dissidents, moderate national-minded thinkers, and simply those who did not fit into the party concept of Ukrainian culture, replenished the camps of Ural and Mordovia with the crиme of the crиme of Ukrainian intelligentsia.^[28] Simultaneously, the same correction colonies welcomed hundreds of Jewish liberal-minded dissidents and refusniks. The traditional “kitchen-talk” so common to the dissidents of the 1960s moved into a correction colony environment. The political predilections of most Ukrainian political inmates (who in their majority sympathized with or participated in OUN’s fight on two fronts against Nazis and Bolsheviks) were on Dontsov’s side. But, ironically, the GULAG reality was a twisted version of Lypyns’kyi’s poly-ethnic, not of Dontsov’s ethnically homogeneous realm.
Since the Ukrainian communist party cadre in 1949 supported Khrushchev’s rise to power, Khrushchev “returned the favor” in the 1950s and early 1960s by tacitly endorsing the Ukrainian Communist Party, returning to the Skrypnyk-like pre-World War II policies that favored Ukrainization of the governmental, military, economic, and cultural elite.^[29] This return inaugurated a new, albeit much less outstanding phase of the Ukrainian national renaissance, the first wave of which was brutally suppressed in the 1930s. At the same time, the denunciation of Stalinism, the rehabilitation of prominent Ukrainian cultural figures, and the widely announced “return” to Lenin’s principles of socialism generated the ideological endeavors of newly emerging Marxists such as Dziuba, who sought consistency in party politics and also required a return to Lenin’s principles in national policies. For the new generation of Ukrainian intellectuals the concoction of nationalism and communism still seemed an indispensable prerequisite for reform. Therefore, it was no wonder that this concoction informed the Ukrainian political discourse and triggered a radical reassessment of the Jews. However, as it happened with Dziuba, the Jewish theme unexpectedly brought Ukrainian “legal Marxists” far beyond the ideological framework in which for the time being they were allowed to function.
Sentenced for various terms in correction colonies, Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents did not hesitate to elaborate new forms of their dialogue. Ukrainians started the 1974 revolt in the Perm correction colony whereas Jews expediently supported it.^[30] In the notorious 35th Perm correction colony the spiritual leadership among inmates was assumed by Ivan Svitlychnyi, a leading Ukrainian literary figure and dissident, and Semion Hluzman (Gluzman), the correction colony “scribe,” both of whom headed the camp resistance. In some cases contacts with Ukrainian dissidents brought liberal-minded dissidents to a more pronounced participation in the national movement. For instance, Yosif Zisels, a human rights movement activist, began closely to cooperate with such Ukrainian dissidents as Nadia Svitlychna, the daughter of Ivan Svitlychnyi, the “father” of Ukrainian dissidents, with Opanas Zalyvakha, a painter, Vasyl’ Romaniuk, the future patriarch of Ukraine, and Mykhailo Horyn who, as Zisels observed, “had a serious impact on the rise of my national self-perception.” It was through and due to Horyn that Zisels started to collect materials on the abuses in Ukrainian psychiatric clinics.^[31] Viacheslav Chornovil reported with genuine sympathy and pride that a group of Jewish inmates managed to outwit and challenge the cruelty and stupidity of camp authorities by taking advantage of medical herbs growing in the camp. Borys Penson sympathetically registered the celebration of important dates in the Ukrainian dissident movement by his fellow Ukrainian inmates. He also depicted the activities of his fellow-inmates who swamped the authorities with their petitions demanding that the correction colony authorities allow Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet of genius, seriously sick at that time, to obtain medicine from home – a luxury he was completely forbidden by local correction colony medical personnel.^[32]
Both Chornovil and Penson independently recorded important cases of the joint Ukrainian-Jewish “social action.” For example, Jewish and Ukrainian dissidents, inmates from the 17th correction colony (joined by Russians and Lithuanians), sent an appeal to the Presidium of the CPSU Supreme Council, demanding that the politically-minded nationalists be kept separate from war criminals, former Nazi policemen who collaborated with Soviet correction colony authorities. When the repressions against Ukrainian dissidents acquired enormous proportions, a number of Jewish inmates in the correction colonies articulated their full-fledged support of the national movement in Ukraine in their written protest to the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR. Since collective protests were forbidden in the GULAG, every Jewish inmate had to sign the following statement:

“December 1, 1974 is the second-year anniversary of the arrests of a number of Ukrainian cultural figures, who were later accused and sentenced for lengthy terms of imprisonment, albeit their only crime was an intent to protect their national and cultural heritage. Since I am a Jew who seeks emigration to his historical motherland in Israel and who is sentenced for this desire alone, the strivings of the national-minded Ukrainians are dear to me, I share their arguments and their hopes, the sufferings of their nearest siblings and relatives. On the anniversary of their arrests, I protest their arrests and demand their release.”^[33]

Eventually, these new relations generated the rise of the new Ukrainian perception of the Jews. In December 1977, Yevhen Sverstiuk in his classical essay “The Grains of Ukrainian-Israeli ‘Solidarity’” gave this perception a brand new spin.

UKRAINE AND ISRAEL

A remarkable Ukrainian poet, philologist, psychologist, and teacher of Ukrainian literature, for his political convictions Yevhen Oleksandrovych Sverstiuk (b. 1928) was repeatedly banished from the editorial boards of the Ukrainian journals where he served (1959, 1960, 1961, 1965). Like Dziuba, Sverstiuk also had to earn his living as a low-profile editor with a scholarly journal on botany. In 1972, Sverstiuk was arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment and five years of internal exile for the distribution of Samizdat literature considered in the then USSR an insolent anti-Soviet propaganda activity. Between 1979 and 1988, Sverstiuk worked as a carpenter – first in exile in Buriatia and later in Kyiv.^[34] Significantly, in 1993, Sverstiuk penned one of the most insightful and profoundly poetic essays on Lypyns’kyi in which he contrasted Lypyn’skyi and Dontsov only to fully solidarize with the former’s stance on democracy, religion, and Ukrainian idealism.^[35] Back in 1977, Sverstiuk was but one of the prisoners of the Perm District correction colony. Perhaps his pronounced religious worldview brought him close to such religious-minded Zionists as Arye Vudka, Shimon Grilius, Mark Dymshits, and Yosif Mendelevich, – who, as Sverstiuk noted in regard to their spiritual steadfastness, were heads and shoulders above their sentenced brethren.^[36] A mere coincidence triggered the dialogue between Sverstiuk and Vudka that later grew into a long-lasting relationship in the spiritual journey of both of them.^[37]
In the Perm camp 389/36, Sverstiuk met his fellow inmate Arie Vudka (b. 1947). Ten years after their first meeting, Vudka penned the following highly poetic and densely metaphoric recollection:

“One of my brightest impressions from that other part of the world was Yevhen Sverstiuk, who was an angel in that hell. Here he comes, in his correction colony robe, deliberately whitened by bleach, and also in his bleached cap, with his bright clever eyes and a clear smile on his lips. Dirt does not stick to him nor does abomination and grayness, anguish and fear, hatred, anger, and roughness – all those things that permeate everything, even the air of that part of the world. In the dark stone coffin of his cell he composes verses that are as transparent as air and as fresh as spring. And he himself looks like a sunbeam in the deep darkness of the night.”^[38]

For Vudka, Sverstiuk was the embodiment of an aristocratic honor unheard of in the correction colony. Sverstiuk’s phenomenal human self-esteem challenged the surrounding slavery, depravity, and corruption. His challenging behavior could not but irritate the correction colony supervisors. The regime was not able to tolerate a Ukrainian speaking offspring of a Ukrainian peasant with a genuine aura of nobility. Yet the regime completely failed to destroy Sverstiuk. In his memoirs Vudka remarked:

“Thus his very image presents a sharp rebuke and a direct accusation to all the devils and demons of the filthy hell imposed by Moscow. As if he was made not from dust and not taken from the ground like other mortals but rather was made from noble marble that suddenly came to life. Likewise, his books are filled with unworldly spirituality, kindness, and beauty. In his writings he uplifts himself to the heights so dear to him where the national cultural heritage was transformed into a universal treasury. It is a very rare opportunity to see a man whose words and deeds are so coherently integrated into a noble personality.”^[39]

Sverstiuk and Vudka soon became close. Vudka, according to Sverstiuk, was an easy-going young man. His deep religious conviction brought him to a complete rejection of the Soviet regime and shaped his unbreakable will and persistence. The KGB officials hated him with unprecedented intensity whereas the inmates, particularly the religious ones of all creeds, felt a deep empathy for him.
In turn, Vudka’s consistent self-restraint and tranquility as well as his prodigious memory impressed Sverstiuk deeply. But nothing could impress Sverstiuk more than Vudka’s amazing knowledge of the Ukrainian language, which exceeded that of some Ukrainian inmates.^[40] In a country where most Jews (and not only Jews) were assimilated into the dominant Russian culture, the ability of a Jew to express himself in an exuberant Ukrainian displayed a clear-cut political message and flagged Vudka’s unrestricted support for the Ukrainian cause. No wonder that a number of Ukrainian literary figures that shared with Vudka the same correction colony entrusted him with smuggling their writings through the multi-level security system of the Soviet GULAG. Since a very effective search system made it almost impossible to smuggle anything put on paper, Vudka memorized the entire poetic texts of the Ukrainian dissidents, among which were poems by Sverstiuk and perhaps Vasyl Stus, a paradigmatic 20th century Ukrainian poet who never made it out of the GULAG. Later, already abroad, Vudka put on paper the memorized poetry and subsequently helped to publish it in a collection “Poetry from Behind the Barbed Wire: the Word of the Ukrainian Poets Sentenced by Moscow” (Munich, 1978). Before the 1990s, when Sverstiuk’s poetry finally reached his western audience by regular mail, Ukrainian readers in the west – for example, in Canada – became acquainted with it due to Vudka, who recited it from memory and inscribed it on paper once in Israel.^[41] Sverstiuk depicted this deed of a Jew who saved priceless pieces of Ukrainian poetry from destruction, emphasizing not only its timeless cultural value but also the significance of its instant impact:

“I think the redeemed texts were not merely saved for posterity. They were redeemed for contemporaneity, too. If a text appears at the end of the century it is one thing, but it is quite a different situation if it appears exactly when people are waiting for it. These texts were rescued in this second sense, namely, for contemporaries. The high priority information was redeemed. This information shaped the worldview of certain groups in society. It also conveyed unquestionable cultural values. I think it was a great mission to bring these cultural values through the impenetrable [GULAG] corridor where nothing could survive and where non-existence reigned.”^[42]

Already in Israel, Vudka continued his dialogues with Ukrainians. In his historiographic essay Moskovshchyna, he devoted a chapter (no. 26) to paradoxes of modern Ukrainian history. It shows that Vudka learned a lot from his Ukrainian inmates whom he praised as “great heroes who did not crash”. Vudka correctly depicted collectivization as a by and large anti-Ukrainian action of the Moscow-based Soviet regime. He poignantly assessed the 1930s famine as “state orchestrated.” He portrayed Russian policy towards Ukraine as that of colonization and Russification based among other things on the practice of resettling Ukrainians outside the territory of Ukraine, simultaneously rescinding their right for Ukrainian education. Vudka strongly protested the policy of Russification of the language of instruction in higher educational establishments of Ukraine. This policy, he claimed, pushed aside the Ukrainian language and culture in favor of the mainstream Russian-based technical revolution. For Russian attitudes towards Ukraine Vudka did not find any other term but “ethnocide”.^[43]
Although it is not clear what particular events prompted Sverstiuk to write his essay “The Grains of the Ukrainian-Israeli ‘Solidarity’”^[44] that has long become a classic of Ukrainian political thought, yet perhaps it was his fellow Jewish inmates, religious Zionists dreaming about aliyah, who inspired Sverstiuk’s theme, imagery, and metaphors. In his essay, Sverstiuk tended to justify the Ukrainian cause for the Jews, simultaneously persuading his imaginary readers that Ukrainian spirituality was incompatible with antisemitism. “To the best of my memory, Ukrainians of a different age and background have good attitudes towards Israel, despite the everyday [anti-Israeli] injections of radio and press.”^[45] Not only contemporary Ukrainian Jews of the 1970s, but also all Jews from all periods of the four-millennia-long Jewish history became a metaphor for the national destiny of the Ukrainian people. In his highly charged language, Sverstiuk related that Ukrainians and Jews have many commonalities. Ukrainians, too, were vagabonds and persecuted in their own land. And their land also did not belong to them. Having compared the two nations, Sverstiuk moved to a groundbreaking parallel between Ukraine and Israel. To a romanticized and politicized image of ancient Biblical Israel that Ivan Franko and Lesia Ukrainka transformed into a symbol of the struggle for Ukrainian independence and statehood, Sverstiuk added something new and no less pivotal for Ukrainian political experience: the concept of contemporary Israel with its continuous wars for national survival.^[46]
To introduce this parallel, Sverstiuk suggested that, in fact, there had long existed some sort of bond between the two people. He dubbed it ukraiins’ko-zhydivs’kyi alians:

“Above all, I consider the Ukrainian-Jewish alliance from the ethical perspective as a turn towards positive sensibilities, as the dialogue of equals. These equal interlocutors, Jews and Ukrainians, threw off the false garb of imitating alien concepts, foreign truth, and somebody else’s interests; they stepped out from that slippery bridge that seemed to unite but in fact pitted them against one another, triggering cunning and hypocrisy. We wish Jews good, respect their holy sites, their promised land – they, too, wish us good and would like us to become the owners of our land.”^[47]

Perhaps following Dziuba’s paradigm, Sverstiuk underscored a tolerant and sympathetic attitude towards Jews in the poetry and narrative of such Ukrainian classics as Pavlo Hrabovs’kyi (1864-1902), Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi (1864-1913), and also pointed to Shevchenko’s support of the protest against the antisemitic diatribes of the Russian periodical Illustratsia.^[48]
In the 1960-1970s, argued Sverstiuk, the literary “alliance” reflected in the literary works of Ukrainian and Jewish classic writers was fully realized in the Soviet correction colonies. There, however, the sublime literary symbolism gave way to the sober comparison of national existential experience. Like the Jews, Ukrainian fellow inmates of the Sverstiuk milieu were sentenced for their nationalist convictions. As refusniks who fought for free emigration, they sought to stop enforced Russification that suppressed Ukrainian national strivings. Like the Zionists, they cast their hopes in the utopian mold of a culturally and politically independent Ukraine. Ukrainian political inmates in the camps were people of dignity, perseverance, and genuine patriotism. Exactly the same qualities Sverstiuk found among the imprisoned Zionists. They, too, were people of strong will, unshaken conviction, and idealistic love of Israel, their spiritual motherland. The expectations of the Ukrainian dissidents evolved mostly in the realm of Ukrainian culture. Yet they believed that Ukrainian culture with its schools, press, and language was still a possibility within the USSR. Jews, noted Sverstiuk, were more courageous: they had no illusions in regard to the Jewish cultural revival under the USSR. For Sverstiuk, sensitive to religious-minded people, the observant Jewish Zionists were people of amazing spiritual and cultural breadth. Their desire to leave the USSR was a defiance that elevated them in their eyes and in the eyes of the Ukrainian prisoners whose motherland, Ukraine, still remained a colony.
Therefore, the Jewish lesson should never be lost on the Ukrainians. Sverstiuk’s reassessment of the Ukrainian human rights movement through the perspective of the Israeli fight for independence was the climax of his attempt to reconstruct a Ukrainian-Jewish alliance. This important coda transformed his essay from a vague reflection of a distant observer into a sharp political pamphlet charged with enthusiasm and hope. Moreover, it surpassed the framework of human rights parlance and reproduced the Ukrainian-Jewish rapprochement in the national democratic context. His was a dialogue of two conscientious, democratically-oriented, and independent people. Sverstiuk identified the milieu in which the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter was possible, namely, the milieu of Ukrainian and Jewish national-minded dissidents, non-conformist intellectuals, conscientious opponents of Russification and national oblivion, and Kulturtrдgers. The rest were not admitted into Sverstiuk’s elitist club of Ukrainian-Zionist imaginary brotherhood. Was it not but another twist of Lypyns’kyi’s conservative elitism?

CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM

Paradoxically, the GULAG did more to bring Jewish and Ukrainians together and make them speak to one another than the scattered groups of loosely connected dissidents outside it. The case of Semen Hluzman (b. 1947) helps to illuminate the point. A 25-year-old doctor of medicine, Hluzman was the only psychiatrist in the USSR who boldly dared to challenge the Soviet penitentiary system. He composed an extra-mural independent expert analysis of General Petro Hryhorenko (Peter Grigorenko, 1907-1987), a paramount Ukrainian dissident and leader of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, whom the corrupt and KGB-sponsored official Soviet psychiatrists diagnosed with schizophrenia, subsequently sentencing him to forced treatment in a prison-like Moscow clinic.^[49]Hluzman’s expertise, based on an in-depth study of the documents smuggled from the KGB and both direct and oblique testimonies made available for him, proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Hryhorenko was mentally healthy and that the treatment imposed on him was criminal and KGB-orchestrated. The regime could not ignore Hluzman’s challenge. On the basis of some fabricated accusations and false testimonies, Hluzman was arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment and three years of exile for his “anti-Soviet propaganda”, although it was only too well known that the real reason for his arrest was his “extra-mural expert analysis” of Hryhorenko.
Brought up in a milieu of Jewish intellectuals so assimilated, as he indicated, into the Russian culture that he spoke Russian to Vasyl Stus, the greatest of the Ukrainian poets of the second half of the 20th century, with whom he shared a cell, in prison Hluzman underwent a significant transformation. The arrest and subsequent circumstances immensely contributed to the fermentation of Hluzman’s identity as the Ukrainian Jew. It was in the 31st correction colony in Ural that Hluzman met Ukrainians sentenced for 25 years for their participation in Stepan Bandera’s armed resistance. Their statistical quantity and unique human qualities left Hluzman stunned. As he penned in his correction colony memoirs, “here I saw the genuine Ukraine”.^[50]Behind bars Hluzman became particularly sensitive to the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter. He recollected how Jews in the correction colony celebrated Israeli Independence Day with a pot of tea (one of the best known commodities, given the meager correction colony cuisine) and inviting everybody to join them. Hluzman’s memory captured the image of Vasyl Prius, the former participant of the Bandera military resistance who congratulated the Jews on that occasion. Hluzman wrote: “…and he added some words – they seemed to me indelibly hopeless yet imbued with astonishing faith – that Ukraine, God willing, will also celebrate its day of independence.”^[51] Ukrainian inmates considerably shaped Hluzman’s intellectual and cultural predilections. Vasyl’ Stus (1938-1985) sang to him Ukrainian songs. Ivan Svitlychny (1929-1992), entitled the father of the Ukrainian dissident movement, shaped Hluzman’s intellectual horizon introducing him to works on Medieval and Renaissance studies as well as to the Tartu semiotic school. Last but not least, Igor Kalynets (b. 1939), the Ukrainian poet and dissident from L’viv, introduced Hluzman to the best Ukrainian poetry of the 1920s.
In the correction colony Hluzman discovered that nobody else but his Ukrainian fellow inmates sentenced for their strong stance on the Ukrainian national issues were his first and foremost brethren. Apparently due to his new acquaintances, Hluzman started to reformulate his Jewish identity, imitating the self-perception of politically cognizant and spiritually mature Ukrainian nationalists of the 1940s who had been fighting, arms in hand, for their land. In his bitter letter to his parents (who bemoaned his dissident activities) he rejected a victimized self-identity based exclusively on Holocaust memoirs and emphasized his new Zionist-like commitments to his people in Israel able to militarily protect themselves.^[52] Simultaneously, Hluzman began composing poetry and narrative in Ukrainian.^[53] In the 1990s, Hluzman arrived at a new Jewish Ukrainian identity, reached spiritual maturity and, according to Zinovii Antoniuk, became a paramount figure in human rights reforms in Ukraine. His activities and personal example taught others how to overcome societal and individual fear of the authorities with their entire machinery of terror. That a leading Ukrainian human rights thinker and activist as Antoniuk chose nobody else but a Jew for the paradigmatic example of “the role of an individual in modern Ukraine” was particularly significant and by no means random.^[54] Generally, Antoniuk’s sharp essays on Jewish issues appear to be responses to the “Hluzman phenomenon”.
It seems that Hluzman’s presence on the Ukrainian political scene had a noteworthy impact on Antoniuk’s subsequent spiritual itinerary. Perhaps in his essay “Do We Need Today a Jewish-Christian Dialogue?”, surely to become a classic of the genre,^[55] Antoniuk applied a profoundly critical approach to ideological myths and received perceptions so characteristic of Hluzman.^[56] Also, the main theme of this essay – the psychology of self-perception with all its psychological ramifications – betrays the possible impact of Hluzman’s “psychiatric” approach to intellectual issues. Yet, what seemed to remain within the frame of normalcy for such a rational skeptic as Hluzman, was amazingly courageous and far-fetched for such a Christian as Antoniuk.
In his “Do We Need Today a Jewish-Christian Dialogue?” Antoniuk was not only critical of traditional Christian anti-Jewish bias, he was sarcastic about it. It goes without saying that in the traditional Christian teleology “Old Israel,” the Jews, had fallen from grace with the coming of Jesus, whom they rejected. On the contrary, New Israel, i.e., the Christians, acquired divine grace, spreading it to the world. Starting from Aurelius Augustine, the Bishop of Hippon (354-430), the only reason Christians should tolerate Jews was their unique status of witnesses of His Coming. Yet even Augustine underscored that the Jews sinned by refusing to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah, and for that sin should be kept low in society. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225-1274), with all his rational approach to the issue, also confirmed that Jews were guilty, having refused to believe in Jesus. Eastern Orthodox Church fathers such as John Chrysostom (ca. 347-407) went even further than that, claiming that Old Israel, the Jews, had no right to exist and should definitively perish.^[57]
Indeed, the decisions of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council dramatically altered those perceptions. Antoniuk attempted to apply some decisions of the new Vatican policies to the Ukrainian case. He argued that Old Israel, the Jews, by remaining faithful to their tradition for centuries, saved their own dignity – and by default the dignity of the Abrahamic legacy in the Christian world. On the contrary, by dooming the Jews, Christians had lost their dignity and caused their own moral downfall that nearly completely destroyed Christianity. The Holocaust embodies this ethical crisis. It led to the physical destruction of the Jews and to the moral collapse of Christianity. Jews did not need the ex post facto and very much condescending post-war attitude of Christians. Rather, Christians themselves needed to dialogue with Jews to overcome their own ethical crisis and to uplift their fallen sense of dignity. Ironically, only dialogue with “semi-beaten, semi-burnt, semi-converted stiff-necked Judaic Israel” could save the face of the “invincible Christian Israel,” claimed Antoniuk.
For Antoniuk, embarking on an intellectual dialogue did not imply an attempt to avoid the ignominious role performed by Ukrainian Christians during the Holocaust. As he argued, given that 20-25 percent of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished in the territory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian contribution to Nazi Judenfrei “utopia” seemed enormous. He asks bitterly: where were the Christians of Ukraine? Antoniuk relates how a Jewish family from his native Helm sheltered him, a native Ukrainian, and his Ukrainian family when Nazis kicked them out of their home penniless. Jews supported the Antoniuks, too, when their mother was taken to the hospital diagnosed with typhus. But the Antoniuks did nothing when Nazis took their redeemers to the ghetto, later brutally slaughtering them near Helm. Therefore, argues Antoniuk, it was not God Almighty who turned his back on the Jews. It was the Christian world that turned its back on them. Jews did not betray the Unified Ethical One; Christians did – by renouncing the Jews. At that point Antoniuk’s essay crossed the limits of the genre and turned into a penitential prayer.
While Western Christianity, first and foremost Catholicism and Protestantism, accomplished a good deal to establish equal dialogue with the Jews, Eastern Christianity, continued Antoniuk, had done next to nothing in this respect. The latter still remained in the mythological realm, such as the laughable fantasy of its uniqueness and exclusiveness. These myths required a dictatorial monologue in relation to the Other, not dialogue. But the genuine tradition was that of a dialogue between Abraham and God, not God’s dictate. Christians, if they want to remain Christians, had no moral right to impose their worldview on the Jews. There was no such thing as standard or exclusive ethics. Christians had to realize that the truth, the final and profound truth, lay in diversity. Yet the Christian Bible, reinterpreting the Hebrew text, looking at it through a Greek lens, had eliminated this diversity establishing the canonic reading, understanding, and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Paraphrasing the famous Biblical metaphor, Antoniuk claimed that Christians should finally stop looking at the Hebrew Bible through the dark glass of the Greeks. Christians in general and Ukrainian Christians in particular should acknowledge the spiritual equality of Judaism – not only the civic equality of the Jews. Eastern Christianity should find it incumbent upon itself to get rid of anti-Jewish, pagan-like sensibilities. “It is crucial to understand that the presence of Jews and Judaism in Ukraine is natural and that it forms part of the Ukrainian self-identity.” Ukraine, finally, had to cure itself of its anti-Judaic complexes. Ukrainian Christians had to step forward and pray for the well-being, national integrity, and religious traditions of the Jews – as once three Christian inmates, a Ukrainian, a Russian, and a Belorussian, prayed for their fellow inmates, Jews among them, during the uprising of political prisoners in the Perm correction colony no. 35.^[58]

The Impact of the Gulag Encouner

Western observers closely followed the unprecedented encounter between Jewish and Ukrainian dissidents and at a certain point began actively to participate in it. The Munich-based Ukrainian publishers contributed considerably to the Ukrainian-Jewish cause issuing “The Islands of Empathy”, a collection of Jewish inmates’ memoirs on prominent Ukrainian dissidents,^[59] as well as “The Chronicle of the Correction Colony Routine”, combining under the same cover the brief notes and memoirs of a Ukrainian and a Jew, Viacheslav Chornovil and Borys Penson.^[60] The former was a well-known journalist sentenced for anti-Soviet activities and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist propaganda. The latter was a painter who joined the famous “aircraft” group of the refusniks (the so-called samoletchiki) who found themselves psychologically and economically in such a desperate situation that they attempted to highjack a Soviet aircraft in order to fly to Israel. The book underscored a lot of similarities in political preferences, attitudes to correction colony authorities, self-perception, and personal dignity between Ukrainian and Jewish inmates portrayed by Chornovil and Penson. If not for the editorial “labels” informing the reader who was represented on the page, it might have been difficult to differentiate between Penson’s and Chornovil’s voices.^[61]
At present, it is hardly possible to encompass all the personal links and intellectual interactions between Jewish and Ukrainian dissidents. In future, this theme may become the subject of a separate monograph. Sooner or later the former KGB may declassify its archives and a wealth of new information become available. I would not be surprised if what emerges is that in the 1970s and 1980s the KGB officials closely followed (metaphorically and literally) the cooperation between Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents. Perhaps the archives will shed light on the personal relations between the Ukrainian writer and journalist Valerii Marchenko (1947-1984) and Alik Feldman, a Zionist activist from Kyiv.^[62] Intercepted letters of Valentyn Moroz to Arie Vudka may come to light that will add a personal facet to Moroz’s denial of antisemitism and his profound sympathy for the steadfastness of the Jewish people at the outset of his political career.^[63] Personal files would probably illuminate the mutual sympathy of Levko Lukianenko^[64] and Aleksander Podrabinek, the editor of the Moscow-based Ekspres-Khronika, as well as Lukianenko’s sarcastic response to the antisemitic bias of some Russian human rights activists.^[65] There is a drastic need to footnote the memoirs of Leonid Pliushch, who underwent an amazing itinerary from his “international antisemitism” to close friendship with Borys Kochubievs’kyi, the Zionist, Semen Hluzman, the human rights activist, and for whom regular visits to Baby Yar became a manifestation of the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter.^[66] The reports of prison and correction colonies stool-pigeons would provide more detail on the relations between the renowned Zionist Natan (Anatolii) Shcharansky, who among other things knew Ukrainian, and Bohdan Klymchak, a Ukrainian nationalist, whose sympathetic portrait Shcharansky traced in his memoirs.^[67] Archives, if not personal interviews, would reopen the most interesting episodes in the lives of such “legal dissidents” as Miron Petrovs’ky, a literary critic and writer of Jewish descent, and his closest friend Vadym Skuratovs’kyi, a leading Ukrainian intellectual of the last quarter of the 20th century, whose impact manifested in Skuratovs’kyi’s numerous publications on Jewish literature, history, and culture.^[68] A future researcher would want to discuss at length the memoirs of Avraam Shifrin, a high-ranking Soviet engineer arrested and sentenced for state treason, who reflected about “tight” and “cordial” Jewish-Ukrainian relations in the correction colony. He left insightful memoirs about Volodymyr Horbovyi, a lawyer committed to the Ukrainian cause; Ivan Dolishnyi, “hard as a diamond,” who fought the Bolsheviks; Yevhen Hrytsak, a person of an “innate generosity” who headed a powerful mass uprising against the colony authorities.
On the eve of Ukrainian political independence, Yosif Zisels, the leader of the Ukrainian Jewish community in the 1990s and former member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, wrote in the Israeli Krug journal (no. 602, February, 1989):

“What is the cause of this apparently unexpected attitude toward the Jews in Ukraine? There are many ways to explain its reasons, the most important of which is that the leadership of the Ukrainian national-democratic movement has long included educated and intelligent people. They are Viacheslav Chornovil, Levko Lukianenko, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Mykhailo and Bohdan Horyn, Oles Shevchenko, Serhii Naboka. “Prisoners of Zion,” imprisoned in the correction colonies for political convictions in Mordovia and Ural, would confirm the benevolent attitude towards Jews from the side of these and many other Ukrainian political inmates.”^[69]

Zisels was among the first to point out to the unique form of the Jewish-Ukrainian encounter behind the bars of the Shcherbyts’kyi era GULAG. Subsequent publications of the memoirs and journalism of former dissidents, as we have seen, confirmed his pioneering insight.

LEGALIZING NEW PERCEPTIONS

The August 1991 events brought Jewish issues straight into the midst of those responsible for policy-making decisions in the first months of the independent Ukrainian state.^[70] The Appeal of the Supreme council of Ukraine to the citizens of Ukraine of all nationalities issued on August 28, 1991, was one of the first (if not the first) documents featuring Jews adopted in Ukraine immediately after the failure of the anti-Gorbachov coup. It mentioned Jews among other nationalities of Ukraine, second only to Russians. It claimed that the previous regime oppressed the spiritual lives, languages and cultures of the nations of Ukraine and claimed that a new period of inter-ethnic relations had begun. Lypyns’kyi’s legacy became an essential part of the Ukrainian intellectual revival.^[71] This was a period when Lypyns’ky’s concepts and ideas – moreover, his suggestions regarding governmental modus operandi – began penetrating Ukrainian political decision-making.^[72] The Lypynsky East European Institute in Philadelphia and the Archeographic Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv supported by the Ukrainian Legal Foundation launched an ambitious project to publish a 25-volume edition of Lypyns’kyi’s works. As Yevhen Sverstiuk noted, “the Lypyns’kyi’s season has come”.^[73]
The subsequent events proved that governmental intentions went far beyond mere rhetoric. On September 10, 1991, the Ukrainian government declared its intent to commemorate nationally the 50th anniversary of the Baby Yar massacre and acknowledged its share in the guilt of the Holocaust in Ukraine. On September 13, 1991, the then President Leonid Kravchuk had talks with the representatives of leading Israeli business companies.^[74] On 25 December 1991, Israel recognized Ukrainian independence and on 26 December the two countries established diplomatic relations. Less than a year after the establishment of diplomatic relations, in September, 2002, Israel welcomed the Ukrainian Parliamentary delegation and in the same month Itskhak Shamir met with President Kravchuk.^[75] The “diasporization” of the Ukrainian politics transferred to Ukraine more than one undertaking previously taking place in the west. Starting from 1991, Ukrainian-Israeli conferences, featuring the crиme of the Ukrainian and Jewish intellectual elite, became part of modern Ukrainian cultural discourse.^[76] These congresses underscored similarities between two national states, Ukraine and Israel, and indicated the crucial significance of the Israeli experience in state building for Ukraine. In January, 1993, Leonid Kravchuk, appeared in the Israeli Knesset where he reiterated that Ukraine “guaranteed equal rights to different nations and defended their ethnical, cultural, linguistic and religious peculiarities.” Finally, the speech of President Kravchuk at the International Conference on Antisemitism in Brussels, on 7 July 1992, reiterated the Ukrainian government’s strong will to promote the development of Jewish life in Ukraine and combat antisemitism.^[77]
Kravchuk’s presentation in Bruxelles was perhaps the pinnacle of the reassessment of the Jews in Ukrainian political thought. The 2001 President Kuchma speech on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Baby Yar massacres proved that Kravchuk’s bold political undertaking created a significant precedent for further development of Ukrainian-Jewish political discourse. Back in 1992, Kravchuk made several points that illuminate the amazing itinerary of the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue from outcast dissidence to the central political theme. Kravchuk emphasized that the previous regime left behind nothing but distorted national and inter-ethnic relations policies. Therefore the new government had to begin from scratch, establishing a legal basis for national relations. In this context, reshaping Ukrainian-Jewish relations acquired particular importance. The co-existence of both people that lasted for two millennia emphasized their common destiny and common sufferings despite their religious, social, and cultural differences. Both people were victims of the same type of persecutions, namely, assimilation and ethnocide. The events of 1991 emphasized once again the commonality between Jews and Ukrainians. The first years of the national Ukrainian renaissance coincided with the rise of Jewish national culture and national educational, scholarly, and communal institutions. The Baby Yar tragedy was of particular significance in this context. Kravchuk reiterated that Ukraine had acknowledged its share of guilt in the massacre and apologized before the Jewish people for the injustices committed towards them in the course of Ukrainian history. Nowadays, he mentioned, Ukraine has banished antisemitism from its state and public discourse. It established firm diplomatic and cultural relations with Israel and disassociated itself from the UNO resolution that identified Zionism with racism.^[78]

CONCLUSIONS

Sensu strictu, by the 1990s Symon Petliura’s dazzling dream “to create the literature that analyzes and deepens the cause of Ukrainian-Jewish relations in people’s mentality” did not crystallize. However, in a metaphorical sense his dream came true. The generation of Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s and the harbingers of their ideas in the Diaspora found themselves in a new environment that generated a brand-new dialogic genre focused on Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Abandoning some ineffective schemes of the encounter between Ukrainians and Jews registered and immortalized by Dontsov, Ukrainian journalists, political thinkers, inmates, writers, and poets, whether consciously or not, began formulating the Ukrainian-Jewish relations in full accord with V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi’s vision of Ukraine as a poly-ethnic political and territorial entity with more than one contributing culture. In their oral discourse reflected in prison diaries and memoirs, as well as in written essays, Ukrainian thinkers began re-imagining Jews as a nation with its own fascinating millennia-long history and national dignity, not as ghettoized second-class imperial subjects or subservient agents of the powers colonizing Ukraine. Ukrainians and Jews perceived themselves as people with shared tragic histories and sufferings and bound by shared guilt. Ukrainian dissidents began perceiving Jews as a nation with its own national territory, a developing concept of statehood, and a record of century-long commitment to, and fearless fight for that territory. Israel has emerged as a major metaphor in the dialogue between the two people. The entire Jewish history before the establishment of the State in 1948 came to symbolize the Ukrainian historical itinerary towards forthcoming state independence. That Jewish inmates, unlike a good many Ukrainians expressed their unrestricted sympathy and respect for those Ukrainians who served in the Bandera troops performed a paramount role in cementing the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue behind bars, emphasizing the unconditional right of the Ukrainian people to fight for its own land. The dialogue brought some Ukrainian thinkers to the rediscovery of Judaism not as an inferior proto-Christian heresy but as a harmonious philosophical and religious system, as an inexhaustible source of spirituality and wisdom. Ukrainian thinkers discovered in Jews the Other with whom they could promptly identify. While speaking to one another they realized that philosemitism was a part of the Ukrainian cultural tradition (another favorite word from Lypyns’kyi’s lexicon) of which they were the harbingers and not a provisional view voiced by marginalized writers.
The Ukrainian dissident movement was different from the USSR’s democratically-oriented human rights movement due to the enormous significance of the national issues within it. Emphasizing the physical survival of Israel and the future revival of Ukrainian statehood, Jewish and Ukrainian thinkers disassociated themselves from both liberal-minded “internationalist” dissidents on the one side and chauvinistic-minded dissidents on the other.^[79] Post-1991 political events in Ukrainian-Jewish and Ukraine-Israel relations were nothing else but the implementation and bringing to fruition of the ideas elaborated by the inmates and legal dissidents of the 1960s-1970s. Yet one should not be too optimistic. However multi-level, the second-half-of-the-20th century rapprochement between Ukrainians and Jews became the cause of few, not the cause of many. Its new ideological patterns remained incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population of Ukraine. And the intellectual achievements of the participants of that dialogue, albeit widely published after 1991, were not destined to reach out to rank-and-file Ukrainians for whom the traditional one-sidedness and xenophobia of the century-long communist ideology made it much easier to absorb the ideology of Dontsov rather than that of Lypyns’kyi. The itinerary of some prominent Ukrainian dissident-nationalists such as Valentyn Moroz who, seeking an expansion of his political outreach, switched to an unabashed antisemitism testified that Dontsov’s ideology still prevails in the mass Ukrainian nationalist movement.^[80] Also, recent events such as Levko Lukianenko’s ignominious publication defiantly accusing Jews (among whom Stalin was listed) in artificially orchestrating the 1931-1932 Ukrainian famine has demonstrated that the “Lypyns’kyi vector” in modern Ukrainian national minority politics is not necessarily irreversible and that the “Dontsov schism” remains an open and dangerous possibility.
The emphasis on Ukrainian literary philosemitism, on common sufferings and victimization, on the Baby Yar symbolism, and on the new type of Israeli-Ukrainian realities flagged the astounding impact of the reconceptualizing of the Jew started by Ukrainian dissidents in the GULAG and scholars of the Lypyns’kyi school in the west on modern Ukrainian political discourse.^[81] But has this discourse resonated within Ukrainian modern thinking? Has it struck roots in the new independent soil? Has it remained only within the boundaries of the dissident milieu, or spread among those politicians who silently sympathized with it? From that viewpoint the post-1991 development of the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter deserves a separate conversation. Yet, already at this point, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn. Back in 1980s the sound metaphor “The Islands of Empathy,” taken as a title for the book of Jewish-Ukrainian GULAG memoirs, captured a new shift in Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Nowadays it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the Ukrainian-Jewish encounter remains the Lypyns’kyi island in the Dontsov sea. Preserving this island and preventing its erosion should become one of the high-priority responsibilities of the Ukrainian political elite.