From August 1965 to May 1966, the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic orchestrated a mass arrest of intellectuals associated with the counter-culture Sixtier movement.
[2] From 24 August to 4 September[3] 25 leading Sixtiers (seven in Kyiv[a] and 17 in Lviv,[b] according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; other sources claim further locations, for those arrested, such as Odesa for Gereta and Krasne railway station for Mykhailo Horyn.
[3] The initial arrests had the opposite of the intended effect; far from cowing the Ukrainian intelligentsia into cooperation with the government, it encouraged them to more actively protest against worsening human rights conditions.
[2] On 4 September 1965, at the film theatre Ukraine [uk] premiere of Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, leading Ukrainian intellectual Ivan Dziuba, along with student Vasyl Stus and with the support of journalist Viacheslav Chornovil, staged a protest against the arrests.
[8] Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department, wrote the foreword to the 1969 McGraw Hill Education-published translation of The Chornovil Papers.
Far-right American legislator John M. Ashbrook entered selections of the papers into the Congressional Record while criticising opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War.
[2] A second, much larger wave of purges began in 1972,[1] one which forced Shelest from power and caused him to be replaced by Chairman of the Council of Ministers Volodymyr Shcherbytsky.