HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

256 Reviewsit is no substitute for laboriously leafing through bound volumes of LiteraturnaUkraina, Vitchyzna, Ukrains'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, etc.The volume begins with an excursion into communications theory thatestablishes the framework for the study. Fully a third of the text is devoted to asurvey of the literature, the author's framework, and a recapitulation of theofficial Soviet theory of proletarian internationalism. If the book is intended toserve as an aid for scholars not primarily occupied with Ukrainian affairs —and the title makes it quite likely that it will be one of the first booksnon-specialists consult for information on the Ukrainian "problem" in theUSSR — a more useful approach would have been to include a brief backgroundsurvey of Soviet Ukrainian politics, with emphasis on the Shelest andShcherbyts'kyi periods.The book's most serious structural flaw is apparent in chapter three, whichhas recently been republished in a slightly altered version as "Politics andCulture in the Ukraine" in the Annals of the Ukrainian Academy (vol. 14,pp. 180-208). Here the author attempts to deal with three of the mostimportant elements in the Ukrainian national revival of the 1960s: historiography,literature and culture, and the origin of the dissident movement in thecurtailment of officially sanctioned modes of expression. Treatment of each ofthese three elements should have been a separate chapter in a more thoroughstudy of Ukrainian nationalism. As it is, the author does little more than defineproblems for further research. Both the history and literary sections shouldhave presented a far more detailed discussion of the 1920s. Treatment of theperiod remains the central bone of contention between reformists and theiropponents, since communism is an essentially conservative system in whichlegitimacy depends on Leninist precedents, and the main advantage reformistshave is that during the 1920s the Soviet Union was not yet a full-blowntotalitarian society. The twenty-five pages devoted to the origins of thedissident movement could easily have been expanded to constitute a fullchapter.The chapter on the issue of language policy is, next to the treatment ofdissidents, the best part of the book. Even here, however, there are someproblems, particularly with the author's treatment of Antonenko-Davydovych'sadvocacy of rehabilitating the letter g in Ukrainian. This is more thanjust a problem of linguistic "authenticity," but a question pregnant withpolitical implications about the degree to which the Skrypnyk era is a precedentfor later policy. After all, the most specific charge of "nationalism"Postyshev made at the time of Skrypnyk's disgrace in 1933 was that Skrypnykhad advocated the use of this henceforth forbidden letter.Since the author systematically read through all available pre-1976 documentson the Ukrainian dissident movement, it is not surprising that the finalchapter on dissidents is the most useful and stimulating in the book. Asidefrom the author's failure to mention Anton Koval's open letter of 1969 — one