2024/01/01 by Paul D’Anieri · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Intelligence, Security, War Strategy
paper · doi:10.1162/jcws_r_01235
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Olga Bertelsen's In the Labyrinth of the KGB is a difficult book to categorize, and in this case, that works to her advantage. The book is part history and part cultural studies, with elements of psychology, sociology, and political science added judiciously. As history, her absorbing study of Soviet repression and the struggles of writers to maintain their integrity while continuing to pursue their vocations seems to take place in a distant era. It is difficult today to relate to a time and place where poets were like rock stars, selling out large halls to audiences eager to hear them recite their works (p. 2). Yet the study is amazingly timely and relevant, with its unflinching portrayals of Soviet/Russian imperialism, Ukrainian resistance, and the enduring power of the idea of the Ukrainian nation and language. The book provides a powerful rebuttal to arguments that Russia's enmity toward Ukraine, its determined assault on the truth, and its deliberate mangling of the notion of fascism are somehow a response to the policies of post-Soviet Ukrainian leaders or the West. Bertelsen's research shows that Russia's policies toward Ukraine, in both the ends and the means, have deep Soviet roots. The continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet Russian attitudes is striking. In that sense, the book is about the present and future as much as the past. Ultimately, rulers in Moscow became bewildered by the labyrinth they built to entrap Ukrainian intellectuals.Why did the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) and its Ukrainian branch put so much effort into repressing the writers of Kharkiv? This sort of repression was ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, but Kharkiv was especially important. It had been the first capital of Soviet Ukraine (until the capital was moved to Kyiv in 1934) and had long been a center of Ukrainian language, culture, and education. Contrary to the common view today of Kharkiv as a Russian-speaking city, Bertelsen shows that the city's writers worked extensively in Ukrainian and Yiddish, as well as in Russian, and that they did not, in most cases, equate speaking or writing in Russian with being Russian any more than Irish or Americans today equate speaking English with being English. Today, Russia engages in the same tortured misconceptions, recognizing Kharkiv's significance as a Ukrainian city (and therefore investing immense resources in capturing, or at least destroying, it), while simultaneously assuming that the predominance of the Russian language in Kharkiv means that residents of the city will welcome the Russian military with open arms.Soviet repression of Kharkiv's literary elite was intended to crush anti-Soviet as well as Ukrainian nationalist and Zionist activity. One question that looms over Bertelsen's story is why Ukrainian language and national identity needed crushing in Kharkiv after over two decades of Stalinist repression that sent many Ukrainian cultural figures to the Gulag and killed millions of Ukrainian-speaking peasants, many by starvation. The reality, underappreciated by leaders in Moscow then and now, is that decades of sustained repression by a dedicated totalitarian regime, not to mention the trauma of World War II and Nazi occupation, were insufficient to snuff out Ukrainian national sentiment there. Similarly, Bertelson shows that after a few years of Nikita Khrushchev's thaw after Joseph Stalin's death, repression remerged under Khrushchev's rule in the late 1950s, was increased by Leonid Brezhnev in the 1960s and 1970s, and endured right up to the end of the Soviet era in the late 1980s. She shows that the shistdesyatnyki, the artists of the 1960s, were much less the beneficiaries of a “thaw” than we tend to believe. Repression was reinstated very quickly. Although the repression had some success, particularly in replacing Ukrainian language with Russian, it appears to have made little headway in quashing Ukrainian national sentiment in Kharkiv. Over 86 percent of Kharkiv oblast's residents voted for independence in December 1991, Kharkivites resisted the efforts of Russian proxies to take over the city in 2014, and they fought resolutely to counter Russian efforts to seize the city in 2022.Bertelsen completed her book before Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but her analysis does a remarkably thorough job of debunking the claims that underpin Russia's war on Ukraine. In contradiction to Vladimir Putin's fanciful assertions that Ukrainian national identity is artificial and a recent invention, she shows that it is so deeply rooted that it has persisted despite the concerted efforts of two of the most repressive regimes in history, Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian state was not an artificial creation of Vladimir Lenin; rather, it was something that Lenin acknowledged as preexisting and deserving of republic status because he understood that the Soviet government could not crush it.In fact, as Bertelsen shows repeatedly, efforts to repress Ukrainian culture and national sentiment not only failed but backfired, stoking renewed and determined efforts to sustain Ukrainian language and themes in the writings of the Kharkiv literary elite. When Yurii Andropov became head of the KGB in 1967, he increased repression of Ukrainian and “Zionist” writers. These efforts “had an effect polar opposite from what the authorities tried to achieve in Ukraine. Writers of various ethnic backgrounds began to write non-Soviet poetry and texts, politically and nationally charged, distributing them through samvydav that quickly transcended Ukraine's borders” (p. 70). We saw the same phenomenon play out after 2014 and again today.Already in the 1960s (and in fact much earlier), Ukraine and Ukrainian, along with Yiddish and Zionism, became associated with freedom, whereas Russia and Russian were associated with repression. Bertelsen shows how, in a foreshadowing of politics today, Jews, Ukrainian-speakers, and Ukrainians saw each other as natural allies both culturally and politically. Although anti-Semitism was not unknown among Ukrainian nationalists, the overwhelming trend in Kharkiv was of a multilingual and multinational community of artists who were concerned much more with what they had in common—as poets, writers, and Ukrainians—than with their differences. Ivan Dziuba, among the best-known of the Ukrainian shistdesyatnyki, criticized Soviet anti-Semitism and “ardently supported Ukraine's Jewish community” (p. 59).Bertelsen shows that Jewish culture and the Yiddish language in Kharkiv received from the Soviet government much the same treatment as Ukrainian culture and language. Russia was then, as now, trying to play Jews and Ukrainians off against one another but ran into a basic contradiction, accusing Ukrainian nationalists of being fascists even as it criticized them for their association with Jews and Zionists. Then, as now, this contradiction was perpetrated by a regime that somehow managed not to notice its own nationalism and anti-Semitism. For Russians, non-Russian sentiment was deviant (and therefore had to be repressed), whereas Russian sentiment was so normal that it was not even noticed.Bertelsen uses the metaphor of the labyrinth to describe the situation in which Kharkiv's writers found themselves. Ultimately, the KGB and Soviet (and later Russian) leaders in Moscow found themselves trapped in the labyrinth they had built. Having invented a series of false narratives and analyses about national identity in Ukraine, they lost track of the truth, which left them repeatedly disoriented in trying to deal with Ukraine. One might imagine what Putin would have thought if he had read Bertelsen's book before he went to war against Ukraine in 2014 or again in 2022. Most likely, he would have dismissed it because it does not fit his worldview. But if he had paid attention to this history and literature, to the sacrifices Ukrainians made to be free, and to the seemingly inevitable counterproductive results of Russia's attempts to extirpate Ukrainian national sentiment in Kharkiv, he might have abandoned the delusions that prompted him to embark on a war that has driven Ukraine ever further from Russia's embrace.