Ivan Dzyuba (Dziuba) passed away earlier this year. The dissident theorist’s role in developing what could have been Ukraine’s version of “socialism with a human face” (the movement that emerged under Czechoslovak Communist party leader Alexander Dubček before Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to quash it in 1968) was an important one. Arrested and jailed in 1972, Dzyuba was silenced by the Soviet authorities until re-emerging as a literary critic in the 1980s and a political activist during the Perestroika years. He served as Ukraine’s Minister of Culture in 1992-94.
Dzyuba’s Internationalism or Russification? (1965) was a powerful, Marxist-based critique of Soviet nationalities policy as a continuation of the colonialism of the tsarist Russian empire. A new edition of the book has just been jointly published by the ecosocialist International Institute for Research and Education and anti-capitalist publishing house Resistance Books. It includes a new introduction by John-Paul Himka. Bohdan Krawchenko’s introduction to the book’s original English (1968) edition can be read at Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign’s tribute page to Dziuba. The earlier edition is also available at the Internet Archive and at Diasporiana (but please support the publishers of the new edition if you can).
Tributes to Dzyuba can be found in leftist (e.g., The Militant) as well as human-rights media (e.g., Euromaidan Press).
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