Petro Shelest

Petro Yukhymovych Shelest (14 February 1908 – 22 January 1996) was a Ukrainian Soviet politician who served as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1965 until his removal in 1972.

Ideologically a social moderate and a national communist, he oversaw a widespread liberalisation of Ukrainian society as part of the Khrushchev Thaw and Sixtier movement that led to increased visibility of the Ukrainian language and culture in public life.

Petro Shelest was born in a Ukrainian peasant family in a village near Kharkiv in 1908.

In 1928 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and in 1935 graduated from Mariupol Metallurgical Institute.

He studied engineering in Kharkiv, and held industrial jobs between 1932 and 1936.

He served in the Red Army from 1936 to 1937, but transferred to working for the Communist Party in 1937, as thousands of its members were caught up in the Great Purge.

Between 1943 and 1954, Shelest was a chief manager of several large factories in Leningrad and Kyiv.

From 1954 to 1963, he was respectively Second Secretary of the Kyiv city party committee, Second Secretary of the regional committee, and First Secretary of the Kyiv regional party committee.

After Shelest was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) in 1963, he set out to run Ukraine with a degree of independence from Moscow, and to develop the republic's economy and encourage Ukrainian culture.

It was during his tenure that construction began on the four nuclear plants at Chernobyl.

He antagonised the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who publicly upbraided Shelest during a visit to Hungary over late delivery of Ukrainian equipment, then remarked: "Look how glum he is - just as if a hedgehog had been rammed down his throat."

In November 1964, when Khrushchev was removed from office, Shelest was promoted to full membership of the Presidium (later renamed the Politburo).

Shelest began his rule at a time of significant cultural shifts in Ukrainian society, as it began to increasingly distance itself from Russia and assert its unique identity.

Regarded within the party as a localist, Shelest was viewed by various sectors of the public as either a supporter of increased Ukrainian autonomy within the Soviet Union or a typical Soviet bureaucrat.

In a statement later attributed to him by historian Roman Solanchyk, Shelest said that he was "not Lazar Kaganovich" and did not rule under Ukraine in "the times of Stalin," noting himself as an opponent of hardliners.

Historian Taras Kuzio has argued that Shelest was the leader of a revived national communist sect of the Communist Party of Ukraine after the group had previously been destroyed in the Great Purge.

According to Kuzio, the national communist group was later led by Leonid Kravchuk, who oversaw the transition from Soviet to independent Ukraine.

A supporter of the Sixtier cultural movement and the Khrushchev Thaw, Shelest's policies brought greater prominence to the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture in public life, with the party echelons actively supporting such developments.

An ultimately-unrealised 1965 plan, later leaked through samizdat, called for Ukrainian to eventually replace Russian as the language of instruction in higher education.

The extent to which Shelest personally was involved in supporting the Sixtiers and other nationally minded Ukrainians, many of whom later formed the core of Ukraine's Soviet dissidents, remains in dispute.

Shelest's policy of greater autonomy for Ukraine was also reflected in economic spheres, as he sought to decentralise economic management to the republican level.

He also argued for Ukraine to become economically sovereign from the broader Soviet Union in 1965, a move which alarmed Soviet leadership.

The core intention of Shelest's policies was to improve the popularity of the Communist Party among Ukrainians, following the extreme unpopularity of Stalinist rule in Ukraine.

In 1968, Shelest played a major role in deciding how the Soviet government should respond to the Prague Spring, the sudden loosening of political control in communist Czechoslovakia, which created an atmosphere that spilled over into west Ukraine.

He was the only other Politburo member beside Leonid Brezhnev to take part in every meeting between Soviet and Czech communist leaders during that year.

Addressing the Central Committee of the CPSU on 17 July 1968, Shelest accused the Czechoslovak communist party leadership of persecuting communists while making no attempt to control "right-wing opportunists".

He claimed:

"The Czechoslovak comrades babble on about their wholehearted support for “democratic socialism.” But they disregard the fact that our country, the first country in the world in which socialism triumphed, has already been living and prospering for more than 50 years in accordance with socialist laws."

During negotiations on 30 July 1968, he berated the Czechoslovak delegation, complaining that "Your TV shows, your radio programmes, your newspapers and magazines distributed into our regions closest to your borders make our people ask questions which are full of embarrassment".

Shelest went on to insult František Kriegel, a senior Czechoslovak communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, calling him a "Galician Jew".

The Czechoslovak party leader, Alexander Dubček, walked out, and later lodged a complaint about Shelest's comment and tone.

On 3 August, Shelest secretly met the hard-line Slovak communist Vasiľ Biľak, who handed him a letter inviting the Soviet government to send in troops to move to restore the dictatorship.

This was used as a pretext for the Warsaw Pact invasion on 20 August.

In 1968, Shelest was awarded the "Hero of Socialist Labor" title.

Such plans had fruitful results: by 1971 KPU membership was 2.5 million, and annually increasing at double the rate of the Union average.

Geographically, Shelest was associated with the city of Kharkiv, and part of the Kharkiv Clan.

This further helped to establish animosity with Leonid Brezhnev and Shelest's eventual successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who were both members of the rival Dnipropetrovsk Mafia.

Shelest was removed by Leonid Brezhnev in 1972 and replaced with Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, who undid much of Shelest's reforms and oversaw intensive Russification of Ukrainian society.

By 1972, the Soviet government, under Brezhnev, had grown irritated by Shelest's continued support for Ukrainian culture.

Shelest was the last Ukrainian leader from the Kharkiv Clan, and the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia dominated Ukrainian politics until being replaced by the Donetsk Clan in the 2000s.