Ukrainian Nationalism and the Fall of Shelest

Abstract

In May 1972, Petr Efimovich Shelest, first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was demoted and transferred to Moscow in the shadowy post of deputy premier. He continued to hold his seat in the Politburo in a kind of lame duck existence, until he was prematurely pensioned off eleven months later. No official charges were placed against him immediately, and most foreign observers attributed his fall to his hard-line views on foreign policy at the moment of budding detente. He was reported to have argued heatedly in the Politburo against the Nixon visit, and his removal on the eve of that occasion was seen as a means of getting him out of the way as the President’s host in Kiev. It was also recognized that Shelest was in trouble for his failures in party administration and his inability to stem the tide of intellectual dissent in the largest non-Russian republic. But the official charges that were eventually brought against him were of a different magnitude. He was accused not only of failing to maintain the norms of Leninist nationality policy, but of actively fostering the intensification of divisive Ukrainian nationalism.