The dissident movement: resistance the USSR called Nazism

Who the dissidents were

The dissident movement was a phenomenon of the 1950s–1980s. These were people who, under the Soviet regime, defended their own convictions: the idea of Ukrainian independence, the Ukrainian language and culture. The movement was not narrowly national: there were also religious dissidents (for freedom of worship) and those who defended the rights of national minorities — Crimean Tatars, Jews^[1]. Compared with the armed stage of the struggle (the OUN, the UPA), the dissidents were few — this was a different, intelligentsia form of resistance.

Valentyn Moroz and “Chronicle of Resistance”

One of the symbols of this resistance was Valentyn Moroz — one of the most radical dissidents from among the Sixtiers, who openly challenged the authorities. He wrote four essays — including “Chronicle of Resistance” (as well as “A Report from the Beria Reserve,” “Amid the Snows,” and “Moses and Dathan”) — that were popular in dissident circles. Under those conditions, Moroz dared to defend the very term “Ukrainian nationalism”^[2]. (Moroz is an ambiguous figure: his later, émigré views were controversial; here we are concerned with his role in the dissident resistance of the 1960s–70s.)

Slander as a weapon

The most important thing for understanding the present is how the authorities fought the dissidents. Besides arrests and labor camps, slander was put to use: Soviet propaganda branded dissidents as “nationalists, heirs of Nazism” in order to strip them of influence and authority^[3]. The regime feared the dissidents precisely because they were intellectuals — lecturers, teachers, writers — capable of influencing the young and the student body, and therefore the future.

A blow against the diaspora

The campaign reached abroad. The publication “News from Ukraine” was a mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda aimed at the diaspora. In it were published the “confessional statements” of broken dissidents — such as Ivan Dziuba or Zinoviia Franko (granddaughter of Ivan Franko)^[4]. The aim was to sow despair and division among Ukrainians abroad, to portray the resistance as “doomed.” These are classic active measures against the diaspora.

What this means

The Soviet cliché “dissident = nationalist = heir of Nazism” is a direct ancestor of today’s Russian “denazification” narrative about Ukraine. The logic is the same: any Ukrainian resistance to the empire is declared “Nazism” in order to dehumanize it and justify repression. The dissidents of the 1960s proved the opposite: the demand to speak one’s own language and to have one’s own state is not “Nazism” but the normal right of a people — a right feared precisely by the empire.