Olga Bertelsen. <i>In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine's Intelligentsia in the 1960s-1970s</i>

Olga Bertelsen's book is a tour de force. It is the best book in any language about the generation of “creative intelligentsia” of Soviet Ukraine, known as the shestidesyatniki, who lived through the 1960s, witnessing a transition from the “de-Stalinization” of Nikita Khrushchev to the “re-Stalinization” of Leonid Brezhnev and participating in various attempts to “liberalize” Soviet culture and society. Using recently declassified files from Ukraine's former State Security (KGB) archive as well as personal interviews and diaries, concentrating on personal stories of poets and writers from the second largest Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, and following the details of life of her father, famous Kharkiv “romantic” poet Robert Tretyakov (1936–1996), who, as an ethnic Russian, composed his lyrics in Ukrainian, Bertelsen offers a unique narrative as the mixture of cultural history, social history, transnational history, and microhistory of the relations between the Kharkiv multinational community, which included Ukrainians, Jews and Russians, and the KGB, the Soviet political police. Bertelsen analyzes “the KGB's deep penetration into the cultural life of Soviet Ukraine and into the very psyche of writers whom they wanted to convert, pacify, recruit, or eliminate” (p. xiv). In contrast to previous studies of the Ukrainian shestydesyatnyky, mainly by Heorhii Kas'yanov (in 1995) and Simone Attilio Belleza (in 2019), who either had no access to KGB documents or just “consulted” a few of them, sometimes misinterpreting the files, Bertelsen's book offers to its readers not only a detailed analysis of all available KGB documents from the state security archive in Kyiv but also a personal view of a person who lived inside the milieu of Kharkiv writers, poets, and literary critics in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, Bertelsen wrote her book as an intriguing personal experiment: she asked her readers to read her book “as a novel, in which they discover a grain of historical truth, rather than a conventional history book, a sample of scholarship that typically denies partiality, errors, prejudices, and the misreading of evidence.” Her book's goal is “modest—to provide a glimpse into Kharkiv writers’ private and social lives, their worries and interactions with the KGB, and their transnational connections under the Soviets” (p. xiv).In her first chapter, using her father's biography, Bertelsen addresses the beginning of the “revolution of poets” in the USSR and Soviet Kharkiv as a reaction of the “creative intelligentsia” to Khrushchev's reforms and the KGB's attempts to control this reaction (pp. 1–53). In the next chapter, she focuses on the connections between Ukrainian and Jewish writers of Kharkiv, fighting the official anti-Semitism of the ruling Communist elite of Petro Shelest (pp. 55–110). According to Bertelsen, Khrushchev's Thaw and de-Stalinization “provoked a cultural and political upheaval among Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals, facilitating the rapprochement of Ukrainians and Jews and fundamentally changing the psyche of both communities.” As a result, “for the first time they realized that Ukraine was also Jewish, not only Ukrainian or Russian” (p. 95). Chapter 3 of her book is a detailed story of the KGB's “active measures” against the dissidents among the Ukrainian intellectuals. In Ukrainian Communist Party documents in Kyiv, these measures were characterized as an operation targeting the so-called organization of BLOC, which allowed the KGB operatives to claim that the dissidents were part of an international conspiracy against Soviet Ukraine (pp. 111–159). The next two chapters (4 and 5) explain the details of those “active measures,” concentrating on the KGB's reliance on psychiatric coercion (pp. 161–202) and the KGB's narrative regarding the Holodomor—the devastating famine in 1932–1933 that stemmed directly from Stalin's policies, pp. 203–240). The final chapter, which is sketchier than the previous ones, deals with the so-called “years of timelessness” of the 1970s in Kharkiv, where KGB operatives subjected intellectuals to constant abuse (pp. 241–273). In the conclusion, Bertelsen briefly sums up the cultural developments of perestroika in Kharkiv and gives readers a dour appraisal of Soviet cultural developments. She argues that for “Kharkiv writers, raised in atmosphere of chronic intellectual abuse, artistic freedom remained an unattainable goal; for a few, their remarkable reincarnation mollified the loss of their potentially productive years when they were silenced” (p. 279).Unfortunately, Bertelsen's wonderful study of Kharkiv intelligentsia has some serious omissions. In her first three chapters, she mentions non-Kharkiv Ukrainian shestydesyatnyky, including Ivan Sokol's'kyi, an undergraduate student from Dnipropetrovsk State University. Concentrating on Kharkiv's writers, Bertelsen neglects to note that, chronologically, the first international scandal connected to the Ukrainian poet's activities took place in Dnipropetrovsk in June 1968, when he, with two other young poets—Mykhailo Skorik and Volodymyr Zaremba—wrote “A Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” criticizing the official policy of Russification of eastern Ukraine. They sent the letter not only to the Communist Party and Soviet leaders in Kyiv but also to representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora abroad. In 1969–1970, this document from Dnipropetrovsk became a model for local dissidents of the “rocket city” and also in Odesa, Kharkiv and other Russian-speaking industrial cities of eastern and southern Ukraine.Another phenomenon Bertelsen misses in her book because of her focus on KGB repressions in the 1970s is the flourishing youth culture in Kharkiv, where the young local poets (not the members of the Union of Soviet Writers, like Robert Tretyakov) composed and performed their own rock songs and created their own discussion clubs in the 1970s that criticized the Soviet “Mafia State.” Moreover, according to Ukrainian KGB documents, Kharkiv and its university became the center of hippie culture in Ukraine from 1968 to 1988. Regarding Kharkiv University, Bertelsen could have used the research of another Kharkovite (now living and working in Canada), Volodymyr Kravchenko, who has analyzed the political and cultural role of Kharkiv in Imperial Russia and the USSR and also the role of Kharkiv State University in educating Ukrainian intellectuals who eventually became active participants in the movement for Ukrainian independence in the 1980s and 1990s. Such points would have strengthened the major arguments of Bertelsen's book and widened the reading audience for it.These minor criticisms aside, In the Labyrinth of the KGB is a major contribution to studies of Ukrainian cultural history and also to the history of the cultural Cold War. Bertelsen's book helps us understand how the political practices and traditions of KGB operations from Soviet times against patriotic Ukrainian intellectuals could be revived by the Kremlin's post-Soviet state security agencies in Russia's “special military operation” (i.e., war of aggression) against Ukraine starting in 2022.

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