Coercion and Coerciveness in the Politics of Cold-War Ukraine and Taiwan

Abstract

The present study is devoted to an examination of the prison memoirs by the Ukrainian writer, Mykhaylo Osadchy (1936–1994) and the Taiwanese writer Tsai Tehpen (b. 1925) from the perspective of coercion. Osadchy was a member of the Sixtiers, a group of young Ukrainian intellectuals who brought about cultural renaissance in post-Stalin Ukraine. Their writings marked a strong reaction against Moscow’s policy of great-power chauvinism at the onset of the regime change that marked the end of Khrushchev’s liberalizing campaign. Osadchy was one of the victims of the subsequent wave of arrests of dissidents in the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, in 1965. His memoir, Cataract (1971) is a powerfully evocative response to trumped-up charges of subversion, anti-Soviet agitation and bourgeois nationalism, and a riveting description of life in a Mordovian labor camp, a work that posed a strong attack on official Soviet culture.