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 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.
According to Kuzio, the national communist group was later led by Leonid Kravchuk, who oversaw the transition from Soviet to independent Ukraine.
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.
[11] 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.
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.
[12] 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.
[14]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".
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.