in [the city] turned to Russian language because they wanted to appear more cultured and civilized.”22
The survey’s detailed and quite convincing description of the massive commercialization and Americanization of the youth culture in cities like Odesa appears to be the most astonishing revelation for researchers. For many students, the labels and the expression “made in the USA” became the benchmarks of how good quality products and, more broadly, successful economic and social developments could be measured. They strongly believed that the Soviet economic conditions did not leave any space for the entrepreneurial talents of Soviet people to develop and become effective drivers of the socialist enterprise. The youth contended that, like in the United States, economic competition was necessary to force out low quality products from the Soviet market. Students appreciated the freedom of opinion and expression, which they thought existed only in the West. In their minds, the main criterion of “human success was defined by the level of his/her personal material prosperity (well-being).”23
It is noteworthy that, on the eve of the September 1968 Plenum of the CPSU that focused on the problems of transition to the new system of planning, the city youth discussed the revival of private entrepreneurship in light industry and the service sphere. College students preferred the black market to lecture halls, demonstrating a high propensity for commercial activities. They routinely joked that “the Americans are wise people, and therefore they have no ruling Communist Party, [only a market].”24
The author of the 1968 survey further argued that beyond commercialization, the hero cult was additional evidence of the effective penetration of American values into the consciousness of Soviet youth:
A contemporary young boy and a girl needed a real hero (as a role model), but our films showed them either unusual people in unusual situations, or personalities that were so dull and boring that they could not be an example for emulation. In this light, the heroes of Western films, strong handsome characters who solved their problems with a punch, unknowingly became the models for emulation. After watching the film The Magnificent Seven, half of college male students developed the walking style of Chris (the major character of the film). The youth love strength; that was why the body-building fashion, which came from the West and was initially criticized by our ideologists, achieved an unprecedented popularity in the country. Regarding this cult of strength, it is noteworthy that we witness a surprising rise of sympathy with fascism among some students. Agreeing with its blunders (such as the annihilation of Jews), they admire the attractive appearance of tall and handsome Arians (ariitsy), parading in the military marches …25
KGB analysts also identified another characteristic of the collective portrait of college students from Odesa—antisemitism and racist attitudes, especially toward African college students. Paradoxically, they physically attacked students from Africa, calling them “black-ass people” (chornozhopye), simultaneously supporting Czech students during the Prague Spring, and openly expressing their affinity with American jazz and beat-music.26
Besides such cases of racism, the idealization of fascist leaders, and antisemitism, the KGB noted the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism among college students in other eastern Ukrainian cities. In some Russian-speaking cities of eastern Ukraine, such as Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, the KGB officers recorded frequent cases of Ukrainian nationalism. They attributed the rise of nationalism in Dnipropetrovsk, for instance, to demographic and political developments, following the 1956 sensational Twentieth Party Congress. According to a KGB decision, former political prisoners who had been indicted for “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and had served their prison terms in the Gulag were released. However, they were not allowed to return to their homes in western Ukraine. These prisoners, identified as banderovtsy in official documents, were either members or supporters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and/or members of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church (Uniate or the Ukrainian Greek-rite Catholic Church) from the Trans-Carpathian and Galician regions of western Ukraine.27 After 1945, when the Soviet Army suppressed these patriotic and anti-Soviet movements, thousands of adherents were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan. KGB officials tried to prevent any contacts between these former political prisoners and their homeland in western Ukraine. By the mid-sixties, many of these ex-prisoners settled in eastern, more Russified regions of Ukraine. The KGB tried to regiment the movements of Ukrainian nationalists and dilute them by more diverse, and less Ukrainian, people of the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts. By 1967, 1,041 former political prisoners who were labeled “Ukrainian nationalists” from western Ukraine had settled in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast alone.28
This posed a danger to ideological and political control of eastern Ukraine because ex-prisoners resided in strategically important cities and their vicinity, such as Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. The amalgamation of several factors, including a cultural influx of college students from western Ukraine to the Dnipropetrovsk oblast and ex-prisoners’ influences, provoked a serious international scandal, involving a group of local young patriotic Ukrainian-speaking poets. They complained about the official politics of Russification in eastern Ukraine. They sent copies of their “Letter from the Creative Youth of Dnipropetrovsk,” in which they documented the KGB’s suppression of Ukrainian patriots and massive Russification of Soviet Ukraine, to various offices of the Communist Party, the Komsomol, and Soviet organizations and colleges in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk in the period from August to December of 1968.29 Ultimately, the letter reached Ukrainian émigré centers abroad. The following spring, foreign radio stations, such as Liberty, included the text of this letter in their broadcasts.30 In 1969–1970, the KGB managed to supress this group of young Ukrainian patriots.31
Until 1990, criminal cases focused on Ukrainian nationalism had always been connected to the activities of college students in Soviet Ukraine. Their “Americanization” was a serious concern for KGB officers, a process that was shaped by new forms of daily consumption of Western (in many cases, American) cultural products, especially popular music. The KGB associated this process with the emergence of hippies in Soviet Ukraine, considering the imposition of American influences on Soviet youth a political threat to the Soviet system.32
In Ukraine, the KGB concentrated on the hippie movement as early as 1968. The first official KGB report about this movement was submitted to the party leadership in Kyiv on 20 May 1969, stating that the followers of this movement were discovered in Kyiv, Simferopol, Luhansk, Odesa, Lviv, Rivne and other Ukrainian cities. They were predominantly teenagers and young adults, students of high schools and college students. According to this document, those hippies emulated Western lifestyles to the last detail: “Some of them, using various excuses, try to avoid military service, criticize the Soviet order, lead immoral lives, use drugs, systematically establish contacts with foreigners, and are involved in black market transactions (fartsovka). […] Gatherings of hippies are held in private apartments and, as a rule, are accompanied by parties with alcohol and listening to new releases of foreign jazz music that are frequently ended in orgies.”33 The transgressor established contacts with like-minded people in Ukraine and outside the republic. To better explain the hippie phenomenon to party leaders, KGB analysts interjected excerpts from an analytical article on American hippies, written by an American social psychologist from Yale University, Kenneth Keniston, and published in Russian translation in the American magazine Amerika.
