Ukrainian samvydav literature served as a potent and popular response to Soviet ideology and its moral-ethical worldview. Samvydav writings illuminate the main ideological trends in the opposition movement in Ukraine in the 1960s to 1980s. Samvydav publications reached a third peak between 1965 and 1972, and gained particular influence and reach with the appearance in 1970 of the Ukrajins’kij visnyk (the Ukrainian Bulletin), a samvydav periodical. This study, based on extensive archival materials, reveals how Ukrainian samvydav served as a vehicle for Ukrainian national self-assertion, and analyzes how the broad appeal and dissemination of this literature displays the continuing struggle by Ukrainians for national self-determination through these turbulent decades.
Mark Hurst, British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965–1985