Unveiled History: the kgb Special Operation to Prevent Ulas Samchuk’s Nomination for the Nobel Prize

In July 1980, the central office of the kgb of the ussr sent to Kyiv two coded telegrams, which made soviet secret services concentrate all their efforts and capabilities on fulfilling the tasks set by moscow. They stated that nationalist circles of Melnyk’s wing and the editorial board of the anti-soviet emigrant magazine “Sovremennik” had launched a campaign to nominate Ulas Samchuk, a member of the UPR Government in exile and the author of 17 anti-soviet novels, including the first work of fiction about the Holodomor, “Maria”, and the “Volyn” and “Ost” trilogies, for the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The kremlin characterized the work by Samchuk, codenamed “Lysyi” (“Bald” – Transl.), as being on par with “Solzhenitsyn’s works where it comes to the themes and epic description of events and people under russian imperialism and communism”.

At that time, the kremlin’s “information war” was already actively underway, with large-scale special kgb operations against the leaders of the Ukrainian national liberation movement abroad, aimed at achieving political goals through disinformation, subversion, compromise, influence on public opinion, and recruitment. Like, for one, the special operation “Nekro” of the “A” service of the first main directorate of the ussr kgb to kill the leader of the OUN (B) and the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Peoples, Yaroslav Stetsko. Therefore, the kgb of the ussr residents in Ottawa proposed to focus on compromising U. Samchuk on the basis of his activities during the war in Kyiv, Lviv, and Rivne.

The kgb’s task was to find evidence of “Lysyi”’s active cooperation with the German occupying authorities, as well as his publications praising the pro-Hitler regime and containing hostile attacks against England and the United States as members of the anti-Hitler Coalition”, as well as anti-Semitic content.

Read about whether the soviet secret services succeeded, and who was involved in the West, as well as how Samchuk was banned in Ukraine in the time of Independence, in the article based on the archives of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.