Literaturna Ukraïna

Literaturna Ukraïna («Літературна Україна»; Literary Ukraine). A literary newspaper founded by a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine as the organ of the All-Ukrainian Association of Proletarian Writers. It began publication on 21 March 1927 in Kyiv under the name Literaturna hazeta (1930–4 published in Kharkiv). Between 1941 and 1945, it was published as Literatura i mystetstvo, in Luhansk, Ufa, Moscow, Kharkiv, and, in 1944, Kyiv. From 1945 to 1962 it was again called Literaturna hazeta and published in Kyiv. It was renamed Literaturna Ukraïna in 1962. It has been first a fortnightly, later a weekly, from 1957 a biweekly, and since 1985 a weekly. Literaturna Ukraïna was the first literary newspaper that unwaveringly toed the Communist Party line; it supported the so-called proletarian writers and had already declared war on Ukrainian culture in the 1920s. Literaturna Ukraïna played an important part in condemning not only the so-called bourgeois literature, of the members of MARS for example, but also that of the members of Vaplite, Prolitfront, and Nova Generatsiia, who although they called themselves ‘proletarian,’ were in fact opposed to the Party line in literature. In 1932 it became the organ of the Writers' Union of Ukraine and was the mouthpiece of Joseph Stalin’s, later Nikita Khrushchev’s, literary policies. In the first years of its existence Borys Kovalenko played a major part in establishing the newspaper’s orientation. Its editors in chief have been Ivan Le, Pavlo Usenko, Leonid Novychenko, Mykola Shamota, Anton Khyzhniak, and, after 1980, Petro Perebyinis, Ivan Kocherha, Dmytro Tsmokalenko, Pavlo Zahrebelny, and B. Rohoza. In the mid-1980s the newspaper assumed the role of defender of the Ukrainian language, and in the early 1990s it became an organ for national revival and independence.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]