Sixties in the Context of Revolutionary Movements of World Youth

Abstract

The article raises the question of the attitude of the Ukrainian sixties to the world youth movements of the same period. Despite the fact that many Ukrainian and foreign researchers of these movements drew parallels between the sixties in the USSR and the phenomenon of "1968", there was still no opportunity to place the Ukrainian phenomenon entirely in the world context, since the basic goals of the Soviet and Western movements differed significantly (opposition totalitarianism vs rebellion against the values of the "parents"). Especially different from the background of world protests is the Ukrainian Sixties, which put liberation from national oppression at the forefront of the struggle, and was supposed to embody the hopes of continuous liberation struggles of several centuries. By all the main features, this phenomenon was self-sufficient, based on its own national discourses and not provoked by external influences. Coincidences with Western movements appear to be episodic and unsystematic. And yet the existing body of research (separately – on the Ukrainian sixties, separately – on Western youth movements and subcultures) allows us to take a closer look at the manifestations of the similarity of these phenomena. It is about the need to reconcile (or explain) the contradictory points that we observe when trying to draw parallels between the sixties and the "beatniks" (conditionally). In particular, it is important, including the Ukrainian sixties in the world protest movement, not to confuse its form and content characteristics with the Soviet, primarily Russian, phenomenon of social thaw. The purpose of this exploration is to outline the panorama of coincidences between the Ukrainian sixties and the world youth movement of the sixties in order to further express the essence of the Ukrainian phenomenon as a national, literary, and antitotalitarian phenomenon. Research methods include structural-functional, typological, biographical, etc. The use of a cultural-historical and comparativist approach allows us to expand the boundaries of the dominant literary interpretation of the sixties.
The scientific novelty of the investigation: for the first time, the Ukrainian Sixties was included in a fairly broad panorama of youth protests in Europe and the world of the same period.