From Ethnocide to Expiation: Jewish Reflections on Ukrainian Nationalism in Late Soviet Labor Camps

Abstract: Challenging scholarly accounts that stress the Jewish national movement's isolation from the broader galvanization of ethnonational politics in the post-Stalin USSR, this article shows how Jewish activists rallied around the Ukrainian issue to universalize their struggle against Soviet power. As the Soviet crackdown on nationalist dissent intensified in the early 1970s, growing numbers of Jewish dissidents were sent to labor camps, where they encountered Ukrainian nationalists spanning generations. In prison memoirs and other samizdat and tamizdat texts, they drew on reconciliatory—if highly selective—exchanges with Ukrainian coprisoners over the history of Jewish–Ukrainian relations to link Jewish and Ukrainian suffering and promote solidarity and joint action. At the same time, carceral encounters with Ukrainians prompted some activists to recast Jewish national mobilization as collective atonement for the previous generation's iniquitous enthusiasm for Soviet socialism. The Jewish–Ukrainian encounter in late Soviet prison camps thus illustrates how state repression paradoxically fueled interethnic exchange, which in turn shaped nationalist political thought and memory construction in multidirectional ways.