Village Writers and the Preservation of “Monuments of History and Culture,” 1959–1972
Chapter
Overview
abstract
Abstract; Chapter 5 analyzes the mid-1960s transition in Soviet leadership from Nikita Khrushchev to Leonid Brezhnev through a study of village writers’ involvement in a new movement to preserve historic churches, which they euphemistically referred to as “monuments of history and culture.” In literary works discussing the neglect and destruction of religious sites, village writers like the Russian poet and prose writer Vladimir Soloukhin and the Ukrainian novelist Oles’ Honchar implied that Soviet officials were hostile to both the village and the nation. This chapter traces the spread of the preservationist movement from the Caucasus to Russia and other republics, focusing particularly on a major controversy around Honchar’s novel Cathedral. Building on a framework originally developed by the political scientist Yizhak Brudny, this chapter discusses the policies that republican Party leaders adopted toward intellectuals, ranging from a “policy of inclusion” which sought to integrate nationalist intellectuals into state institutions to a “policy of exclusion” which sought to marginalize them. It shows that a “policy of inclusion” in one republic led to demands for similar policies elsewhere on the basis of the “national equality principle” (the idea, promoted by the Soviet state, that all national groups were equal in the USSR). After Leonid Brezhnev’s rise to power in 1964, central Soviet authorities pursued a policy of inclusion toward Russian nationalists while simultaneously cracking down on church preservation advocates in Ukraine, alienating Ukrainian intellectuals who had previously been loyal to the Soviet state.
