Volodymyr Vasyliovych Shcherbytsky (17 February 1918 – 16 February 1990) was a Ukrainian politician in the Soviet Union who served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1972 to 1989. A close ally of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Shcherbytsky replaced the reformist leader, Petro Shelest, in 1972 as part of a crackdown on the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Under Shcherbytsky's rule, Ukraine was subjected to an intensive Russification campaign as well as a rapid shift to nuclear power, which ultimately resulted in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In 1989, Shcherbytsky was removed amidst widespread protests against his rule, and died months later.
Early life Shcherbytsky was born in Verkhnodniprovsk on 17 February 1918 to Vasily Grigorievich Shcherbytsky (1890–1949) and Tatyana Ivanovna Shcherbitskaya (1898–1990), just two weeks after the Soviet takeover of the city during the Ukrainian–Soviet War. During his school years, he worked as an activist and a member of the Komsomol from 1931. In 1934, while still in school, he became an instructor and agitator for the district committee of the Komsomol. In 1936, he entered the Faculty of Mechanics at the Dnipropetrovsk Chemical Technology Institute. During his training, he worked as a draftsman, designer and compressor driver at the factories in Dnipropetrovsk. Shcherbytsky graduated from the Dnipropetrovsk Chemical Technology Institute in 1941 and in the same year became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Military career Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Shcherbytsky was mobilized into the ranks of the Red Army. Because he was a graduate with a major in chemical equipment and machinery, he was sent to attend short term courses at the Military Academy of Chemical Protection named after Voroshilov, which was evacuated from Moscow to Samarkand in Uzbek SSR. After graduation, Shcherbytsky was appointed head of the chemical unit within the 34th Infantry Regiment of the 473rd Infantry Division in the Transcaucasian Front. In November 1941, the division was formed in the cities of Baku and Sumgayit in Azerbaijan SSR. On 8 January 1942, the division was renamed as 75th Rifle Division, and in April of the same year, Shcherbytsky and the division took part in the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. On the same year, he served in a tank brigade.
In March 1943, Shcherbytsky was transferred to the chemical department at the headquarters of the Transcaucasian Front, where he served until the end of the war. In August 1945, the Transcaucasian Front was reorganized into the Tbilisi Military District and Shcherbytsky's last military assignment was as an assistant chief of the chemistry department of the district headquarters for combat training. In December 1945, he left the military service at the rank of captain.
Political career After World War II, he worked as an engineer in Dniprodzerzhynsk (now Kamianske). From 1948 Shcherbytsky was a party functionary in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In 1948, he was appointed Second Secretary of Dniprodzerhynsk city communist party committee, soon after Leonid Brezhnev had taken over the First Secretary of the regional party committee. He succeeded Brezhnev as regional party boss in November 1955. In December 1957, he was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In February 1961, he was appointed chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers, the second highest post in the republic, but in June 1963, just after Petro Shelest had been appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Shcherbytysky was shifted to the lesser job of First Secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional party committee. On 16 October 1965, after Brezhnev had risen to the supreme position as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Shcherbytsky was restored to his former position at the head of the Ukrainian government.
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine
In May 1972, Shelest was recalled from his post as head of the Ukrainian government, as part of a broader attack on the nationally-minded Ukrainian intelligentsia by the central Soviet government that had begun in January. He was instead transferred to Moscow and elected to be the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. As a result of this development, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) elected Shcherbytysky as their new First Secretary; this was the highest political office in the Ukrainian SSR. While Shelest had pushed for increased Ukrainian autonomy from Moscow, and had been a supporter of increased Ukrainian cultural identification, Shcherbytsky was unfailingly loyal to Brezhnev, and conducted policy accordingly.
Shcherbytsky's appointment was both a victory for the Soviet government and a personal victory for Brezhnev; Shcherbytsky was a member of Brezhnev's political clan, the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia, which was opposed to Shelest's Kharkiv Clan. In government, Shcherbytsky relied on a group of party cadres from both the Dnipropetrovsk Mafia and emerging Donetsk Clan, both of whom were more supportive of Russification than other political clans in Ukraine. The Kharkiv Clan was pushed out of government and marginalised. Ideologically, Shcherbytsky was a neo-Stalinist and hardline conservative.
The first year of his rule was marked by a wide-reaching purge of the CPU and Ukrainian civil society. As a result of the purge, which was co-orchestrated by , 5% of the CPU's members were removed, and several leading Ukrainian intellectuals, among them anti-Communist leaders Viacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Svitlychnyi, and Yevhen Sverstiuk, were arrested. Described by Peter Reddaway as the "heaviest single KGB assault", the intelligentsia interpreted the purge as an effort to undo Shelest's rule and reestablish Russian control over Ukraine. Ivan Dziuba's book Internationalism or Russification?, which was critical of the role the Russian language played in the Soviet Union, was harshly criticised and suppressed by the Ukrainian government. Dziuba himself was later arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labour. Arrested dissidents were linked to the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, then operating abroad. The purge led to increased radicalism among the dissident movement, bringing many in the dissident movement to consider the outright separation of Ukraine from the Soviet Union rather than simply increased autonomy.
Further purges continued throughout the 1970s, including against the Ukrainian academia and the filmmaking community. Through the Helsinki Accords the dissident movement reemerged and strengthened its position despite continuous attacks by Shcherbytsky's government.
Shcherbytsky was also an influential figure in the Soviet Union's larger government. In April 1971, he was promoted to membership of the Politburo, on which he remained a close ally of Brezhnev. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott have argued that Shcherbytsky's rule was among the most corrupt and conservative among the Soviet republics.Democratic Changes and Authoritarian Reactions in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova By Karen Dawisha, Bruce Parrott. Cambridge University Press, 1997 , . p. 337
On March 7, 1985, Shcherbytsky visited the United States, where he met with President Ronald Reagan to discuss the potential resumption of arms control negotiations. The talks between Reagan and Shcherbytsky were reportedly tense from the outset, with Shcherbytsky characterizing the United States as a "destabilizing force." Following the meeting, Reagan remarked that Shcherbytsky would return home with a clear understanding that the United States was open to negotiations. However, Reagan emphasized that the United States would not lower its defenses or permit the Soviet Union to expand its offensive capabilities unchecked.Reagan By Brett Harper. New Word City, 2015
Russification
His rule of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was characterized by the expanded policies of re-centralisation and suppression of Soviet dissidents, accompanied by a broad assault on Ukrainian culture and intensification of Russification. During Shcherbytsky's rule mass arrests were carried out that incarcerated any member of the intelligentsia that dared to dissent from official state policies. The expirations of political prisoners' sentences were increasingly followed by re-arrest and new sentences on charges of criminal activity. Incarceration in psychiatric institutions became a new method of political repression. Ukrainian language press, scholarly, and cultural organisations which had flourished under Shcherbytsky's predecessor Shelest were repressed by Shcherbytsky. Shcherbytsky also made a point of speaking Russian at official functions while Shelest spoke Ukrainian in public events. In an October 1973 speech to fellow party members Shcherbytsky stated that as an "internationalists", Ukrainians were meant to "express feelings of friendship and brotherhood to all people of our country but first of all to the great Russian people, their culture, their language - the language of the Revolution, of Lenin, the language of international intercourse and unity". Shcherbytsky also claimed that "the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people" is "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism and also international Zionism".Bohdan Nahaylo, The Ukrainian Resurgence, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1999, pages 39 and 40 During Shcherbytsky's rule, Ukrainian-language education was greatly scaled back.
Shcherbytsky diminished the degree of official usage of Ukrainian. Under his leadership, all meetings of the CPU were conducted in Russian, and Ukrainian education was further Russified. By the time of Brezhnev's death, fewer books had been published in Ukrainian throughout his rule than during the rule of Stalin, a result owed in part to Shcherbytsky. However, despite Shcherbytsky's stance against all forms of Ukrainian nationalism and his break with the explicit pro-Ukrainian politics of Shelest, he still broadly "defended the use of the Ukrainian language, promoted Ukraine’s particular interests, and defended certain aspects of Ukrainian culture, such as Shevchenko’s poetry".
Downfall Following Brezhnev's death, he was replaced as General Secretary at first by Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko before the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1985, Shcherbytsky was in San Francisco, United States when he received news about Chernenko's death and that the Politburo was in the process of picking up a successor. By the time he is airborne, he received news about the election of Gorbachev as General Secretary.War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine By Mikhail Zygar. Scribner, 2024 , p. 130 Gorbachev's liberal rule contrasted heavily with Shcherbytsky's hardline principles, and remaining Brezhnev loyalists either retired from their positions or were removed by Gorbachev. Shcherbytsky's removal was originally planned by Gorbachev, owing to the former's hardline rule. However, he decided to allow him to remain in office for several more years in order to keep the Ukrainian nationalist movement subdued. Shcherbytsky was likewise a strong opponent of Gorbachev, saying in one instance: