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Title: Ukraine under the Soviets
Author: Clarence Augustus Manning
Release date: September 15, 2026 [eBook #79579]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Bookman Associates, 1953
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UKRAINE UNDER THE SOVIETS ***
Ukraine Under the Soviets
CLARENCE A. MANNING
_Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
Columbia University_
Ukraine Under the Soviets
BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES
_New York_
_Copyright, 1953, by Clarence A. Manning_
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PRINTED BY RECORD PRESS, N. Y. C.
Foreword
It was not many months after the downfall of the tsarist regime in
Russia in 1917 that that great empire began to disintegrate. The
subject peoples began to demand their own states and showed themselves
willing to fight for them. The significance of this was lost upon most
of the leaders of the Western democratic powers and they tried to
explain it as some new device of the German General Staff, instead of
recognizing it as a part of a democratic procedure.
Three and a half years of war had then passed and the attention of the
democracies was focussed on the Western Front. They were aware of the
contribution in manpower the Russian Empire had made to the common
cause and they looked forward with apprehension to the campaign of 1918
without the aid of the imperial Russian army. They had greeted the
disappearance of the tsars in a bloodless revolution as a sign of the
triumph of democracy and they were ill prepared to face the strange
events that followed the fall of the Romanovs.
They could not believe that the government of Lenin and the Communists
who seized control of the city of Petrograd late in 1917 could long
endure. Its methods they could not understand and they sought to
interpret them in terms with which they were familiar. They did not try
to fathom the reasons why, within a few months, the Russian Empire fell
apart and they sought instinctively to bring it once more together.
They watched without understanding the downfall of the Ukrainian
National Republic, the rise of Soviet rule in Ukraine and elsewhere,
the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and
the events of the next years. The rise of Nazism seemed to them the
all-important menace and the opening of World War II convinced them of
this even more strongly. The sudden understanding between the Soviets
and the Nazis and then the equally sudden attack of the Germans upon
the USSR still did not clear up the situation. The West aided the
Soviets and, despite one difficulty after another, they willingly
conceded the Soviet demands as a contribution to a common victory
and sought in the United Nations a common meeting place for all
anti-Fascist states. With some misgivings they admitted the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist
Republic as independent states to the United Nations.
In the meanwhile, as Soviet armies pushed westward into the heart
of central Europe, they spread out what has since been termed the
iron curtain to mask from the eyes of the world the nature of their
government. Step by step, information from the Baltic Republics of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
from Rumania and Bulgaria has grown increasingly difficult to secure.
When China and North Korea passed within the same veil, the world began
to awake.
The scanty reports from Ukraine today receive more attention than did
the neglected information of thirty-five years ago. Yet that is still
not enough.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Russian Communists have used
the Ukrainian land and the Ukrainian population as the laboratory for
their future conquests. It is there, among the Ukrainian people, that
Lenin and his associates worked out their program of disintegration,
infiltration, conquest, exploitation and russification that they have
employed so successfully since the end of World War II. It has cost the
Ukrainians dearly to serve as this laboratory. By the millions they
have perished of starvation, execution, and deportation, and the other
peoples of central and eastern Europe are meeting the same fate.
The object of this work is to study that process, insofar as it can
be known. Other books have told the story of the Ukrainian struggle
for independence, the efforts of the Ukrainian people to set up their
own free and independent state. That story is not retold here, for
this book is concerned with the reverse of the picture--the efforts
of the Ukrainian people to protect themselves, their mode of life and
their culture, against the extension of the Soviet Russian influences,
against that system which, starting from a declared policy of
internationalism, has turned into a rigid, Russian imperialistic policy
which weighs heavily upon every form and department of life.
It is not only a study of the past. What happened in Kiev and Kharkiv
is happening to-day in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Bucharest and Sofia,
in Ulan Bator, Peking and Pyongyang. It is the story of a process and
it is from that point of view that we must view the developments in
Ukraine and the methods of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Once that is grasped, much that is obscure in the history of the last
years will become clear and we can see the process in its development
and in its completed form. We will know what to expect and what methods
can best be devised to check this creeping paralysis of civilization
and bring back to mankind its hope for a civilized future.
Acknowledgments
This volume is primarily based upon a series of detailed studies
of Ukraine under the Soviets, which were prepared by a group of
Ukrainian DP professors in Europe. They were selected by the Shevchenko
Scientific Society and supported during their work by the Ukrainian
National Association, which has provided the means for publication.
They were:
_Dm. Sv._--The Partisan Struggle in Ukraine
_Ivan Koval_--The Ukrainian Communists
_Ivan Koval_--The Russian Communists in Ukraine
_Kost Pankivsky_--Western Ukraine under Bolshevik Rule, 1939-1941
...--The Ukrainian Lands under Bolshevism up to World War II
_Ol. Yurchenko_--The State Legal System
_Mykola Vasiliyiv_--The Soviet Economic System
...--The Agricultural Exploitation of Ukraine
_V. Marchenko_--Social and Economic Conditions
_K. Kononenko_--The Agricultural Economy
...--Changes of Population in Ukraine
_Y. Sherekh_--Principles and Steps of the Soviet Linguistic Policy
_M. Hlobenko_--Ukrainian Literature
_Ol. Ohloblyn_--The Humanities under the Soviets
_M. Mishchenko_--Ukrainian Medicine
_Ev. Olensky_--Ukrainian Music
_N. Makhiv_--The Natural Sciences in Ukraine
_Iv. M._--Ukrainian Religious Life
Contents
PAGE
+Foreword+ 5
+Acknowledgments+ 9
+Chapter+
I. The Background of the Communist Triumph 15
II. The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic 25
III. The Period of Militant Communism 35
IV. The New Economic Policy 45
V. Ukrainization 57
VI. The Literary Renaissance 65
VII. The Scholarly Revival 73
VIII. Mykola Khvylovy 79
IX. The Five Year Plan 85
X. The Famine 93
XI. The Famine, The Soviets and The World 103
XII. The Early Trials 109
XIII. The Turning of the Cultural Tide 115
XIV. The Debacle 121
XV. The Thirties 131
XVI. Ukraine in the Late Thirties 141
XVII. The First Occupation of Western Ukraine 149
XVIII. The Western Ukrainian Reaction 159
XIX. The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania 165
XX. The German Attack on the Soviets 167
XXI. The Return of the Communists 175
XXII. Soviet Ukraine During World War II 181
XXIII. Ukraine After World War II 185
XXIV. The Soviet Cultural Policy in Ukraine After the War 195
XXV. The Soviet Religious Policy 205
+Conclusion+ 215
+Index+ 221
Ukraine Under the Soviets
CHAPTER ONE
The Background of the Communist Triumph
No idea could be more erroneous than that the triumph of Communism in
Ukraine and the destruction of the Ukrainian National Republic, which
had declared its independence on January 22, 1918, was the choice of
the Ukrainian people themselves. It did not suit their desires or their
interests, and the methods which Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin adopted to
master Ukraine were essentially the same as those by which the iron
curtain has been pushed steadily to the west. Ukraine was the testing
ground for the development of the Communist methods of conquest, just
as it has been the testing ground for all the Communist methods of
control of their helpless satellites.
From the moment when he arrived in Petrograd in April, 1917, Lenin
commenced a policy of disintegration. The collapse of tsarist Russia
had destroyed all of the organized forces of law and order throughout
the empire, and it was no easy task to restore these in an area
where there had not been allowed for centuries a popular government
resting upon the will of the people and staffed by experienced
democratic administrators. Under such conditions, Lenin’s propaganda of
self-determination for all the peoples of the empire fell upon ready
ears, as did his efforts to promote class conflict on every hand. At
the same time his promises to the Great Russians constantly called,
under one guise or another, for the restoration of Russian unity even
while his talk of internationalism and the Communist International
seemed to imply a world Communist regime in which all peoples would
be equal. It was this policy of lying and deceiving until the moment
for successful armed intervention came that gave him the dominating
position.
He enjoyed an immense advantage in the fact that the civil war between
the Whites and the Reds was largely fought on Ukrainian territory and
thus compelled the young Ukrainian government to fight upon two fronts
throughout the entire period, while for some time the new republic was
forced also to oppose the Poles in the west. Lying as Ukraine did on
the shore of the Black Sea, the armed forces of General Denikin, who
was heading the effort to create an anti-Communist monolithic Russian
government, could only reach Moscow by crossing Ukrainian territory. It
was only across Ukrainian territory that the supplies sent to him by
the Western nations after the ending of World War I could be delivered
and it was his policy to allow no manifestation of Ukrainianism in any
form, for he intended to continue that denial of Ukrainian existence
that had characterized the old tsarist regime.
His efforts in this direction were aided by the unfortunate failure
of the Western democratic powers which had triumphed in the war to
understand either the nature of Bolshevism or the desires of the
various national movements. At the same time his success was rendered
impossible by the refusal of the West to back him in his efforts
to restore all or most of the social and political order which had
vanished with the abdication of the Tsar.
Thus with the White Russians and the Ukrainians locked in a desperate
struggle, the way was open for Lenin to move with relative freedom on
his path of disintegration and of conquest. He did not fail to take
advantage of every opportunity, and the advances and retreats during
the period from 1917 to 1920 and even later were but a preliminary for
the later tactics of Communism.
On the other hand it cannot be denied that there existed in Ukraine
certain factors which also worked to his advantage. The political and
social system prevailing up to 1917 had not given any training in
self-government to the Ukrainian people and in the midst of war and
revolution they had to start on the most elementary tasks of popular
education, while at the same time they corrected fundamental abuses
in the economic situation and created and administered a government.
Let us, therefore, look briefly at the outstanding elements of the
situation as they were at the beginning of the revolution.
From the time of the organization and Christianization of the Kievan
state at the end of the tenth century to the eighteenth century,
Ukraine, whether independent, or subject to Poland-Lithuania, or to the
Russian Tsars, had remained as a political unit, even though divided.
However, in 1775 Catherine II destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, the
centre of the Ukrainian Kozaks, and in 1783 she abolished all Ukrainian
political institutions and privileges. From that time the area was
divided into _gubernias_ as the rest of the Russian Empire and the full
Russian methods of administration were introduced.
From that moment, too, the Russian government spared no efforts to
destroy every vestige of Ukrainian national and cultural consciousness.
The Ukrainian language was treated as a peasant dialect of Russian; the
name Ukraine was forbidden and even the substitute Little Russia was
treated as a generic term for the area north of the Black Sea, but it
did not figure on the political map of the Russian Empire as a distinct
entity. The Ukrainian revival in the nineteenth century beginning with
the publication of Kotlyarevsky’s parody of the _Aeneid_ in 1798 was
confined to the cultural sphere and could offer little or nothing in
the way of administrative experience to the Ukrainian people. Those
Ukrainians who entered the Russian service were usually sent to distant
areas, while the administrative personnel in Ukraine was chiefly
Russian in origin and feeling.
The great estates were largely owned by Russians or by Poles and even
many Ukrainian landowners who had succeeded in retaining their holdings
were so thoroughly Russianized that they felt little sense of kinship
with the peasants on their estates. Ukrainian life was lived chiefly
in the villages. The Ukrainian language was not taught in the schools
or used in the courts, for all education and administration were in
the Russian language. Still the peasants continued their own manner of
living with their own traditions and their own tastes and desires.
The cities of Kiev, Kharkiv and Odesa had a large Russian population.
The administrative, commercial and financial institutions were largely
in Russian hands and the directors and leaders of these, whatever
their political disagreements, were united in opposing the efforts
of the Ukrainians to secure even that minimum of rights that they
were guaranteed by Russian imperial law. The Russian element in
Ukraine, radical or conservative, acted as a unit during the fateful
years 1917-1920. On the other hand, the miners and workers in the
Donets basin and Kryvy Rih, the centre of the Ukrainian coal and iron
industry, were in very large part likewise Russian and the ideology
of St. Petersburg, especially in its radical aspects, was dominant
throughout this part of the Ukrainian territory. Many of the most
bitter opponents of Ukrainian rights were, in fact, Russian radical
miners and workers from this area.
The Jewish population of Ukraine, a large minority, was little
interested in the Ukrainian problem. Insofar as they were not actively
sharing in the movement for special Jewish institutions, the majority,
with certain conspicuous exceptions, were strong supporters of Russian
unity, either conservative or radical or, like Leon Trotsky, they were
at the service of any government which was opposed to the Ukrainian
demands.
Thus in 1917 the strength of the Ukrainian movement was to be found in
the villages. Here Ukrainian life was lived, Ukrainian thoughts and
ambitions were sponsored and it was here that the vision of an old and
a future independent Ukraine found its chief support. Even so, that
population was itself divided, not according to the class principle but
on an ideological pattern which included members of all classes and
walks of life.
When the revolution broke out in 1917 or, to be more precise, when the
tsarist regime collapsed, there were four main divisions in Ukrainian
society and they were made clear within a very few months.
The first of these were the nationalists and the advocates of the
restoration of order in the country. At the very beginning of the
century Mykola Mikhnovsky had issued a call for an independent
state and for a while he had exerted a strong influence upon such
future Ukrainian leaders as Symon Petlyura, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and
Volodymyr Chekhovsky, but his ideas of placing national liberation in
the forefront seemed too extreme for his adherents and by 1917 many of
these had in a sense fallen away from his advanced position.
On the other hand, two and a half years of war had shown to many of
the Ukrainian officers and men in the Russian army the need of a
disciplined force to uphold the national cause. Some of the Ukrainian
regiments had early joined the forces of the Revolution, had adopted
the Ukrainian flag and introduced Ukrainian as the language of command.
Now at the Military Congresses which were held in Kiev in 1917, they
took a strong stand in their demands that the Ukrainian National
Rada adopt a firm policy toward St. Petersburg and the Provisional
Government and they were willing to go much further than the Rada in
the setting up of independent governmental machinery.
Opposed to this group were the great mass of the peasants. They were
little aware of the involved task of governing or even maintaining
order. It would be hardly fair to say that they were anarchistic in
temperament. They had rather maintained almost unconsciously their
Ukrainian character. Few of them had been further from their villages
than the nearest administrative centre and they could not see the
necessity of substituting another regime on a broad scale for the
fallen tsarist system. For decades they had attributed all their
hardships and difficulties to the tsar, the bureaucrats and the police,
and with all three vanished, they had no desire to replace them. It
seemed to them that the land was intended by God for their use, and
once the landlords were dispossessed, they were ready to forget the
past and live in peace and quiet with their neighbors. Two and a half
years of war had taught them the folly of organized destruction and
they willingly accepted the position that a new world had come into
being in which there was no need for complicated forms of government,
for the collection of taxes and the enforced maintenance of order.
They believed that the Revolution had almost automatically given them
all that they desired--the right to use their own language, to have
that language placed on a par with Russian and the right to secure
their own land and to live peacefully upon it.
Between these two groups stood the bulk of the Ukrainian intellectuals
grouped in the Social Revolutionist and Social Democratic Parties, each
of which was modelled on its Russian equivalent. Yet we must not delude
ourselves into thinking that these were political parties in any sense
known to the Western world and America, where there has been a long
record of political activity. They were before the Revolution rather
conspiratorial and debating groups, busied with theorizing about all
manner of political questions and (except where they had an opportunity
to take part in the work of the zemstvos) without practical experience.
A few of their members had served in the First Duma in 1906 but this
had been dissolved within a couple of months by Tsar Nicholas II and
each succeeding duma had become less representative. Thus the number of
those intellectuals who had had practical political experience even in
the conduct of elections was very small, while the debaters, students,
theoreticians, etc. in these parties cared more for the proper solution
of ideas than for their application to practical life.
Neither of these groups existed as distinct Ukrainian parties. They
tended largely to follow the leadership of the similar Russian
groups; they had learned to employ the same methods, listened to the
same leaders, and their demands as Ukrainians were loosely connected
with their social and political theories. They were conscious, but
only potentially active, nationalists and at the moment when it was
necessary to make rapid decisions, they hesitated and splintered on the
importance which they assigned to national and to economic and social
measures.
The Social Revolutionists, largely intellectuals from the villages,
were at first the more important. They were populists and non-Marxian
socialists who voiced the desires of the peasants for the ownership
of their land. They called for the confiscation of the large estates,
for they did not believe that any one should have larger holdings
than he and his family could work. Since the land in Ukraine was held
individually and the village community was only a figment of Russian
law, they differed sharply from the Russian Social Revolutionists who
stressed the existence of the community with an emphasis on the almost
annual redistribution of land. Finally, they set themselves up as a
Ukrainian party but still grouped around the journal _Narodnya Volya_
(The People’s Will), the traditional name for a Social Revolutionist
paper.
By the autumn of 1917 this party had definitely split. The left, which
stressed the economic and social aspects of the party, established
another journal _Borotba_ (The Struggle). This was soon followed by
a formal schism and the creation of a new Social Revolutionist Party
(Borotbisty) with the name taken from their paper. It was only natural
that the relations between this group and the Bolshevik Great Russians
tended to become closer as radical ideas gained strength in the country.
The numerically smaller Social Democratic Party was purely Marxian and
it spoke primarily for the Ukrainian factory workers. Like the Russian
Party, it was divided between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, with
the latter drifting steadily toward the Social Revolutionists and even
some of the bourgeois groups. On the other hand, the efforts of the
Ukrainian Bolsheviks to establish their own party met with continual
opposition. The Marxian theories of the withering away of the state
had long been used by Lenin and some of the German Social Democratic
leaders as weapons against the Poles in both the Russian Empire and
Germany, and the same ban was now applied to the Ukrainian Bolsheviks.
If they wished approval by the central authorities, they were told
to become merely a Ukrainian section of the Russian Party. If they
persevered in their efforts, they were read out of the party which in
Ukraine was dominated by the Russian factory workers and the Russian
miners from the Donets basin and Kryvy Rih.
The position of the Ukrainian Social Democrats and especially the
Bolsheviks was thus much more difficult than that of the less organized
and more spontaneous Social Revolutionists. Strict party discipline
hampered them at every turn and ardent Ukrainians as Mykola Skrypnyk, a
personal and trusted friend of the Russian Bolshevik leaders, refused
to make any schism in the party, even though he and his Ukrainian
friends quite regularly appealed for recognition as a separate party,
especially after the Bolsheviks recognized the existence of an
independent Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
He, as an old Bolshevik, however, refused to cooperate with those
Ukrainian Bolsheviks who dared to risk a fight with the central
committee in Moscow and who finally tried to set up a Ukrainian
Communist Party.
The greatest weakness of both of these intellectual groups was their
lack of appreciation of the importance of foreign policies. It was
with great hesitation that their representatives in the Central Rada
in the summer of 1917 approached the Russian Provisional Government to
include a Ukrainian representative in all Russian diplomatic missions.
They had had few or no representatives in the pre-revolutionary
Russian diplomatic service; relatively few of them had been abroad,
even to Western Ukraine under the Austro-Hungarian Empire; they had no
distinguished Ukrainian emigrants abroad who could speak to the world
with the great authority of Ignace Jan Paderewski, Thomas G. Masaryk
or Michael I. Pupin and during the crucial early months they largely
neglected any consideration of foreign policy.
They wasted precious time in futile negotiations with the Russian
Provisional Government over questions of federalism and they turned
rather slowly toward the idea of independence. At each move of the
more nationally conscious toward this goal, a certain portion of the
more leftist members drew away toward the appropriate Russian camp in
the name of internationalism and thus became the unconscious tools by
which both the Provisional Government and later the Bolsheviks hoped to
retain their control of the wealth of Ukraine.
It was this vagueness on the part of many of the intellectuals which
kept them from being true intermediaries between the nationalist
and military groups and the great mass of the peasants. It weakened
the energy and zeal of some of the Ukrainian regiments which had
declared for the Ukrainian cause immediately after the outbreak of the
revolution and facilitated the development of pacifist opinion in the
rank and file. So when, at the end of 1917, actual fighting started
between the Russian Communists and the Ukrainian Central Rada, the
armed forces of the new state were not as well prepared as they had
been some months previously, and it was necessary to start again under
almost new and more unfavorable conditions.
The pressure of events and the necessity for defense against the
Red and the White invaders brought together the more consciously
nationalist elements, first to declare the independence of Ukraine and
then to organize, but the economic and social divergences were never
solved. The dissolution of the Central Rada by the Germans and their
support of a conservative government only embittered the political
feuds and encouraged the rise of peasant leaders who were content to
operate in their own areas and switched sides as questions of the
moment moved them. All this weakened the sounder forces of the state
and created the bewildering succession of such forms of government as
the Rada, the Hetmanate of Skoropadsky and the Directory under Petlyura
and gave the struggle at times a bizarre appearance as the different
forces raised by the different political groups now combined against
one or other of the invaders, only to separate when the other became
the more pressing danger.
Under such conditions the central authority was finally over-whelmed
and those people who were most strongly committed to a free and
independent Ukrainian state withdrew from the country. The Soviet
regime was able to take control. This did not, however, end the
difficulties for there soon came a revelation that all was not yet well
and harmonized. The peasants continued to be restless. The guerilla
leaders did not at once cease their activity. Above all, the country
was ruined but the relations between the Russians and the Ukrainians
were not yet solved.
CHAPTER TWO
The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic
As the power of the Provisional Government in Petrograd declined
and more and more responsibility was assumed by the Central Rada in
Kiev, relations between Petrograd and Kiev grew rapidly worse and the
conception of Ukrainian independence gained strength in all circles,
except among the Russian population of Ukraine. The seizure of power in
Petrograd by Lenin could not fail to hasten the progress of separation.
During the summer and autumn of 1917 Lenin had advocated the widest
application of the principle of self-determination and encouraged
the non-Russian peoples to demand separation from the Provisional
Government. He and his friends had hardly come into power, when he
showed at once the cynicism and hypocrisy of his entire policy. The
Central Rada in Kiev and the vast majority of the soviets in Ukraine
repudiated the demand for the confiscation of all property, the
expropriation of the land and the turning over of the control of
all industry to the workers, although in the Third Universal it did
provide for “state control over production in the interests of Ukraine
and Russia” and declared that all land not worked directly by the
owners was to become the property of the workers. For all intents and
purposes, the Third Universal which was issued on November 20, 1917,
did its best to separate Ukrainian affairs from Bolshevik control
without as yet resorting to a declaration of formal independence.
This produced a very unsatisfactory situation, for the Bolsheviks
attacked the efforts of the Secretary of the Rada for Military Affairs
to effect an understanding with the old Russian Army Headquarters
at Mohylev and with the other national groups which were rapidly
making common cause with the Central Rada in their opposition to the
extreme measures of the Petrograd Soviet. The Council of Commissars in
Petrograd claimed to speak for the whole of the former Russia in its
efforts to make peace with the Germans. When the Rada denied this and
approached the other non-Russian peoples, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd
formally accused the Rada of withdrawing Ukrainian troops from the
front, of disarming Bolshevik units in Ukraine and of allowing the Don
Cossack forces to retire to their homeland across Ukrainian territory.
On December 17, it hypocritically recognized the right of Ukraine to
independence but threatened war on the Rada if it did not meet the
conditions of the Council of People’s Commissars.
At the same time the Bolsheviks in the Kiev Soviet arranged an
All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in the hope of putting pressure on
the Rada. The attempt missed fire for the Congress proved to be under
the influence of the anti-Bolshevik parties and adopted resolutions
declaring that the Ukrainians had not thrown off the power of the Tsar
to accept the domination of the Commissars. The Bolshevik spokesman
Zatonsky was unable to make himself heard above the opposition and only
80 members supported the Soviet demands.
As a result of this failure Vasili Shakhray and Zatonsky left Kiev for
Kharkiv where they joined a Congress of Soviets largely from the Donets
basin and Kryvy Rih. There, on December 20, they established a new
Ukrainian Rada under Russian Communist control and set up a Ukrainian
Soviet Republic. They were joined by a group of Ukrainian Bolsheviks
including Neronovych and George Kotsyubynsky, the son of the well-known
Ukrainian author who had been a friend of Gorky.
The so-called Ukrainian army loyal to this new regime was composed
almost exclusively of Russian troops and was under the open command
of a Russian officer, Michael A. Muravyev. This force occupied Kiev
on February 7, 1918 and held the city for about three weeks. Its
actions showed clearly the nature of the government. Under the pretext
of liberating the Ukrainians from the control of the Ukrainian
bourgeoisie and the Rada, it abolished all Ukrainian newspapers and
its disorderly elements not only executed members of the Ukrainian and
Russian bourgeoisie but also Ukrainian Communists and radicals who used
the Ukrainian language in their hearing.
In the meantime the Bolsheviks had opened negotiations with the Germans
in Brest-Litovsk where Trotsky claimed to speak for the entire former
Russian Empire. To circumvent this, the Rada formally declared the full
independence of Ukraine and sent delegates to the peace conference.
As a balance to this, Trotsky introduced into the conference the
representatives of this new Ukrainian Soviet Republic who claimed to
be the spokesmen for the Ukrainian peasants and proletariat. Their
arguments did not convince the Germans and Austrians, who saw greater
possibilities of profit by recognizing the Ukrainian National Republic,
so as to secure without fighting a large part of the Ukrainian grain
supplies. The Ukrainian National Republic signed this agreement with
misgivings, for, in fact, it threw the Rada into the power of the
Germans and ended all chance of assistance from the Allied democratic
powers which had previously regarded Lenin as the tool of the German
General Staff. Now, with the conclusion of this peace, they extended
their ill-will to the Ukrainian Central Rada.
The immediate result was German assistance to the Rada and the Soviet
forces were quickly forced out of Ukraine and back into Great Russian
territory. The leaders of the Ukrainian Soviet government were members
of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and could not raise the
question as to whether or not their new state was actually independent,
and whether it could be, if it did not have its own Communist
Party associated on a par with the Russian Party in the Communist
International.
This brief Communist interlude in Ukraine should have been most
instructive to both the Allied powers and the Germans, but neither drew
the true lessons from it. The Allies, who were still opposed to the
principles of Bolshevism and were annoyed by the speeches of Zinovyev
and Chicherin, became more friendly disposed to the Russian Whites
and gave up their efforts to win through invoking the democratic
principles of self-determination the support of any of the non-Russian
peoples. The Germans, on the other hand, after aiding the Rada to
return, dispersed it on the ground that it was too radical, but when
a more conservative regime was set up under Hetman Skoropadsky, they
did not give this honest support. They sought only for Ukrainian
supplies and by their actions they weakened the power of the Hetman and
strengthened discontent against his regime without allowing him to do
anything that would weaken the power of the Communists.
The situation became almost ridiculously complicated. Germany, anxious
to secure troops for the Western Front, was, by the spring of 1918, at
peace with both the Commissars of Moscow and the government of Ukraine.
It was therefore opposed to both the White Russians and the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic. Even the Czechoslovaks on their way to Vladivostok,
thanks to the negotiations between President Masaryk and Muravyev, were
on friendly terms with the Ukrainian Communists and had difficulties
with the Ukrainian government and the Germans. As soon as they crossed
into the Russian Soviet Republic, they had difficulties with the
Russian Communists and the Germans and found their support among a part
of the White Russians. It was the same situation as in the far north
where the Germans backed the White Finnish forces under Mannerheim
against the red Finns who were the favored party of their friend and
associate, Moscow. Yet all the time there was no Ukrainian Communist
Party, for the Ukrainian Communists owed their prime allegiance to the
Russian Communist Party which was, in theory at least, on the opposite
side in the general disturbed situation.
To the Communists, as Skrypnyk, Shakhray and George Pyatakov who
had played an important role in the Communist occupation of Kiev,
this seemed a serious gap and at a meeting in Tahanrih in April they
triumphed over the Communists from Katerynoslav who had insisted upon
remaining merely a part of the Russian Communist Party. Their victory
was of short duration, for when there came an organization meeting in
Moscow on July 5, the Russian authorities definitely made it clear
that they would not tolerate the existence of a Ukrainian Communist
Party. Bela Kun warned that in the international civil war that was
to be begun, great efforts were to be made not to allow it to assume
anything of a national character, but to keep it restricted and fought
on class lines. They were also informed that they could in this new
struggle have no relations with Mensheviks or any Ukrainian Social
Revolutionists or Social Democrats. A few months later Stalin was
elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian
party as a symbol of the dependence in which the party was to be kept.
The first people to appreciate fully the dilemma in which the Ukrainian
Communists found themselves were the Ukrainian Communist leaders who
had established, with Russian help, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. They
were quickly taught that as long as the control of their Party was not
in their own hands, they were completely helpless and at the mercy of
the Russians.
Shakhray, who had endeavored to argue at Kiev in December, 1917 that
the Ukrainian Communists were to be counted as Ukrainians, very soon in
Russia became so disgusted that he resigned from the Russian Communist
Party and retired to Saratov to establish a Ukrainian Communist Party
of Bolsheviks. He criticized the extreme policy of centralization
carried on by the Russian Communists.
Along with S. Mazlakh, he published a book entitled _The Wave--What is
being done in Ukraine and with Ukraine_. This book, which was often
quoted later by Skrypnyk and his associates, was the theoretical basis
for Ukrainian Communism. Shakhray tried to foster discontent against
the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky by stressing his relations with both
the German forces in Ukraine and the White Russian refugees who had
taken shelter in that country. He declared that Ukrainian independence
could only be consistently won by the Ukrainian Communists, for they,
as the Ukrainian proletariat, were the only people who could advocate
and carry through a real revolution in view of the treachery of the
bourgeoisie. On the other hand, he attributed the Communist failure in
Ukraine to the fact that the Party was entirely under Russian control
and looked at the cause of the Communists through the eyes of the
Russian colonists in Ukraine who were, in accordance with the Russian
imperialistic tradition, working not for Ukraine but for Moscow.
He soon left Saratov for Kuban and here he was captured and killed by
the Denikin forces. Mazlakh, who had remained a member of the Russian
Communist Party, was later shot by them for nationalism. The third
Commissar for War, Neronovych, became disillusioned and on the entrance
of German troops into Ukraine he gave up politics but he fell into the
hands of the Ukrainian National Army and was shot. Thus, the first
attempts of the Russian Communist Party to seize Ukraine and expel the
Ukrainian National government ended disastrously and relatively few of
the early leaders survived. Most of them paid the penalty for their
actions to one of the contending forces, with the Bolsheviks executing
then or later the larger number.
During the summer of 1918 while Hetman Skoropadsky remained in power,
the chief work which the Communists could hope to do in Ukraine was
through their mission in Kiev under the leadership of D. Z. Manuilsky.
This was ostensibly engaged in negotiations for a definite peace treaty
between the Ukrainian National Republic and the Russian Socialist
Federated Soviet Republic. In reality, Manuilsky was almost openly
intriguing with the tacit consent of the Germans who had no desire to
see their own position in Moscow jeopardized, as their armies were
being driven back on the Western Front. Manuilsky was also able to
notice the constant splitting of the leftist Ukrainian parties, which,
in their hostility to the policies of the Hetman, tended to move nearer
to the Communist position.
The disintegration in both the Social Revolutionist and the Social
Democrat ranks became steadily more marked during the summer of 1918.
When the German armies collapsed and the Hetman could no longer retain
his post, a Directory of five men, including Petlyura and Vynnychenko,
set themselves up at the news of the abdication of the German Emperor
and they soon recovered Kiev. At the same time the left wing of the
Social Revolutionists (Borotbisty) refused to recognize the new
Directory and drifted rapidly toward the Bolshevik position.
The Kremlin, sensing the great change in the Ukrainian situation, at
once refurbished the idea of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Its real head
was now Christian Rakovsky, a Rumanian with Bulgarian citizenship who
had never been in Ukraine, but its nominal leaders were Pyatakov and
George Kotsyubynsky. These moved from Kursk along the railroad lines
into Ukraine at the end of December but Chicherin, in his telegrams to
the Directory, categorically denied that the Russians were supporting
this movement in any way. He laid all the responsibility upon the
Ukrainian Communists. The ruse did not work and finally on January 16,
1919, the Directory, in which Vynnychenko’s star was sinking, declared
war.
This was opposed by the left wing of the Social Democrats who were
very influential in the Directory. On January 10-12, the two wings
definitely parted and the left adopted the name of the Ukrainian
Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Independent) and insisted upon the
establishment of a non-Communist Soviet Republic. The right wing, in
view of the weakness of the Ukrainian proletariat, advocated instead
a Congress of Workers which would include both peasants and the city
proletariat. When war actually started, the left wing split again
between those who were willing to stand for an independent Ukraine and
those who refused to act against Russia under any circumstances. The
latter took the name of USDRP (Independent Lefts).
It was not long before the Borotbisty and the USDRP (Independent Lefts)
began negotiations for merging. Both were convinced of the superiority
of the Soviet form of democratic government and both were convinced
that any Communist government would inevitably recognize the essential
rights of the Ukrainian people. In this respect they were far more
naive than were the leaders of the first Ukrainian Communist regime who
had already become completely disillusioned at the contrast between the
theories and the practice of Lenin and his associates. They refused to
cooperate with Petlyura and the Directory and, in effect, they withdrew
from its support a considerable section of the Ukrainian intellectuals
at a crucial moment.
On the other hand, with their own armies they fought against the White
Russians of Denikin, because they saw in these merely an attempt
to restore the old order. Yet they declined to be included in the
organized army of the Directory and by their independent actions they
made more difficult the burden of the army commanders. They encouraged
the formation in the country of independent military bands which added
to the growing chaos. To emphasize their position they again changed
their name to the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) and constantly
sought to ingratiate themselves with the Ukrainian branch of the
Russian Communist Party which had again succeeded in reoccupying Kiev
and in forcing the Directory to flee.
On the other hand, the USDRP (Independents), almost as true admirers of
the Soviet system but far more critical of the Russian influence, did
merge their forces for the fighting against Denikin with the forces of
the Directory. In the summer of 1919, this group, under the influence
of the Khmelevtsevs of Kobilyaky in Poltavshchyna, commenced again to
review their position. After the death of their leaders in a crossing
of the Dnieper and after the defeat of Denikin, they decided to adopt
the appellation of Communists and to rename themselves the Ukrainian
Communist Party without any additional description title. Thus, they
took the name of Ukapisty and as such they dragged on an independent
existence for some years, confidently expecting that they would
ultimately receive national and international recognition from the
Comintern, the Communist International.
This endless splitting and regrouping of the various parties proved
a headache to the Directory which was trying to organize the country
for defense against both of the Russian invaders. The individual
armed forces, acting independently, aided in wrecking the economy and
this inspired peasant leaders of various kinds to seek the control of
their own native regions. Some of these men proved themselves able,
if short-sighted, leaders. Some, as Nestor Makhno, were unadulterated
anarchists who saw no need of any central regime. Others were mere
adventurers thrown into prominence by the course of events and willing
to shift their principles for the sake of a momentary personal
advantage. Others were patriots with no broader vision than their home
districts.
As a result, throughout 1919 there were some 328 revolts against the
extending power of the Russian Communist forces which were fanning out
over Ukraine, slaughtering and robbing as they went but still unable to
secure a definite control of the villages.
As opposed to this welter of conflicting ideals, the policy of the
Russian dominated Ukrainian branch of the Russian Communist Party was
simplicity and clarity itself. This supported the paper independence
of the Ukrainian Soviet regime and openly avowed its intention of
subjugating the country and of exploiting it for the benefit of
Moscow. Their purposes were even openly avowed at the Moscow Soviet
of Workers’ Deputies on March 22, 1919, when Shlikhter, a Ukrainian
German and one of the commissars appointed by Moscow to collect grain,
declared: “You all remember how Ukraine began to become Soviet; with
every day of the advance of the Red Army, we and you felt more easy;
the rich grain-producing Ukraine is ours. We have four central military
divisions collecting and on them we rest all our hopes. We have a mass
of workmen sent in (from Moscow to Ukraine), who know how to search
all the Ukrainian villages. We always remember that the eyes of the
proletariat of Russia are turned toward Ukraine.”
These remarks represented the cynical attitude of Lenin and the
Communists. They ignored the statements as to a Ukrainian Soviet
Republic that were being made by Lenin and others to woo the various
leftist Ukrainian parties. They were safe speeches made to reassure the
Great Russians that the Bolsheviks still had a monolithic outlook, even
though they were prepared to go to almost any lengths to create a paper
regime which would insure and facilitate the plundering of the rich
grain-producing Ukraine. They told, more or less, the truth, that was
not recognized by the more idealistic theoreticians, that the Ukrainian
Communists were, in fact, the dupes and victims of the Moscow regime
which cared nothing for the Ukrainian people, or even the Ukrainian
proletariat.
By the end of 1919 the Ukrainian Soviet regime was so satisfied with
the success of its raiding and collecting parties that it felt able
to proclaim an amnesty and to disarm the population completely. To
accomplish the latter purpose, new Russian forces were sent into
the country, the villages were thoroughly searched and disarmed.
The peasants were tiring of the apparently endless exactions of the
independent commanders and they turned against many of the patriotic
partisan bands and declined to give them further support. This broke
the movement and even the alliance of Petlyura with the Poles and the
short occupation of Kiev by the combined armies in the spring of 1920
did not suffice to restore the old enthusiasm for the hard-pressed
Directory.
By the end of 1920, when the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet delegations
met the Poles in Riga in October, 1920, the fighting was nearly over.
The Poles signed a treaty of peace without consulting their Ukrainian
allies of the Ukrainian National Republic. There was nothing for
the forces of the Directory to do but to retire abroad and continue
their unsuccessful efforts to secure Western assistance. This was not
forthcoming. The French were interested in aggrandizing Poland as
a bulwark against Germany; the other allies were openly supporting
Denikin through a misinterpreted friendship with the Russian people and
there did not seem to be left even a spark of the principles enunicated
but a short time before in Wilson’s attitude toward self-determination
and the rights of people to govern themselves. The struggle was ended
and the Ukrainians were left at the mercy of their Russian overlords,
now back in a new guise.
CHAPTER THREE
The Period of Militant Communism
Any interpretation of the so-called period of Militant Communism which
extended from the Soviet seizure of power to the spring of 1921 must
rest upon the individual estimation of the sincerity and idealism of
Lenin and his associates. If we assume that they had a real belief in
the principles of Marxism as it developed into Communism, the period
must seem one of disillusionment on the world, national and regional
scale. If, on the other hand, the stress is to be laid upon their
seizure and maintenance of power, the period becomes a further step in
the total disintegration of society in the former Russian Empire and
in the destruction of all those institutions and conceptions handed
down from the past or developed by the democratic Ukrainian National
Republic.
On the world scale it became almost immediately obvious that the world
revolution as projected and preached by Lenin and Trotsky in 1918
was not going to occur in the immediate future. The failure of the
Communists to secure control of Germany and the defeat of Bela Kun in
Hungary reduced the Communist International from an association of
revolutionary representatives of Communist nations and governments to
a gathering of exiled and embittered conspirators totally dependent
upon the will of the Russian Communists in the Kremlin. This, even had
Lenin been sincere, would have inevitably inspired him with the idea of
collecting the territory of the Russian Empire for his own advantage.
In the first heat of enthusiasm the Petrograd Soviet had confiscated
all property, nationalized land and industry and embarked on a series
of far-reaching changes. They thought of the land question in terms
of the use of land by the village community and of industry and
factories by the workers and they did their best to inflame the workers
and peasants against the great landlords and the factory owners and
administrators. In this they succeeded admirably and the already low
standard of living in the Russian Empire began to drop lower and lower.
Under such conditions it became more and more necessary for the Soviet
leaders in Moscow to make renewed efforts to master Ukraine and to
inject some apparent vitality into their puppet, the Ukrainian Soviet
Republic. In this they were finally successful, but even though the
Communists came back into Ukraine, they did not venture to destroy the
fiction of Ukrainian independence, although they had no intention of
allowing it to develop.
From the moment of its formation and adoption of a Communist
Constitution on March 14, 1919, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic declared
itself an independent and sovereign state. It was recognized with
all due pomp and formality by Lenin, who again stressed it in his
_Letters to the Workmen and Peasants of Ukraine_ in his efforts to
strengthen the opposition to Denikin. The Ukrainian Soviet Government
was represented at the Conference in Riga that ended the Soviet-Polish
War in the fall of 1920. The travesty was continued when, in December
of the same year, Lenin concluded with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic a formal treaty of alliance in which Ukraine, for purposes of
defense, graciously handed over to Moscow the commissariats of war,
navy, foreign trade, railroads, finances, labor, posts and telegraphs
and the Supreme Council of National Economy. It still retained the
right to have its own diplomatic representatives in Poland, Germany
and Austria, countries which had recognized the Ukrainian National
Republic, and there were still preserved Ukrainian military schools to
train officers for the Ukrainian army in both Kharkiv, the capital of
Soviet Ukraine, and Kiev.
Still all this was merely a sham arrangement, for the bulk of the
forces that fought against the Ukrainian National Republic were Russian
and they operated with no regard for the feelings even of the Ukrainian
Communists. They moved at will over Ukrainian territory, collected
supplies at will and shipped them to Russia and they behaved in every
way as if they were in their own territory.
The key to this enigma is to be found in the fact that the Ukrainian
Communist Party was not regarded as an independent Communist Party
with a seat in the Comintern, but was merely a branch of the Russian
Communist Party. Its officers were therefore appointed at will and
changed at the pleasure of the Russian Party. Its discipline and
actions were controlled by Moscow and any independent Ukrainian
development could be countermanded by a mere word from the centre. By
this extremely simple device Lenin could maintain his hold over the
Ukrainian Communists, even in the unlikely case that the Comintern was
revitalized by the Communist seizure of power in another of the large
states.
The policy did not fail to arouse criticism, even during the wars, by
some of the Ukrainian members of the Party. In 1920, a “fraction of
the federalists” was formed under Yu. Lapchynsky with the aid of S.
Kirychenko, P. Slynko and E. Kasyanenko. It was naturally dissolved as
soon as its importance was recognized, and its leaders were expelled
from the Party. They accordingly joined the Ukapisty and only returned
when that voluntarily liquidated itself some years later.
There were thus at the moment of the ending of the Civil Wars three
Communist Parties in Ukraine, the official KP/b/U, the branch of the
Russian Party, the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) and the
Ukapisty, i.e. the Ukrainian Communist Party.
The Borotbisty were the first to go. They had been formed out
of the Left Social Revolutionists and were less sure of their
Marxian knowledge but they contained many of the leftist Ukrainian
intellectuals who valued the development of Ukrainian culture. The
group had been praised by Lenin for its great part in the defeat of
Denikin. In the spring of 1920, the proposal was made that they fully
join the Ukrainian Branch of the Russian Communist Party. Shumsky
and Blakytny led the affirmative. The spokesmen for the opposition
were Poloz and Panas Lyubchenko, who was later to be the head of the
UkSSR and to commit suicide in 1937. The affirmative triumphed, and
the Borotbisty were dissolved as a separate group. They were given
the nominal right of choosing two members for the Executive Committee
of the KP/b/U but this was, of course, an empty phrase, since that
Executive Committee was itself but an agent and tool of the Executive
Committee in Moscow.
The Ukapisty offered a more serious threat, for they were trained in
Marxian dialectics and they knew the weak points in the program of
the Moscow centre. They accepted the Marxian analysis of capitalist
society and the Leninist theory of imperialism, the dictatorship
of the proletariat and the Soviet regime. As regards the question
of nationality, they shared the Marxist-Leninist conception but in
contrast to the Russian Communist Party they adapted this to suit a
non-ruling and enslaved nation. The Ukapisty theoretically based the
difference between its attitude and that of the Russian Communist Party
on the fact that the latter represented the proletariat of a dominant
nation, while they stood for the proletariat of an enslaved nation.
Thus the one considered the question of nationality as a question of
tactics connected with the spreading of the proletarian revolution; for
the other it was a question of program connected with the liberation of
the people and itself not only from capitalistic but also from national
enslavement. They condemned the Russian Bolshevik practices in Ukraine
and, in contrast to the Bolshevik idea of spreading the revolution by
armed force (an idea which collapsed with the defeat of the Red Army
at Warsaw in 1920 and which was then condemned by Lenin himself), they
believed in the “internal forces”, i.e. that the revolution would only
be organic and lasting if it was carried out by the internal forces of
each nation and not if it was introduced by bayonets from abroad. They
stood therefore for an independent Ukrainian Soviet state, with its
own red army, its own independent economy, and its entrance into the
Comintern on an equal footing with all other Communist parties.
The Ukapisty were allowed to exist until 1925 and it was not until the
Comintern was willing to declare that it was Muscovite to the core and
that all foreign Communist parties were of right subordinate, that the
Ukapist appeal for inclusion was definitely rejected and that the group
was offered the choice of suppression or of self-liquidation. They
accordingly accepted the voluntary decision and signed thus their own
death warrants as had the Borotbisty by their early submission.
All three parties had the same general attitude toward all
non-Communists and bourgeois groups. They were in general agreement
that these had to be destroyed and driven from political and
social importance. Thus, all adopted a hostile attitude toward the
nationalists who had supported Petlyura and the Ukrainian National
Republic. They attacked the remains of the Social Revolutionists, the
Social Democrats, and all the non-Marxian or Marxian groups that did
not accept a strict Communism. They dissolved the organizations and
seized their property, while they imprisoned many of the older leaders
and tried to humiliate them in the eyes of the Ukrainian public.
Thus in 1921, they staged in Kharkiv a public trial of the members of
the Executive Committee of the Social Revolutionists. The list included
V. Holubovych, the Prime Minister at the time of Brest-Litovsk, N.
Petrenko, P. Hubenko (Ostap Vyshnya), Lyzanivsky and many others. They
were charged with hostility to the “government of workers and peasants”
but apparently the regime was not too sure of its ground and merely
sentenced them to relatively short terms in prison.
It was not only the politicians who suffered, for the new regime
attacked every institution which it did not control. In 1920 it
abolished all Ukrainian professional organizations and trades unions,
including such as the Poltava Society of Workers in Cooperatives and
similar groups in Kiev, Kharkiv, and other cities. Then, by arrests of
the leaders of the cooperative societies, it forced new elections and
put into power only those persons who had the direct approval of the
Russian Bolsheviks.
It was next the turn of the purely cultural organizations. All the
societies of the Prosvita (Enlightenment) which operated a chain of
reading rooms, schools, libraries, theatres, etc. were disbanded
on the ground that they were connected with the Rada of the old
Ukrainian National Republic. The regime arrested and shot as chauvinist
counter-revolutionists many of the active workers. Those who were
spared at the moment were treated as members of the proscribed classes
and were punished by the exclusion of their children from schools, the
denial of food cards, etc., all the traditional devices to eliminate
the counter-revolutionary and suspected classes.
At the same time the government confiscated all the funds of
educational institutions and the private organizations which had,
during the Ukrainian National Republic and earlier, been interested in
educational and scientific work. It closed the Ukrainian scientific
societies in Kharkiv and Kiev and it put an end to all of the
pre-Soviet journals, newspapers, and magazines. The Ukrainian Academy
of Sciences which had been planned during the regime of Hetman
Skoropadsky but had not commenced its work, was treated somewhat more
leniently and it was allowed to open largely to support the pretext
that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was an independent state,
although it was made clear that Communist influence would be exerted on
its statutes and organization.
Such a period of intellectual disintegration could not fail to leave
its mark on all aspects of Ukrainian culture and art. The older writers
who had achieved some prominence before 1914 either retired again into
the emigration or they became silent. The younger generation, which was
just rising into prominence, was either driven into temporary seclusion
or, for the most part, swept into the surging current of events. They
felt the leftward urge of many of the intellectuals and tried in one
way or another to catch the spirit of the times in their works.
Yet it must be realized that, as in the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic, there still did not exist a predominant party
line in the field of literature and the arts. Writers, painters and
dramatists of widely differing tendencies accepted the revolution and
loudly protested that they and they alone were the true mouthpieces of
the times and greedily sought for support from the commissars.
They were the more fortunate in this because the bulk of the leaders,
like Rakovsky, had little appreciation of Ukrainian life. Few of them
understood the language and they preferred to work through the Russians
in the cities and the Donets basin. They were, however, still unable to
deal advantageously with the villages where the Ukrainian population
was chiefly congregated and they allowed the former Borotbisty to
secure key positions in the People’s Commissariat for Education. Thus
it came about that the one commissariat which could exert the most
direct influence on the cultural life of the country was the one in
which the Ukrainian influence was strongest.
The time was not propitious for the publication of works of large size
and of high artistic value. The years 1919, 1920 and 1921 were years of
turmoil when nothing seemed to be real and permanent except death and
violence of every kind. The mere struggle for existence was so intense
that it absorbed the energy of almost the entire population and the
economic decay spread like a creeping paralysis over the land. To the
destruction of the civil wars and of the fighting with Denikin were now
added the ravages of the Communist detachments, which swarmed over the
country seeking for food to take to the north to save the Russians.
In the early months it would be hardly fair to talk of a Communist
system of government, for while the theorists were debating as to
how they should build socialism and Communism, armed Communist bands
organized under the Red Army or under the Cheka (the Extraordinary
Committee for Suppression of the Counter-Revolution) indulged in mass
terror, murder and robbery.
The measures adopted in Petrograd and Moscow for the distribution of
the land were ill adapted for the Ukrainian situation. It was only
natural that these were applied with a certain amount of peasant
approval at the expense of the larger Russian and Polish landlords,
many of whom had cooperated with the Germans. This was the more natural
because in pre-war days the bulk of the grain that had been exported
from Ukraine had come from these estates and, as everywhere in peasant
Europe, the confiscation and division of the land among the peasants
reduced the amount of food stuffs available for the urban population.
The natural result was the growing depopulation of the cities. Peasants
who had gone into industry now flowed back to their native villages and
demanded their share of the land in the hope that they might be able
to raise food for themselves and their families. This increased the
already overcrowded rural population and intensified the bitterness
that was felt among all classes.
The hatred thus aroused was increased by the formation of committees
of poor and landless peasants to take over the estates. Yet in Ukraine
there was an important sector of the population who had been the owners
and proprietors of from two to nearly one hundred acres of land. In
some districts these included nearly a quarter of the peasant families
and in an attempt to propitiate them the Soviets were frequently
inclined to favor them and allow them to retain their holdings instead
of dividing them among the more idle and shiftless of the population.
Yet this did not serve to maintain agricultural production, for the
crying demand of Moscow was for food. The Communists had abolished
all markets and taxes but they substituted for them a rule that the
peasants were to turn over their entire crop to the government and
should retain for themselves only 31 pounds of grain per month for each
member of the family. This naturally dissatisfied the peasants who
had been won to the support of the new regime by the promises of the
government that they could secure for their own use the land of the
state and of the landlords. Each year, as the Soviets tried to enforce
the collection, they planted less and less acreage and resorted to more
skilful methods of hiding what they did produce in the hope that they
might somehow exchange it for those manufactured products of which they
were in urgent need.
To counterbalance this, the Russian detachments made more and more
extensive raids and they were not satisfied to take merely the legal
surplus. They seized everything in the way of food and supplies on
which they could lay their hands and, in case of opposition, they
ruthlessly shot the peasants without any trial or investigation as
counter-revolutionists. In a sense they succeeded in their mission, for
the food collectors in 1920 secured in Ukraine 2,560,000 tons of grain
or about 75% of the total amount that they secured in the whole of the
former Russian Empire.
This led to new clashes and with the suppression of the larger armed
partisan bands, there grew up a new feeling of ugliness that boded ill
for the security of the whole regime. The success of the Communists in
the industrial centres was thus balanced by their failure to win over
any substantial part of the rural population.
In the cities the new regime met with problems of another kind. The
workers in the great coal and iron industry where Communism was
strongest had at a very early date expelled the managers and foremen
and had taken over themselves the operation of the plants, many of
which had been ruined in the civil war. Now they found that they were
not able to restore production. Industry practically came to a halt
and by the end of 1921 there was only one blast furnace operating in
Ukraine. The production of pig-iron dropped to 11,300 tons, or barely
3% of the pre-war production. The railroads suffered the same fate.
There was no way of repairing them and without a trained administrative
staff, they almost stopped functioning. This, in turn, increased
unemployment and a lack of food in the cities and once more the city
dwellers began to stream out into the country districts.
As a final blow there came in 1920 one of those periods of drought
which have recurred sporadically in Ukraine throughout the centuries.
In view of the general decay in transportation and the ravages of the
war, this became serious and the situation grew even worse when the
same phenomenon was repeated in 1921. Between the drought and the
raiding detachments, the peasants had no reserves of grain and a famine
broke out which cost the lives of several million Ukrainians.
This famine was very definitely the result of Communist mismanagement,
plus the drought, but the Soviet regime was unable to take any
effective counter-measures. When its extent was realized, the regime
allowed through the League of Nations the organization of the American
Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover. This collected and sent
to the stricken areas large quantities of grain but it carried on its
work with such impartiality that it ignored for humanitarian motives
the discontent of the peasants and its operations enabled the Soviet
regime to master a storm which would otherwise have endangered its very
existence. It is interesting in this connection that the Soviet regime
only with the greatest reluctance allowed relief work to be carried on
in the Ukraine, where the famine conditions were the worst. Their only
interest was in the Volga area inhabited by Great Russians and they
tried to use the assumed independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic
as an excuse for refusing to allow help to be extended.
Thus by the spring of 1922 the policy of Militant Communism had broken
down at every point. The system had shown its political, economic
and cultural bankruptcy and its sole success had been among certain
groups of idealists abroad who were infatuated with the resolution with
which the Soviets had broken with the old order. Yet this was a poor
foundation and it was obvious that something drastic had to be done, if
the Soviet system was to be saved.
CHAPTER FOUR
The New Economic Policy
With the cities prostrate, the land untilled and the people starving,
not only in the Ukraine but elsewhere on Soviet-controlled territory,
Lenin suddenly changed his policies and introduced various measures
which rapidly relieved some of the most glaring defects of the Soviet
system. The general term for the new arrangement is the New Economic
Policy which more or less remained in force until 1929.
The basis of these measures was a change in the method of collecting
taxes and income. Whereas, during the period of Militant Communism,
the peasants had been compelled in theory to hand over their entire
production to the state with the exception of what they were allowed
to retain for their own personal use, they were now assigned a fixed
amount which they were to contribute, and the balance they could retain
or even sell in the local markets. The decree providing for this was
signed March 21, 1921. This gave the peasants a new inspiration to
work, for they could begin to make plans rationally and intelligently
and could hope to receive some reward for their diligence and industry.
This measure was supplemented by others which made it appear that the
Bolshevik regime was in some degree returning to the philosophy or the
practices of capitalism.
That was undoubtedly the impression that Lenin wanted to convey abroad.
There had been signs that some of the European countries were willing
to renew commercial relations with the Soviets, and the introduction
of the New Economic Policy strengthened these desires. People began to
speculate glibly and naively that the practical realities of existence
had forced Lenin to admit much that he had previously denied and they
predicted that in the coming years the form of Soviet life would
steadily approach that in the Western world.
The same reaction was to be seen at home. Many of the more sincere
and convinced Communists greatly disliked the concessions to the old
order that were made at this time. It seemed to them that their revered
master was turning his back upon his old position and they scoffed at
the new Nepmen, who were growing wealthy under the new regime.
Lenin was not to be shaken in his policy. His motives in these
concessions to capitalism are well expressed in the remarks in the
_History of the All-Union Communist Party_. “Militant Communism had
tried to take the fortress by frontal assault. It advanced too far
and risked being cut off from its base. Lenin made the proposition to
retire a few steps, to retreat for a while further to the rear, so as
to pass from an assault to a siege, and then, after gaining strength,
to return to the assault.”
The later sequence of events showed the correctness of this
explanation. The New Economic Policy in Lenin’s mind was a temporary
move which was made in the hope that the economic life of the country
would revive. He made no lasting concessions and a careful reading of
all the measures shows that they were not motivated by the sense of
failure that was ascribed to them by the capitalistic world. Lenin did
not put the measures in any form that would definitely bind himself
or his successors. They did not provide any guarantees of their
permanence, nor did they state any principle that was in contradiction
with the basic philosophy of Communism. They were, obviously, a mere
tactical manoeuvre in the difficult situation in which the Soviets
found themselves.
The basic decree was signed in Moscow and was, of course, only
applicable to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. It
could not therefore be valid without further action in the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic which was, by hypothesis, a completely independent
and sovereign state. Yet so closely knit together was the fate of the
Ukrainian Communist Party with that of Russia that it was not necessary
for the Ukrainian Soviet regime to issue immediately any new decree on
the subject. It was automatically assumed that it was equally binding
in Ukraine and without any further ado, the Ukrainian peasants were
given the right of selling any surplus products exactly as if there had
been no independent Ukrainian Soviet government.
The legal aspects of this decree did not interest the bulk of the
Ukrainian peasants. They saw only the relief which it afforded them and
the opportunities that it gave. They immediately took advantage of it,
and its first effects were to be seen in a surprisingly short time. Of
course, there could be no improvement in the national well-being until
the harvest and the harvest of 1921 was again reduced by drought, so
that with the best of intentions, it was not until 1922 that conditions
began to improve.
A new Russian land code was finally adopted on March 3, 1921, and it
was, of course, the model to be observed in the Ukraine. Yet this did
not suppress the discontent of the Ukrainian peasants.
In an effort to suppress this smouldering discontent, D. Manuilsky,
who was then the Commissar for Agriculture of the All-Ukrainian
Revolutionary Committee (the revolutionary centre and the provisional
government of the country), summoned to Kharkiv a gathering of
agronomists from all parts of Ukraine in the First All-Ukrainian
Agronomical Congress. He found the more than one thousand present
practically united in their assertions that the agricultural laws
as developed by the Bolsheviks were inapplicable to the Ukraine.
They had been drawn up and approved on March 6, 1919 and they were
entirely based on the spirit of the Russian land commune which provided
usually for a redistribution of the land every three years, with
the supplemental provision that the redistribution should take into
account the number of persons in each family. This was all very good
when it agreed, as it did in Russia, with the general spirit of the
people who were vitally interested in the commune as such. Conditions
were different in Ukraine and the purely artificial Land Society was
developed. Of course, all the peasants had to become members but the
land was divided by households rather than on an individual basis.
Furthermore, it was provided in the Ukrainian Code that “The right to
land handed over for labor use is without term and can be taken away
only in accordance with the provisions of the law.” This insured the
individual household in possession of its own piece of land and made it
possible for the more industrious to undertake the improvement of the
soil.
By the time that the final form of the Labor Code was established on
November 22, 1922, it had become almost essentially different from
the Russian Code, although it paid a lip service to the principle of
nationalization through the actions of the Land Societies. A further
sign of submission was the establishment of maximums on landholding. No
household in the densely settled areas could have more than fourteen
hectares or, in the less thickly populated areas, forty-eight hectares.
The Land Society had the right to decide on the form of exploitation
of the land to be carried out but if a family disagreed with the form
established, it was entitled to demand the same amount of land but not
necessarily the same land that it had contributed. Furthermore, outside
of the requirement that all members of household were compelled to
labor personally on the land, the provisions dealing with hired labor
and the renting of land were left purposely vague or were omitted for
further study.
The new code, which was more liberal than that in Russia, was devised
in the interests of the landless peasants and also the poor and middle
peasants, and definitely ratified the seizure of the estates of the
large landowners. Sixty-eight per cent of the landless peasants
received small tracts of land and fifty-two percent of those with
holdings from two to four hectares were settled under more favorable
conditions, or received additional land. On the other hand, 27.2% of
those with more than sixteen hectares, the normal holding, and 56.8%
of those with more than twenty-five hectares, saw their additional
land removed and handed over to their less fortunate neighbors. In a
sense this might seem to have been a solution of the crying need of the
peasants for land but it brought with it some unexpected results.
The civil war had completely destroyed any free capital, and without
capital the peasants could not buy the tools, the fertilizers, etc.,
which they needed to prosper. This made little difference in the very
beginning, for at the moment the primary need was for food and the
peasants were compelled to live upon what they could raise. It was not
long before the returning prosperity commenced new differentiations
in the villages. The poorer peasants began to take advantage of the
provisions that they could lease their newly acquired land, and while
the Russian law provided that a lease could run for only three years,
the Ninth All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets soon lengthened this term
to 13 years and liberalized the laws for hired labor.
The result was that by 1926, the poor peasants had leased 1,181,000
hectares and 53.9% of the peasants who had at least ten hectares rented
additional land.
In a word, under the New Economic Policy conditions began, in fact, to
return to what had been the situation prior to the revolution, with
the exception that the great land owners had disappeared, but as they
had been largely Russian or Polish, their departure only increased the
Ukrainian influence in the villages and made them more homogeneous than
they had been before.
The Commissariat of Agriculture endeavored during these years of
reconstruction to maintain as independent a position as possible. It
established its own independent services, its own research stations
which were concerned with Ukrainian agricultural problems, its own
breeding stations and its own bureaus for study and development of the
various branches of agriculture, and it did its best to separate these
from the similar services directed by Moscow and not concerned with the
particular problems of Ukraine.
The peasants responded to this with their own efforts. In 1922, with
the famine still raging, they secured permission from Moscow to
establish the so-called Selo-Pomich (or Village Aid) to provide credit
for the peasants. This finally persuaded the Cheka to hand over part of
the golden objects which they had stolen from the churches, and it used
the capital thus secured to buy seed corn in America. It then loaned
this to the peasants and when the harvest came, the loan was repaid in
kind and more credit was then extended.
The peasants also revived and breathed new life into the cooperatives
which had been broken up during the period of Militant Communism.
In 1923 they established another cooperative organization, the
Selo-Tekhnyka (Village Machines) which purchased more expensive
agricultural machinery and rented it out to the peasants for the
appropriate agricultural work. These points became the centre of
mechanization and were in effect the first tractor stations. In 1924
they established the First Agricultural Bank, a sort of private
institution which at one time had more loans outstanding than had the
Ukrainian State Bank which was, of course, closely supervised by Moscow.
All these efforts met with marked success and agriculture speedily
began to revive. The peasants became more prosperous and their holdings
of livestock rapidly increased, although they did not reach the pre-war
level. This, in its turn, created a new demand for manufactured
products and restored the factories to operation, and with them the
conditions in the cities began to improve.
Similar concessions were made to industry, but with one important
difference. The larger and more important industrial plants were
not turned back to their former owners who were, as before, allowed
no voice or influence in their direction. They were taken from the
workers who had seized and abused them during the period of Militant
Communism and placed under the supervision of government trusts. These
were either regional in character or confined to a single branch of
industry. In either case, they were under the control of a more or
less trusted group of men among whom Communists were in the leading
positions, but while they received certain credits from the state,
they were more or less autonomous and they were allowed to go through
regular commercial transactions and encouraged to show profits in their
annual reports. There was thus again a source of encouragement both
for the directors and the workers, and slowly but surely the level of
industry began to rise.
The smaller plants were very often leased to individuals who were
allowed to employ hired labor and the hope was given to these that
their taxes would be at such a level that they, too, could show
profits. The very small shops and plants were in some cases taken back
by their former owners when they had survived and any provisions about
the use of hired labor were tacitly forgotten in the first flush of the
New Economic Policy.
All of these measures were interpreted by the great mass of the
Ukrainian people as a recognition of the validity of human experience.
There were, of course, keen realists who gave full credence to the
declarations of Lenin that the Soviets had never wavered in their
objections and were using these concessions only as a means of reviving
the life of the country and strengthening their own position. At first
this did not seem to be true and it was only as conditions really
settled down and a semblance of prosperity returned that it became
possible to note the steadily increasing pressure which the government
exerted.
In the same way the currency reforms were not without their own
influence. In 1923 the government introduced a new currency, the
chervonets, which was ostensibly based on a gold standard, to take
the place of the old depreciated paper. Nevertheless, the latter was
allowed to circulate in the rural districts with the result that its
value continued to fall and it became more and more difficult for the
peasants to satisfy their needs for manufactured goods which were
priced in the new currency. This produced the so-called “scissors,” for
with the restoration of industry, the value of manufactures continued
to rise, while the prices of agricultural products continually fell.
The political system was still not clear. The new regulations
were introduced in the Council of Commissars in Moscow and it was
emphatically stated that they were for the Russian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic, but Ukraine and also the other Soviet Republics put
into practice the same resolutions, often without any decree by the
ostensibly independent government.
The key to this enigma lay in the nature of Communist discipline. In
theory and on paper the Soviet regime was thoroughly democratic in the
broad sense of the word. There was an elaborate scheme of elections
to the village and the higher Soviets, and even though this was
weighted very heavily to provide increased representation for the city
proletariat where the Communists felt themselves strongest, it was
always possible to defend the system.
Yet this does not tell the full story, for though non-party men were
elected to the lower and local Soviets, the number of Communists
increased steadily in the higher. These Communists were themselves
classified as members of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Communist
Party and they were bound by party discipline to obey all the
instructions given by the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist
Party.
There was thus, in reality, two governments in both Ukraine and the
Russian Republic. There was first the republic government theoretically
responsible to the people and thus transmitting the wishes of the
people upward, even though the highest republic authorities were
the direct appointees of Moscow. There was likewise the domination,
more or less veiled, of the Communist Party, a government which only
transmitted instructions from the top down. In the early days, and
indeed for a considerable period, it is often difficult to determine
whether certain measures came into effect because they had been
approved by the Council of Commissars in Moscow or because they had
the backing of the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party
which was a monolithic organization, responsible only to its chiefs.
It was in a sense a theoretical question for, by the period of the New
Economic Policy, the Council of Commissars, the Executive Committee
of the Russian Communist Party and the control of the Communist
International rested in the hands of the same men who functioned in
three different capacities but still formed a well-knit body. Even
though the legal relations between Ukraine and Russia rested on the
vague treaties and agreements made during the period of Militant
Communism and the civil wars, the Ukrainian Soviet government could
be practically overruled at any moment and on any point on which it
disagreed with the wishes of Moscow.
Since all non-Communist organizations had been dissolved, the only
possible opposition could come from the Ukapisty, the Ukrainian
Communist Party. This was composed of a small number of brilliant men,
confirmed Communists, who insisted upon preserving the independence of
the Ukrainian Communist regime in the hope that sooner or later they
would be admitted to the Communist International as an independent
national Communist Party. They therefore willingly accepted the
doctrines of the International, which was little more than the third
facet of the ruling block. By 1925 the situation had so far developed
that their aspirations for this were definitely checked and even this
theoretical opposition was eliminated by compelling the Ukapisty to
enter into the Ukrainian Section of the Russian Communist Party, or
else.
This situation makes clear the relations that existed between Ukraine
and Russia during the early years of the New Economic Policy. As
agriculture and industry revived in Ukraine, it was suggested that
the Ukrainian government send aid to its Communist brothers. That
suggestion was a command, and just as the Muscovite bands under
Militant Communism scoured Ukraine for food, so under the New Economic
Policy, the so-called Ukrainian government began to drain off the
wealth of the country for the charitable purpose of helping its Russian
brothers.
The vagueness and the ambiguity of this system was partially cleared
up by the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The
treaty establishing this was signed on December 30, 1922, just as
Lenin was becoming paralyzed and unable to function efficiently. It
bound together the various Soviet Republics, while at the same time
it paid lip service to the right of any of these Republics to secede.
Of course, this was from the beginning an empty phrase, for the only
people who had the power to declare the secession was the Council of
Soviets of the Federal Republic and they were Communists assigned to
their posts by Moscow and bound to obey the orders of the Central
Committee of the Russian Communist Party. In addition to this, a
surprising number of the ruling group of the Russian Soviet Republic
now took over the corresponding posts in the Union and thus added still
a fourth facet to their varied activity.
The Constitution, which was formally adopted at a Union Congress of
Soviets on July 6, 1923, went still further in providing for the
government of the Union. The Commissariats were divided into three
classes: Union, Joint and Republic. Thus, those of Foreign Affairs,
Armed Forces, Foreign Trade, Communications, Water Transport, Posts and
Telegraphs, Heavy Industry, Light Industry, Supply and Timber had full
control over the corresponding sections in the federal republics. Those
of Internal Trade, Labor, Finance and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection
were nominally joint commissariats but, in case of a dispute between
the Union and the Republic commissariats, the rights of the former were
supreme. The remaining commissariats, Interior, Justice, Education,
Health, Agriculture, and Social Welfare were still left under the
Executive Committee of the Republic Supreme Soviet. It was thus very
evident that, except in a few fields, the powers of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic to decide its own destiny were practically non-existent.
It goes quite without saying that it was these local commissariats
which attracted the Communists of Ukrainian origin, whether or not they
belonged to the Ukapisty or had joined the Ukrainian Section of the
Russian Communist Party as former members of the Borotbisty. This was
a very important development in the next decade in Ukrainian history
and it was due to the relative freedom of the Commissariat of Education
that the Ukrainian cultural renaissance took the form which it did.
At the same time, despite all the verbiage and the apparent exceptions,
it was abundantly clear from the very beginning that the economic
system of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was to be bound hand and
foot to the Moscow regime and that its financial and industrial
potentialities would be treated as Moscow wished.
It was relatively simple to deal with industry. The development of
the coal and iron resources of Ukraine were simply transferred to
Moscow control and it was practically impossible for the Ukrainians to
express any opinion as to the form which that development would take.
The Russian directors of the trusts could make such contracts as they
desired and carry them out without regard to the wishes of the local
population or the workmen.
Agriculture was a little more difficult. The decree of 1921, which
had started the New Economic Policy, provided for the payment of a
specific amount of tax in kind and left to the peasant the rest of his
crop. In an endeavor to get this grain into Russia, the government
offered to buy it but it did not have the funds or the inclination to
pay for it at the market price. The financial reforms connected with
the introduction of the chervonets could, to a certain degree, make it
expedient for the peasant to sell to the government for cash, and as
time went on the peasant gained the power of selling his crop for cash
but the Moscow control of transportation and the prohibition of large
scale trading left him helpless and he saw himself forced to dispose of
it locally or to the government. Then the government made a fixed price
which was far below that of the free market, and was often scarcely a
third of the amount that the peasant could have secured. This sale of
large quantities of agricultural products at a fixed price gradually
became the rule and was one of the signs that the period of toleration
for private income was coming to an end.
In 1925, the government began to clamp down on the small traders, the
Nepmen, who had profited by the opportunities which they had had. Again
it had a large choice of measures. Thus, depending on the situation, it
could invoke laws against the hiring of labor; it could order the state
agencies to refuse to buy from or sell to an obnoxious individual and
thus isolate him; it could suspend his ration cards and perquisites,
take away his right of voting and thus make him a pariah in the
community; it could levy prohibitive taxes which would put him out of
business and confiscate his property; or it could find some violation
of some other law or regulation and imprison or exile him.
The degree of pressure which was put upon the peasants and the workers
varied from year to year. Each year Ukraine was compelled to export
more to Russia without regard to the needs of the local population.
Thus, the amount of grain rose from 1,050,000 tons in 1924-5 to
3,165,000 tons in 1926-7, when there was a bumper crop, but in 1927-8,
when the harvest partially failed and there were signs of need in the
country, the amount collected and exported rose to 4,353,000 tons.
At the same time, the continually increasing demands aroused again a
spirit of opposition and of indifference among the peasantry and a
resentment against the growing exactions of the Soviet regime in Moscow.
Still these were years of relative peace. With the introduction of the
New Economic Policy, the government became more tolerant of differences
of opinion and the OGPU (the Organization of the State Political
Administration, the new name for the old Cheka) was relatively
inactive. There were few political arrests, imprisonments, executions
and deportations and the bulk of the population began to breathe more
easily. There were men, however, who saw the straws in the wind. For
example in 1924, Mikhnovsky, who had been one of the early Ukrainian
nationalists, committed suicide and so did Syrotenko, a prominent
Social Revolutionist, but these were in a way exceptional cases.
It is far more likely that this lull was part of the Moscow policy of
preparing to eliminate in one swoop all persons who might prove to be
dangerous, but it was also affected by the confusion and the intrigues
that were going on in Moscow. With the death of Lenin, there was no
clear successor to his post and prestige. There were many claimants,
notably Stalin and Trotsky. When Lenin died, the power passed into
the hands of a small group of leaders with Stalin, the Secretary of
the Communist Party, and Trotsky as Commissar for War as the main
contenders for the supreme power. The struggle between these two
men lasted for several years, with the star of Stalin rising over
that of Trotsky who favored a far more rigorous policy toward both
the Nepmen and traders in the cities and the kulaks or kurkuls (the
richer peasants) who had profited materially by the opportunities for
private trade and production. It was not until that conflict was over
that any one dared to risk the internal upheaval that might come with
a change from the avowed outlines of the New Economic Policy and a
reintroduction of more rigorous socialist or communist practice.
CHAPTER FIVE
Ukrainization
The period of the New Economic Policy was likewise the time when the
movement for the Ukrainization of the state reached its highest point.
This was a complicated political, cultural and scholarly movement which
aimed to develop the Ukrainian self-consciousness in every possible
way and to establish the proper role of the Ukrainian language and
culture in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It took many and
diverse forms, and while it developed into a definite opposition to
Russian influence and Russian methods, it was not primarily so much an
anti-Communist as an extra-Communist movement, even though most of its
outstanding leaders were tried and tested members of the party.
The basis for the entire movement is to be found in the slight
attraction that Communism as a doctrine possessed for the Ukrainian
people. As late as 1927 there were only 122,928 Ukrainian Communists,
that is, about thirty-nine for each ten thousand of the Ukrainian
population. The bulk of the Communists in Ukraine were Russian and the
vast majority of these belonged to the urban proletariat or to the
workers in the Donets Basin and Kryvy Rih.
The general period of disintegration during the civil war and the
period of Militant Communism had greatly strengthened the power and
self-confidence of the peasants and had weakened the power of the city
workmen. This showed Lenin and the dominant group that some method had
to be found to win at least the passive support of the countryside if
new troubles were to be averted.
The Bolsheviks were well aware of the tenacity with which the Ukrainian
peasants, whether they were literate or illiterate, clung to their
native language. Lenin had used this characteristic with skill
and success in encouraging the Ukrainian opposition to the Russian
Provisional Government. The proper recognition of the language had
been one of the most insistent demands put forward by all groups
which had later come together in the Ukrainian National Republic. The
failure of the Bolsheviks in their early occupation of Ukraine to
recognize the Ukrainian language had been one of the surest means of
arousing opposition to their course and this time with their power
established, the Bolsheviks decided to change their policy. As early
as December 6, 1919, the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist
Party had declared: “In carrying out absolutely the principle of the
self-determination of peoples, the Central Committee considers it
necessary to repeat again that the Russian Communist Party maintains
the recognition of the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic.” It encouraged the Russians in Ukraine to learn Ukrainian and
to aid in developing this as a weapon for the Communist education of
the laboring masses.
Yet all was mere verbiage and even Vynnychenko who, at this moment, was
sympathetic to the Bolsheviks in his “Letter to the Ukrainian Workmen
and Peasants,” published in _Forward_ (Lviv, 30.10. 2-3, II, 1920),
lamented the fact that, despite this, the Ukrainian language did not
receive its just due and that many Russian Communists were inclined to
look upon even Ukrainian Communists as potential counter-revolutionists.
On the other hand, there was one group of Communists who were sincerely
devoted to this goal. They were the former Borotbisty and the Ukapisty
who had stressed the need for Ukrainian Communism and who had never
lost an opportunity, while stressing their Communist feelings, to
express the hope that the Ukrainian Communists might some time be
formed into a special party and be duly admitted to the Communist
International on a par with all the other Communist parties of the
world. They took advantage of the situation offered by the formation
of the Union of Soviet Republics and eagerly sought posts in the
Commissariat of Education, which was one of the independent republic
commissariats. This gave them a very good opportunity to work for the
development of Ukrainian and Ukrainian culture in a field where there
could be little expressed opposition.
On the other hand, every step for the fostering of Ukrainian or its
development was met by the Russian Communists, and especially by those
in Ukraine, with the greatest hostility. This went so far that Dmytro
Lebid, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the KP/b/U, declared
that there was a conflict of two languages and cultures in Ukraine and
that it was not the duty of the Communist Party to interfere in this
but to allow the dominant culture to win. In this he was actuated as
a Russianized Ukrainian by his hostility to his native language and
culture but he failed to win support, for it was very obvious that his
policy of favoring Russian was only deepening the gulf between the
Party and the Ukrainian peasants, the thing that the Moscow authorities
were endeavoring at the time to bridge.
On August 1, 1923, the Communist Party passed a new decree which said:
“The government of the workers and peasants regards it as necessary
in the immediate future to concentrate its power on the spreading of
a knowledge of the Ukrainian language. The former equality existing
hitherto between the two most widely used languages in Ukraine,
Ukrainian and Russian, is insufficient. Life, as experience has shown,
causes the actual superiority of Russian. To remove this inequality,
the government of the workmen and peasants will introduce a series of
practical means which, respecting the equality of the languages of all
nationalities on Ukrainian territory, must assure to the Ukrainian
language that place which corresponds to the number and economic
importance of the Ukrainian people in the territory of the UkSSR.”
It further provided that Russian officials in Ukraine should learn
Ukrainian within a definite period. All this sounded well on paper but
the date by which Russian officials had either to learn Ukrainian or
be recalled was constantly postponed further into the future, and the
highest men who came for but short periods and who represented Moscow
in the Ukrainian capital stubbornly refused to make any effort to obey
these decrees.
On the other hand, every declaration to this effect was eagerly
snapped up by the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty in the Commissariat for
Education. In a short time they worked so effectively that nearly all
the books published in Ukraine and about 85% of the newspapers were put
out in Ukrainian. The circulation of these Ukrainian publications in
the villages increased rapidly and aided in producing a sense of relief
among the peasants and a tolerance of the situation which was in sharp
contrast to the prevailing mood of a few years before.
A network of Ukrainian schools was set up throughout the country with
instruction in the native language and the number of students grew
rapidly from among the peasant classes. It had been centuries since the
Ukrainian language had reached such a state of popularity. The theatres
produced plays in Ukrainian as the chief part of their repertory. The
cities assumed a markedly Ukrainian appearance and the leaders could
look with satisfaction on their results.
The one difficulty was the low level of the instruction in many
places but this was equally characteristic of the Russian terrain.
The revolution and the Bolshevik laws had abolished the old Russian
system of education and had eliminated from the schools the bulk of
the older intelligentsia and their children who, on one excuse or
another, were excluded from all opportunities for study. The old
disciplines were abolished and the Soviet school entered upon a chaotic
period. Nevertheless, the changes which the former Borotbist Hrynko
introduced, including the establishment of seven year schools which
gave the students the right to enter upon a three year course in
various technical schools, served to increase rapidly the number of
young and partly trained Ukrainians who were available for posts in
the government service and who thereby freed the organization from its
dependence upon Russian-trained people.
In 1925, he was succeeded in the post of Commissar by O. Shumsky,
likewise a Borotbist, who had held the post of Ukrainian Minister in
Warsaw. He had come back in 1923 to become the Director of Agitation
and Propaganda for the Central Committee of the KP/b/U. An ardent
believer in the Ukrainian cause, he opposed very strenuously all
the Russifying influences in the Party and insisted, as a matter
of principle, that only Ukrainian Communists should be promoted to
prominent posts in the Ukrainian Communist organizations. He even went
so far as to insist, when Kaganovich was sent from Moscow as Secretary
of the Ukrainian section of the party, that he be removed and replaced
by Chubar, an old Bolshevik, and he recommended that Hrynko should be
made the head of the state.
Kaganovich, who had been rather on the side of Shumsky in many of his
enterprises, now turned against him on the ground that he was breaking
Communist discipline and, in a short time, Shumsky was removed and
transferred to Moscow, where he received a post as head of the trade
unions. From there he was moved to Leningrad to become head of a school
of economics, but by this time his star was setting. Shumsky, on more
charges, was sent to a concentration camp near the Finnish border.
According to the story, he was assured that he had a chance to escape.
He tried it and was shot. His leading assistants, Maksymovych, Vasylkiv
and Turyansky, were branded as Shumkyists and punished accordingly.
His successor, M. Skrypnyk, took up his work as Commissar of Education
under even better auspices. Unlike his predecessors, who had entered
the Communist Party from the ranks of the Borotbisty or the Ukapisty
and who thereby risked the charge of being Ukrainian nationalists and
having bourgeois-nationalist sympathies, Skrypnyk had been an old
member of the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks). He had been
a personal friend of Lenin long before the Revolution. He had been
arrested several times by the tsarist government, had taken an active
part in the October Revolution of 1917 and was a disciplined member of
the party. He was thus above reproach so far as his party standing was
concerned.
From the time of the foundation of the Ukrainian National Republic,
Skrypnyk had been one of the outstanding Ukrainians in the Communist
Party. From the beginning he had taken the definite stand that the
Communist organization in Ukraine should be thoroughly Ukrainian,
independent of the Russian Communist Party and with a seat in the
Comintern. He believed that Ukraine should naturally have a Soviet
government and be an independent state with all the rights and
perquisites of the RSFSR and he regarded the war between the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic and the Ukrainian National Republic as a civil war
in which the Soviet Russians naturally came to the aid of the Soviet
Ukrainians. At the same time he believed equally strongly that this
assistance should be that of a brother-nation and should have no
elements of a foreign occupation.
He was a disciplined Communist and he always acted in accordance
with the strictest Communist tradition. He never joined any faction
or questioned the vote of his superiors but he remained firm in his
convictions, and while he was always in the minority and was willing to
yield superficially, he always seized the next opportunity to advance
substantially the same points but in a somewhat different form. He was
on friendly terms with Stalin and he came to his post after a definite
interview with Stalin and with instructions that put him in a position
second only to Kaganovich.
The appointment of Skrypnyk with his Communist record showed very well
that in 1927 the VKP (the All-Union Communist Party) was still playing
with the idea of making the Communist International a real gathering
of supposed equals, united under the leadership of a central body in
Moscow. It was a tacit recognition of the independence of the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic as a political entity, but it was equally the
recognition of a Marxian Socialist culture which might lead to some of
the later developments of Stalinism. The appointment insured Stalin of
the aid of the true Ukrainian Communists in the coming battle between
him and the left deviationists.
Once in his own mind Skrypnyk had answered the problem, he did not
waver. He accepted the Marxian doctrine that by the development of an
urban proletariat he could develop the Ukrainians to the point where
they would be justified in demanding an entrance into the Comintern as
an independent nation. He interpreted the cases of Czechoslovakia and
Latvia as exactly that, since the proletariats of Prague and Brno, as
well as Riga, had forced national independence and he set himself to
do the same in Kiev and Kharkiv.
Without wavering in his devotion to the principles of Communism, he
attacked the problem in the broadest possible way. He stimulated
derussification by supporting the Ukrainian press, theatre and schools.
Under his influence and work, the cities, including Kharkiv, where
Ukrainian influence had been relatively weak, came to be predominantly
Ukrainian and in smaller places it became very rare to hear Russian
spoken. The State Printing House and the smaller cooperative publishing
houses produced almost nothing that was not in Ukrainian and during the
few years that he remained in control, there were more Ukrainian books
published than in the preceding century and a half.
Skrypnyk was still not satisfied. He extended his activity and
patronage of things Ukrainian to all those areas in the RSFSR where
Ukrainians were living in compact settlements. He provided Ukrainian
papers, books and theatres for those who were living in Kurshchyna,
Voronizhshchyna, along the Volga, Kuban, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan
and the Far East. He sent educated men and women to establish schools
and other cultural institutions and, for the first time in history,
efforts were made to establish a real community of interests among all
the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union.
More than that, he held out a friendly hand to Western Ukraine, which
was under Polish rule. Although by this time the entire control of
foreign affairs was concentrated in Moscow, Skrypnyk was allowed to
arrange for a Ukrainian consul in Lviv and Yur. Lapchynsky, a former
Ukapist, was appointed to the post. The consul’s duty was to win
support for the Communists in Eastern Galicia and, in pursuance of
this purpose, Skrypnyk, too, paid a visit to Lviv. He had a certain
success in his work and a few Western Ukrainians, as S. Rudnytsky,
who came from Prague to become the head of the Ukrainian Institute of
Geography and Cartography in Kharkiv, and the mathematician Chaykivsky,
entered the UkSSR. They formed a special club in Kharkiv and had their
own literary organization “Western Ukraine.” Skrypnyk even worked
out a plan to recruit 8,000 teachers in Western Ukraine to undertake
Ukrainian work in the Donbas where the Russian influence was strongest.
At the same time Skrypnyk was a determined Communist and he lost no
opportunity for advancing the doctrines of the movement, even at the
risk of doing violence to those Ukrainian ideals in which he believed.
Thus, in 1928, he demanded a reformation of the All-Ukrainian Academy
of Sciences which had been working feverishly in the same cause of
Ukrainization but which, from his point of view, was insufficiently
Marxist and Communist. In 1929 he won his point and the Academy was
forced to elect to membership seven Communists who were chosen for
their knowledge of the subject and not for their scientific ability.
One of the seven was Skrypnyk himself, and among the others were
O. Shlikhter and Zatonsky, the veteran from the earlier Ukrainian
Communist movement. He soon promoted Shlikhter to a prominent position
and refused to confirm the election of the non-Communist scholar,
Krymsky, to the post of secretary. At the same time he forced the
election of several Western Ukrainian members, so that for a few
years the Academy did become a real centre to represent all Ukrainian
scholarship.
Thus, in this complex process Skrypnyk played at times a curious and
often contradictory role. He was at once the head of the Ukrainian
movement and of the Communist movement in the country and he never
realized or noticed the contradictory character of his actions, like
Tito in the early years of his dealing with Moscow. Still, during his
term of office the Ukrainian movement reached its height and seemed to
be flourishing.
CHAPTER SIX
The Literary Renaissance
At the beginning of the Ukrainian struggle for independence, the
time was ripe for a new period in the literature. There were still
living some of the old masters of the nineteenth century as Ivan
Levytsky-Nechuy, who died shortly after the establishment of the
Ukrainian National Republic. Lesya Ukrainka and Kotsyubynsky, the two
foremost of the writers of the next generation, had died in 1913 and
Oles, the representative of the generation of 1905, was in retirement.
This cleared the way for a younger group, as Tychyna and Rylsky, who
were already testing their abilities when the First World War broke out.
The outbreak of the struggle in 1917 called back into life such
publications as the _Literary-Historical Journal_ which had been
suppressed in 1914 by the imperial Russian government. It attracted
to its pages the leading men of the older generation who were largely
populist in their political views and in it appeared the writings of
such men as Prof. M. Hrushevsky, Vynnychenko, Samiylenko, Oles, Vorony,
G. Chuprynka and L. Starytska-Chernyakivska. The list of contributors
includes most of the people who had already established their
reputation and the journal had a short but distinguished career.
When the Ukrainian National Republic finally was overthrown and the
Soviet regime established, many of these older writers disappeared from
Ukraine. Oles retired to Prague, and Vynnychenko and many others made
their way to Western Europe. Even those who remained in Ukraine found
themselves out of sympathy with the new government and relapsed into
silence, but even this did not save them for many were arrested and
executed at various times.
It was only natural that the period of the civil war was not conducive
to the production of artistic literature. For those who were willing
to cooperate, there were many posts open in the government, but the
pressure of public affairs distracted them and left them little time
for belles-lettres. For others who had less taste for political and
public life, the obvious course was to retire to the villages and
there meditate and work in silence with scanty hope for the immediate
publishing of their works. This was the course largely pursued by
Tychyna and Rylsky and their friends, together with many of the
Symbolists.
However, during 1917 and 1918 new almanacs and journals put in an
appearance and these could hardly fail to express the political
struggles, for some of them, as _Mystetstvo_ (Art), were definitely
leftist in character and others were the product of various groups and
schools of writers.
With the final establishment of Soviet power, the literature lost most
of the freedom which it had acquired in the years of struggle. The
Communists lost no time in suppressing all the old publications and in
establishing their own. These were more or less strictly censored, and
it was impossible from the beginning to publish any work which might
awaken the suspicions of the new regime.
At the same time in Ukraine, as in the RSFSR, the Communist attitude
toward literature was not clearly defined. The new authorities spread
over the country a whole chain of Proletkult (Proletarian Art) centres
with the idea of a speedy development of a new proletarian art. Yet the
experiment was not too successful and, as an outcome of the similar
developments in Petrograd and Moscow, these were soon suppressed but
not until they had created a taste for writing in many of the younger
and often uneducated generation, who were attracted by the slogans and
the hopes inspired by the Communists.
This marked a definite break with the past and it was sufficient to
eliminate from their commanding positions most of the older men.
However, there was no official attitude adopted toward literature, no
definite command to write in accordance with a definite style, provided
that the authors stayed away from subjects that seemed to be openly
anti-Communist.
The authors who were closest to the new regime were those that had
approached Communism through the Left Social Revolutionists (the
Borotbisty) and who considered themselves a “proletarian” group in the
new terminology. Many of the earlier members of this group, as the
impressionistic poet Vasyl Chumak and the prose impressionist Andry
Zalyochy and also Hnat Mykhaylychenko, were killed during the civil
wars or in various uprisings. In a sense they were fortunate and so was
the outstanding novelist, Vasyl Blakytny, who died in 1925. Blakytny’s
death was widely lamented as the death of a distinguished author of
revolutionary romanticism, but it was only a few years later when he,
like the other Borotbisty, was accused of “unreliability,” his works
were officially banned and the plaque which marked the house where he
died was removed.
Artistically, the Symbolists, as Tychyna, were technically the most
advanced on the literary side. They were consciously trying to adapt
the Western, and especially the French, conceptions of Symbolism to
Ukrainian and without going into the decadent features of French
Symbolism, they sought to acclimate in Ukrainian many of the devices
and the metres that had been worked out in the West.
Close to them was the group of the Neo-Classicists headed by Mykola
Zerov. The members of this group, too, endeavored to produce high art
with as few political overtones as possible. The group, which also
included the poet Maksym Rylsky, sought to draw their inspiration from
the classical world and they stressed the ancient connections between
the Black Sea and the classical world of the Mediterranean.
Both the Symbolists and the Neo-Classicists were in their hearts more
or less hostile to the revolution, in so far as it was a destroyer
of cultural values but they were anything but reactionaries or
anti-Communists in the ordinary sense of the word. They were rather
far removed from the developments of the present, interested in
literature and literary criticism and standing for the preservation of
cultural values.
In view of the relations between the Communists in Ukraine and those in
the RSFSR, it was only natural that all of the literary debates that
went on in Moscow should find an echo in Ukraine. This was the period
when Bukharin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky were debating very seriously
the relations between the Communists, the proletarian writers and the
so-called “fellow-travellers” who sympathized more or less sincerely
with the revolution but who had not taken the full step and become
members of the Communist Party. It was in this latter group that the
greater Russian writers of the day were to be found and many of them
had already achieved fame before the revolution. In 1925 they succeeded
in obtaining what seemed to be a certain recognition by the party and
it was on the basis of these decisions and this standard that both the
Symbolists and the Neo-Classicists continued to be able to publish.
At the same time Ukrainian literature could not be considered as a
mere reflection of any of these groups. There was still too much
consciousness of Ukrainian independence to make the more able authors
merely blind imitators of a foreign literature. Besides, the contacts
which still existed with Western Ukraine under Polish rule brought it
about that even the Eastern Ukrainians were influenced both by the
Polish and Austrian developments and writers as Stefanyk were read
almost as much in Kiev and Kharkiv as they were in Lviv and Stanislaviv.
The taking over by the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty of the Commissariat
for Education could not fail to have a definite effect upon the leftist
writers who dreamed of establishing not only a proletarian literature
but also a Ukrainian proletarian literature, and with this purpose
in mind there developed at the capital of Kharkiv and also in Kiev
and elsewhere a new series of literary schools and movements, each
of which based itself upon its own interpretation of the revolution.
They started in general from two contradictory positions, depending
on whether they stressed the revolutionary ardor of the peasants or
that of the proletariat and this was roughly parallel to the division
between the peasant and the factory writers in the RSFSR.
Thus the organization, the _Plough_, as its name implies, was the organ
of that group which emphasized the role of the peasants and their
connection with the proletariat. They admitted to membership every one
who wished to write, provided he belonged to the “laboring element.”
Naturally, with such a slogan, much of their work was not of a high
order but the leaders considered their work as educational and they did
not object when the more competent and trained writers dropped away or
joined other organizations.
Opposed to them was the _Hart_ (the Tempering of Steel) which
existed from 1923 to 1925. This based itself far more solidly on the
proletarian writers of the cities. It stressed urban and factory
life and saw the triumph of Communism transforming the peasantry
into a type far more like that of the city proletariat than that of
the old, independent farmer. Yet this group, too, was very soon torn
by questions over the relations between the Russian and Ukrainian
Communists and it split up after the publication of its first almanac.
The sharpest defender of a definite Ukrainian line in the _Hart_ was
Mykola Khvylovy and he very soon split away from the more moderates and
those seeking a closer alliance with the Russians. He formed the group
_Urbino_ in 1925 and out of this grew the _Vaplite_, the Free Academy
of Proletarian Literature, which became the rallying ground for all of
the more consciously alert members of the leftist and Communist groups.
It was with the _Vaplite_ that there were associated most of these men,
as Arkady Lyubchenko, Yury Yanovsky, Petro Panch, the dramatist Mykola
Kulish, the theatrical producer Les Kurbas and such poets as Tychyna,
Mykhaylo (Mike) Yohansen and Mykola Bazhan. This was the outstanding
literary development of the period of Ukrainization and under the
leadership of Khvylovy, they took a definite political stand on all the
questions of the day.
There were similar groups in Kiev. Thus there was formed the _Aspis_
(Association of Proletarian Writers) in 1923 and from this, in its
turn, was developed the _Lanka_ or Link in 1924-6 and later the _MARS_
(the Workshop of the Revolutionary Word), 1926-8 with such members as
Evhen Pluzhnyk, Dmytro Falkivsky and T. Osmachka. They sought to keep
themselves somewhat free from excessive flattery of the government and
in general shared the general attitude of the _Vaplite_ in Kharkiv.
Another movement which had appeared just before the revolution was
Futurism which, in the person of its leader, Mykhaylo Semenko, denied
totally the artistic value of all preceding literary schools. The
revolution gave this, too, the possibility of boasting that by its
denial of the past it was the true mouthpiece for revolutionary
art, even though its successes were relatively slight and many of
its productions were almost unintelligible to the general public.
The Futurists, too, engaged in the usual process of splitting and
recombining during the height of this period, when the authors were
still relatively free to express their own thoughts.
Beyond these again was the great mass of the proletarian authors. These
were men, usually of less artistic ability, who listened eagerly to
the general slogans put out by the Communists in Moscow and Kharkiv.
They followed blindly the established formulas for the production of
Communist literature. They had, in fact, the general attitude of the
Russian On-Guardists and they were more renowned for their reliability
and skill in following the general line of the Party than they were
for their literary originality or their moral and artistic integrity.
They were in general the literary hacks of the day, often with slight
preliminary education, and proletarian in more senses than one.
Thus during the period of Ukrainization, the literature moved along
two distinct planes. Leaving aside those authors who endeavored
to work in an anti-political world, there were those who blindly
followed the political line and those men who ventured to think for
themselves but along the lines of Communist thought. These latter were
the logical outcome of the ideas of the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty
and the proclamation of the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic. At times they could even be critical of the actual
developments of the day but in their hearts they accepted the general
articles of belief and sought to give them a fuller significance. The
way was open to make them a loyal opposition to the regime and for
several years they seemed to be attaining the position which they
desired.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Scholarly Revival
The third great field of development was in the realm of study and
research, especially in such fields as concerned Ukraine, its history
and culture. This was connected especially with the foundation and
development of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and its subordinate
institutions.
Ukrainian studies had developed during the nineteenth century and from
the very beginning they had played a great part in the arousing of the
national consciousness. While the scholars under the tsars were not
allowed to touch the fundamental problems in the relation of Moscow
and Ukraine and their results, of necessity, were compelled to stress
the official line of the tsarist government as to the desire of the
Ukrainian people to lose their identity in the Russian Empire, still
studies in folklore and in folk-songs could not fail to bring home the
great differences in the mentality and aspirations of the two peoples.
Ethnography could not fail to show that the customs and the manners,
the architecture and the decorations differed in Ukraine from the Great
Russian territory and the scholars, if they were sincere and careful,
could not fail to notice it and to publicize it.
As soon as the Ukrainian National Republic was set up, the situation
changed, for now there was a Ukrainian regime which was not afraid to
speak out. There began, despite the hardships and the destruction of
the civil war, a new flood of publications in all these fields. By
1918, under the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky, plans were made for the
establishment of an Academy of Sciences, its statutes were drawn up,
and a few members selected as a nucleus.
The changing fortunes of the war compelled the postponement of its
realization but the work was not really lost. Soon after the definite
formation of the Ukrainian Soviet government, the work was resumed,
with those men who had survived leading in the work.
Despite some slight interference of the Soviet authorities,
who demanded that history should be treated along the lines of
Marxo-Leninism, the Academy succeeded in remaining almost completely
autonomous. The period of the New Economic Policy, which seemed to
restore the financial position of the country and the more peaceful
life, provided a fairly favorable atmosphere. As a result the Academy
flourished and in 1924, it was even able to invite Prof. Mykhaylo
Hrushevsky, the recognized dean of Ukrainian historical studies, to
return to Ukraine and take a position in the Academy.
Hrushevsky accepted the invitation and on his return to Kiev, he
renewed the work of the old Ukrainian Scientific Society which had been
united with the Academy. As head of the Historical Section, he fostered
the creation of a large number of commissions in various branches
of study and from 1924 to 1930 he edited a journal _Ukraine_ which
speedily became the outstanding journal in the field of historical and
cultural studies. There was no period of Ukrainian history, no section
of Ukrainian archaeology, art, and ethnography which was not assigned
to some commission or group in the Academy.
At the same time the Academy was put in charge of most of the
libraries, collections and resources of the older universities on
Ukrainian territory. This had its good and its bad sides. It materially
increased the resources of the Academy and the material at its
disposal. On the bad side, it rendered more difficult the position of
the younger scholars who were seeking to start upon a career.
The various Soviet Commissars of Education had made these changes with
the idea of securing large numbers of half-trained men and women who
would occupy positions in the new state and take the place of the old
bureaucrats. They therefore turned the universities into technical
schools of a rather inferior character, unlike the situation in Russia,
where despite all the changes there was still preserved the fiction of
university teaching and research. It was made clear that the teachers
were not supposed to busy themselves with more advanced subjects for
these were now the province of the Academy. Still there was a steady
stream of young people into its influence and for several years it
could well be said that there had never been a time when Ukrainian
scholarship was so free and untrammeled.
The Academy in Kiev was, of course, the highest organ of scientific
studies but it was not isolated, for some of the academicians, like
Dmytro Bahaly, set up in Kharkiv a Chair of Scientific Research like
an institute and Slabchenko did the same in Odesa. The example of
these were followed in smaller cities and similar research centres
were opened in Poltava, Chernihiv, Nizhin, Dnipropetrovsk, Kamyanets
Podilsky, Vinnytsya, Zhytomir, Mykolayiv and Luhansk.
In the early years there was a constant effort to establish closer
relations with the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the other
scholarly institutions in Western Ukraine, and for some years there
was an active interchange of views between the scholars of the two
sections. Several outstanding Western Ukrainians were elected to
membership in the Kiev Academy and the scholars went back and forth
across the boundary with considerable freedom and cooperated in the
development of Ukrainian studies.
In the field of history and of economics, it was necessary for the
scholars to pay some slight attention to the Marxo-Leninist ideas. They
could not too openly contradict them but it was usually possible, by
the addition of a few official quotations, to speak quite plainly with
regard for scientific truth and accuracy.
Even these restrictions were far laxer when it came to studies of
language and material culture. The All-Ukrainian Archaeological Society
and the Society for the Preservation of the Antiquities of Ukraine sent
out expeditions to all parts of the country.
The studies for the enrichment of the language developed two opposing
tendencies. There was one group, including Evhen Tymchenko and Olena
Kurylo, which championed a puristic development. They rested their
studies on the older forms and the peasant dialects and sought to
remove from the language features which they felt had been erroneously
added by the literary men and the colloquialisms of the day. The
opposing school, including Ol. Synyavsky and many of the younger
men, took the opposite attitude and welcomed the innovations which
had been introduced into literature, especially from Western Europe.
The discussions revealed the wealth and the variety of the literary
resources of Ukrainian and, on the whole, broadened the appreciation of
its independent character, even though in their use of terminology many
of their words failed to come into common usage owing to the position
of scientific Russian.
At the same time the scholars endeavored to coordinate the orthography
of the language in the east and in the west, for previously there had
been considerable variation in the Galician and Russian Ukrainian. Thus
the eastern, following the Russian tradition, did not separate _g_ and
_h_ and there were other differences, especially in the transliteration
of European names into the Cyrillic.
To carry this work through there was held in 1927 a special conference
in Kharkiv. Scholars were invited from all parts of the Ukrainian
world, and after lengthy discussions there was worked out a standard
system which represented the general consensus of scholarly opinion and
opened a new period in the writing of the language.
At the same time there were published over thirty technical
dictionaries and a group of academicians including A. Krymsky, V.
Hantsov, K. Holoskevych, M. Hrinchenko and S. Yefremiv, began work
on a great Ukrainian dictionary, six volumes of which, from A to P,
were published. This was intended to be a general dictionary of the
language and to represent all regions where Ukrainian was used, without
stressing either archaism or reformation.
The development during these years was not only in the humanities but
it extended to all fields of science, especially those that had to
do with the study of the Ukrainian resources and agriculture. Young
geologists, biologists, etc. found convenient opportunities for the use
of their talents, and their studies revealed new and often unsuspected
potentialities in the country.
All this work, which was under the Commissariat of Education, was
treated kindly by the former Borotbisty and Ukapisty who were in
control of the Commissariat. At times they grumbled that more was not
being done in the field and under the principles of Marxo-Leninism, but
they did not use their power to suppress or hinder the work. In a sense
they looked at it with a certain lack of comprehension and criticism.
It is not too much to say that this intellectual and scholarly activity
proceeded outside the range of Communist interests and was allowed far
more free scope than was possible in the case of the writers or the
administration.
The only answer which the more rigid Communists found was the
establishment of a large chain of Marxo-Leninist Institutes which were
ostensibly devoted to the study of the philosophy of Communism and to
the working out of Communist sciences on the same pattern as those in
Moscow. These reflected the actual state of Communist thinking and were
really schools for propaganda and not for scientific study in any sense
of the word. They were liberally supported and they were frequently
able to secure their pick of the more talented and ambitious scholars
who were willing to rise through the established channels of Communism,
rather than by the more exacting service of true knowledge.
It was not until 1927 that Skrypnyk, with all of his Ukrainian
patriotism, hearkened to the Communist protests that there were no
Communists in the Academy of Sciences and he insisted that a certain
number of prominent Communists should be admitted. It was, of course,
done but not without grumbling, for the members of the Academy had been
very careful as to the type of man whom they elected and as to his
scholarly abilities and reputation. They felt, deservedly, that the
addition of these new members would lower the standards of the Academy
but there was no way out.
This was to be the signal for the ending of the old system of
relatively free thought. It was the first step in the approaching
changes that were to wreak havoc on every form of Ukrainian life and
bring to an untimely end the rapidly developing Ukrainian Renaissance.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mykola Khvylovy
Shumsky and Skrypnyk, as Commissars for Education, defended the
position of the Ukrainian language in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic and among the Ukrainians in the entire USSR. They worked
to break down the anti-Ukrainian attitude that had existed from the
beginning in the Communist Party of Ukraine, but as men holding public
office and busied with the political and administrative problems that
were thus raised, they did not go further. The additional step to point
out the road for this newly conscious Ukrainian Communism was taken by
Mykola Khvylovy.
Khvylovy, who was born in 1891, was already well known as a Communist
writer. A fearless author of strong convictions, he had worked his
way early in the Civil War to the position of the Communists and had
served as a commissar in the Ukrainian Communist Army. He was now one
of the recognized Communist writers and moving spirit of the leading
literary group, the _Vaplite_ (the All-Ukrainian Academy of Proletarian
Literature), the members of which were devoted to him.
Khvylovy was an ardent admirer of Trotsky and when the break came
between Trotsky and Stalin, he took the side of the former and held,
with him, that the cause of counter-revolution had triumphed and
that the rise of a Soviet bureaucracy was merely a return to the old
unhappy state. Khvylovy had become a Communist solely because of his
belief that it was only through Communism and Communist teachings that
humanity could achieve its goal of liberation and self-development and
he was impatient with anything that seemed to contradict this theory.
He was at the same time an ardent Ukrainian. He could not bear to see
the subordinate position which Ukraine and the Ukrainian Communist
Party held in the USSR and he resented the already obvious attempts
to present Moscow as the supreme representative of Communism and of a
general Communist culture.
In 1925, he began to publish a weekly pamphlet as a supplement to the
central newspaper _Visti_ under the title _Culture and Life_. In this
he advocated the development of an independent Ukrainian Communist
culture which would be distinct from that of Moscow. His first
articles, which were purely literary in character, started a lively
controversy in the press and in public meetings. It was difficult to
attack him, for he based his arguments entirely upon the official
statements of the Communist Party and he revealed the inconsistency
which existed in these official statements. The entire Ukrainian
section of the KP/b/U was aroused and so was the whole of Ukrainian
society. Here was a popular writer who dared, in the name of Ukrainian
Communism, to take the statements of the Communist Party (KP/b/U)
seriously and to draw the logical conclusions from them. These articles
he then republished in book form, _Quo Vadis_ (1925), _Thoughts against
the Current_ (1926) and _The Sociological Equivalent_ (1927).
Khvylovy’s original arguments had urged the necessity for the new
Communist Ukrainian literature to assimilate and build itself upon the
great European cultural and literary tradition as exemplified in its
greatest and noblest writers and thinkers and not to confine itself
to being, as it had been too often in the past, a mere appanage and
colony of Russia. He deplored the already evident tendency of Ukrainian
Communist literature to base itself on the pronunciamentos of Moscow
without testing and analyzing them and this led him to proclaim as his
slogan “Away from Moscow.”
“The ideas of the proletariat we all know without the guidance of
Moscow. Only the young Ukrainian nation, the Ukrainian proletariat
and its Communist intelligentsia are the true bearers of the great
revolutionary socialist ideas and they must not orient themselves on
the centre of All-Union Philistinism, on the Moscow sirens. They need
to orient themselves on themselves and Europe, but not on the Europe
of Spengler, which is declining and which we all hate, but on the
Europe of the great civilization, the Europe of Goethe, Darwin, Byron,
Newton, Marx, etc. That is the Europe that the first legions of the
Asiatic Renaissance cannot dispense with.”
In another article he wrote, “Russia is an independent country.
Independent. We too are independent. Insofar as our literature has its
own path of development, we must ask ourselves the question as to which
of the world literatures it is to follow. It is not the Russian in any
case. This is positive without any reservations. Ukrainian poetry must
flee from Russian literature as rapidly as it can. The reason is that
Russian literature has dominated us for centuries as the master of the
situation and has trained our psychology to slavish imitation. To base
our young art upon it means the halting of our development.
“The time has come to put an end to all Little Russianism, to
Ukrainophilism and to Prosvitaism (an allusion to the net of elementary
Ukrainian educational institutions existing before the Communist
Revolution), and also to ragtag Moscophilism.”
The ideas which Khvylovy expressed about literature had a far wider
significance, for they could be applied to every aspect of Ukrainian
life and activity. As the discussion shifted to the broader questions
that were involved, Stalin, who was engrossed in the struggle with
Trotsky, interfered personally. He wrote in April, 1926, as general
secretary of the VKP/b [the All Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)]
to the KP/b/U: “If the Western European proletariat look with longing
on the banner which waves in Moscow, the Ukrainian Communist Khvylovy
has nothing else to say in favor of Moscow but to urge the Ukrainian
workers to flee from Moscow. What is to be said about the other
Ukrainian intellectuals of the non-Communist camp, if the Communists
begin to speak and not only speak but write in our Soviet press in the
words of Khvylovy?”
This was the signal for a new series of attacks on Khvylovy by the
complacent russifiers in the Communist Party of Ukraine. All the
members of the Executive Committee except Shumsky joined in the
attack and so did their satellites, but Khvylovy stood his ground and
reiterated more strongly his demands for an independent Ukrainian
cultural development and repeated Trotsky’s attacks on Moscow as the
centre of the new Philistinism which had devoured the revolution.
By the end of the year, Khvylovy and the _Vaplite_ found it necessary
to prepare a formal letter of apology and self-accusation for
publication. However humble and self-accusing he was in this letter,
he was thoroughly insincere, for he had no intention of changing his
course and in a few weeks he resumed his hammering at the forces and
advocates of Moscow. He merely sought to gain time to let his words
sink in more deeply into the consciousness of the Ukrainian people.
His opponents recognized this and throughout 1926 and 1927, they
ceaselessly attacked him. In fact, at the end of 1927, at the Tenth
Congress of the KP/b/, Kaganovich declared that Khvylovy was an “echo
of the bourgeois and kurkuls who base their hopes for the restoration
of a bourgeois government in Ukraine on the forces of an armed foreign
imperialism.”
Khvylovy’s article on _Ukraine or Little Russia_ was refused
publication by the _Visti_ on the orders of the party authorities and
renewed efforts were made to silence him. This it was impossible to
do decisively until the final expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist
Party, for the leading representatives of Moscow could not be sure
until that time that many of the expressions used by the daring writer
would not be incorporated into the principles of the party itself, even
though Trotsky had never been known for any pro-Ukrainianism.
To make his cause more vocal, Khvylovy began to express his basic
ideas not only in his publicistic articles but in his artistic stories
and novels which were very popular among all classes of literate
Ukrainians. The climax came with his _Woodsnipes_, the first part of
which appeared in 1928.
This was strictly a propaganda novel written with all of Khvylovy’s
artistic skill. In this he depicts types of his Ukrainian opponents,
the Russian Bolshevists, the typical careerists, and the character
of Aglaya, the new Ukrainian type who speaks in the words and
with the views of the author. She denounces the gloomy devils
in the Moscow chauvinists who were bent upon the enslavement of
Ukraine in the name of the International. “It is the same Russian
intelligent-internationalist, who willingly talks about the
self-determination of nations ... only not of those which are in the
Soviet Union. Here it sees only followers of Petlyura and does not
notice its own interference. It here thinks that Ukrainian culture
exists ... as an Austrian intrigue. He points out to Europe the
achievements of the Russian genius and leads out into the arena
the other peoples of the Union, as the Russian tsarism maintained
its own zoo for the people it had conquered. In a word, he is an
internationalist who, behind his cosmopolitanism, preserves his own
zoological nationalism.”
The second part of the novel was completed and Khvylovy went abroad.
As a result of the storm that this novel aroused, the journal of the
_Vaplite_ was suppressed. The moment was apparently chosen in the
hope that Khvylovy would maintain his position and be forced into
emigration, from which his influence in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic
would be lessened, if not destroyed. Instead, Khvylovy promised to have
the manuscript of the second part destroyed and returned to Ukraine.
“By destroying the _Woodsnipes_ and thus buying the right to return
home ... and to continue the struggle in more limited forms,”
wrote Yur. D., in the introduction to the Salzburg edition of the
book,--“Khvylovy assured the possibility of the appearance of a numbers
of plays by Kulish, of the pieces of the Berezil, his own compilation
of the _Literary Fair_, the Ukrainian films of Dovzhenko, the
Ukrainization of the higher schools,--in a word he postponed for five
years the assassination of the great cultural renaissance.”
The other members of the _Vaplite_ joined in their own way with
Khvylovy in painting the contrasts between the high ideals set forth
in the decrees of the Communist party and the sordid reality of the
Bolshevik bureaucracy in the Ukraine, who were making no attempt to
turn the visions of the party principles into the life of the people.
All of the writers were attacked as Khvylovy and sooner or later
silenced, even though for some time they worked with him in publishing
the _Literary Fair_, a medley of works of all kinds with pungent
introductions and comments.
This tendency became so marked that in 1927, Andry Khvylya, one of the
most faithful supporters of the official line of the Party declared of
the story of Valeriyan Pidmohylny, the _Third Revolution_, “It makes it
seem as if Makhno was at the head of the revolutionary movement, that
the villagers were with him, as their earth bore them, and that the
Bolsheviks were running after Makhno and collecting cream, ... that the
Communist Party were a group of plotters, who had no connection with
the masses but through espionage were profiting by the great deeds of
other people.”
Khvylovy found another Communist ally in the person of Volobuyiv. He
was a young Ukrainian economist who utilized the materials on the
Ukraine prepared by Prof. V. Dobrohayev and published in the central
organ of the KP/b/U, the _Bolshevik of Ukraine_, a series of articles
which showed the extent of the exploitation of Ukraine by Moscow.
He proved clearly that Moscow was carrying out a colonial policy in
respect to Ukraine, instead of treating it as an equal republic. This
was a sensational revelation for the twenties. Later the works of both
Volobuyiv and Khvylovy were condemned by Moscow as anti-Communist and
Volobuyiv, shortly after 1933, was exiled to a Siberian prison.
The growing pressure upon Ukraine, the forced collectivization which
was beginning and the beginning of the great famine of 1932-3,
completed the disillusionment of Khvylovy, who up to this time had
maintained a stubborn faith in the principles of Communism and its
aspirations for a better future for the common man. His later works
made it clear that he had lost all hope that the revolution would
accomplish anything except a continuation of the streams of blood that
were beginning again to flow throughout Ukraine. Yet there was nothing
for him to do but to continue his work.
CHAPTER NINE
The Five Year Plan
Lenin and the Communists had never made any concealment of the fact
that the New Economic Policy was only a passing concession to put an
end to the stagnation and demoralization which had resulted from the
civil war and the period of Militant Communism. It was not the adoption
of a definite plan for the future nor was it a sign of a growing
rapprochement with capitalism or a gesture toward the rest of the
world, as the partisans of the Soviets abroad tried to make it appear.
With each step of the recovery of the economy of Ukraine and of the
Soviet Union as a whole, unobtrusive steps were taken to remove the
various concessions which had been made. Year by year, from about
1925, new regulations were introduced by the Commissariat of Finance,
one of the All-Union Commissariats which had the definite object
of suppressing not only the concessions but of tightening up the
restrictions on individual life and preparing the way for socialism
and communism. By one device or another, the Nepmen were broken. Now
the government forbade the state trusts to sell to them as individual
traders either raw materials or finished or semi-finished products.
Agreements which had been freely made by the government were either
suddenly cancelled or were perverted. Obviously false charges
were brought against the various individuals and they were fined
exorbitantly or they were arrested and deported. By the fall of 1927
the sector of private trade had been almost completely liquidated and
the way was open for the central government to do what it would with
the situation.
With the Nepmen disposed of, the way was open for a similar attack upon
the wealthier classes of the peasants and those who had profited by
the operation of the Ukrainian land code which, as we have seen, was
less rigid than were the similar arrangements in the RSFSR, where the
land society was organized far more on the lines of a collective than
it was in Ukraine. It was always possible to apply individually any of
the laws against the leasing of land or the employment of hired help,
for in both cases the provisions had been left vague and indefinite, so
that the authorities could act whenever they so desired. As a matter of
fact, as one of the first measures the administration of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic reduced the period on which a lease could be made from
thirteen to six years and thus it was easily possible to upset many of
the calculations that had been made by the richer and more progressive
landowners.
At the same time the closing of the official markets rendered it
possible for the government to force the peasants to dispose of their
grain at the officially pegged prices which in the grain-growing
districts were considerably lower than they were in the less fertile
areas of the north. If this did not produce the desired results, it
was equally possible to demand the grain tax in kind and to compel the
peasants to turn over, free of charge and under the guise of payments,
additional supplies. All these measures, which were introduced in many
cases personally and not by districts, caused the peasants to feel
themselves becoming steadily more impoverished and less able to resist
the demands of the government.
On the other hand, the All-Union Commissariats which took precedence
over those in the individual Soviet republics and which were, in
reality, staffed only by Russian Communists, effectively broke the
power of the localities or of the republics to have any special
voice in the management of their own affairs. This was, in its turn,
skilfully explained by stressing the superior requirements of the Union
which, on any closer analysis, turned out to be the interests of the
Russian area. Thus, at the XVth Congress of the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolsheviks), a Russian who was at the time the chief of the
Ukrainian State Planning Commission remarked in an unambiguous manner:
“It seems to me that we must assign perfectly clear tasks, to emphasize
that the national republics are to fulfill certain functions in the
economic system of our Union, and that on the basis of the fulfillment
of a certain mission, which is to be a part of the joint mission--the
industrialization of our Union--is to be founded the growth of the
economy of the national republics.”
In the next few years the sense of these remarks was to become
perfectly clear, although it was apparently not noticed even by the
more ardent Ukrainian Communists. It was to the effect that the economy
of the national republics was to be fitted into the general picture of
the Union and that the planning committees were to coordinate their
work in such a way that there would be little or no place left for the
initiative of the authorities of any republic. This did not require any
action by any of the various republican governments, for step by step
the central regime in Moscow gradually made more and more of the local
Commissariats mere operating agencies under the control of All-Union
Commissariats as these were increased in number and in scope by the
vote of the Presidium of the Union or by the decisions of the All-Union
Communist Party.
In this connection the final liquidation of the Ukapisty as a group
in 1925 was significant. They had definitely cherished the hope that
sooner or later they would be able to win recognition as a special
Ukrainian Communist Party with their own seat in the Communist
International. That was now becoming merely a subsidiary organ of
the Russian Communist Party and there was no longer any reason for
maintaining the fiction of an independent existence. The foreign
Communist Parties had definitely sunk to being poor relations of the
Russian Party or the All-Union Party. Their representatives were
exiles from their native lands under Russian protection and under
those conditions they speedily ceased to have any voice in the work
of the Comintern, which existed only as a Russian propaganda organ
abroad. It was therefore unrealistic for the Ukrainian Communists to
build any real hopes on the Comintern or on the building of a separate
Ukrainian Communism and the abolition of the Ukapisty was but a formal
recognition of this fact.
Yet this obvious truth apparently was overlooked by Skrypnyk and, to a
lesser extent, even by Khvylovy, who was absorbed in his everwidening
discussion of the cultural significance of Ukrainian Communism and the
role and mission of the Ukrainian Communists. While these were talking
and arguing about certain ideas, the central authorities in Moscow were
cleverly laying plans for removing from the field of practical politics
and administration the very basis of local government for which they
were fighting.
In the same way, reform of the administrative divisions was under way
with the concealed purpose of changing the boundaries of the local
sub-divisions, so that they would have a purely economic basis. This
was done by the elimination of the central areas, the _gubernias_
and the _okrugs_ and the introduction of a two-step system of
administration, the _kray_ or _oblast_ and the _rayon_ or region, which
was designed on a purely economic purpose and was admirably adapted for
the elimination of local and even republic feeling.
By these and other administrative measures the essential features of
the New Economic Policy were eliminated but they were done so gradually
and locally that a large part of the population only realized the
situation when the process was too far advanced to be affected by any
scattered protests.
At the end of 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and
this ended the long feud between him and Stalin for the control of the
Party. Trotsky had quite consistently fought the New Economic Policy
as a needless concession to capitalism and within a few months of his
rival’s defeat, Stalin reversed his policy and openly adopted a more
rigid system of controls similar to those which he had attacked Trotsky
for urging.
As a matter of fact the pretext for a distinction between the Soviet
government and the Communist Party was wearing thin. It was a needless
piece of propaganda, once the regime felt itself sufficiently strong.
There was no longer the need of maintaining non-party men in places
of apparent authority and with his practical sense, Stalin speedily
allowed the system to lapse into the limbo of obscurity and made the
Communist Party openly what it was, the dictatorial party dominated
directly from Moscow.
Once this was decided, the way was open for the establishment of the
First Five Year Plan which was frankly drawn up so entirely in the
central offices that the local Commissariats of the different republics
ceased to have their former significance in the state and became, for
the most part, mere subsidiaries to be watched and checked at every
turn or at every manifestation of a tendency toward independence.
There was no longer any talk of the independence of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic with its powers to maintain diplomatic representatives
abroad or with the pretense that it was handling its own affairs under
the guidance of the All-Union Communist Party. The role of the Russian
element in the state kept on increasing and once more it was possible
to revive the old arguments as to the need for definite russification.
It was relatively a simple matter for the government to administer
industry as it wished. It had retained control throughout the period
of the New Economic Policy of the leading factories and industrial
enterprises and the workers had been deprived of any of the rights
which they might have imagined themselves possessed when they took over
the plants. They were by now completely dependent for their conditions
of work and for their employment on the whims of the plant managers who
were themselves directly under the central authorities in Moscow. The
government built new plants where and as it wished and was not bound to
consult any one as to its purposes and measures.
The peasants were less tractable, for especially in Ukraine they still
felt themselves the masters of their own fate. The new philosophy
looked upon them, too, as the servants of the state and determined
to collectivize them in one way or another and to force them into
collective farms, whether they wished it or not.
In this process the first step was to break the peasant power of
resistance and the regime saw clearly that this was based upon the
financial power of the richer and the middle peasants. Whereas Lenin
and the earlier Soviet regime in Ukraine had grouped together the
middle and the poor peasants and had supported them against the richer
peasants and the large landowners, the policy was now changed and the
middle and the richer peasants were grouped together and opposed to the
poor peasants. This multiplied enormously the hostile and unsympathetic
elements of the population but by holding out tempting offers to the
poor peasants, the Communists succeeded in fanning anew the flames of
class hatred in the villages and in producing the desired effects.
Along with the adoption of the Five Year Plan, the All-Union Congress
called for the strengthening of attempts at collectivization. As a
result, the amount of grain demanded and the amount of taxes were
rapidly raised with the avowed purpose of ruining the kulaks and
kurkuls, as they were called in Ukraine. Increased pressure was put
upon all classes of the rural population to join collective farms and
in some districts this was so effective that almost seventy per cent of
the land was turned over for organization on a “voluntary” basis.
As a further step in the same direction there began in 1928 and also
in 1929 a furious attack on the richer and middle peasants and a
growing insistence on the need of “dekurkulizing” the villages. This
meant nothing more or less than the elimination from the countryside
of all those people who had prospered under the New Economic Policy.
The property of the richer and more prosperous peasants was completely
confiscated and they with their families were deprived of all their
rights, often including the house where they had lived or the shacks
into which they could crawl for shelter. With superb inhumanity the
Bolsheviks would drive formerly wealthy peasants and their families
from their homes in the middle of winter and leave them without food or
clothing and would threaten any of their relatives or friends who dared
to give them any relief.
In the first stages of the process, cases were known where some of
these richer people were moved out of the Ukraine with their goods and
cattle, but as the Communists settled down to their work, they simply
seized everything for their own use and that of the collective farms
and contented themselves with shooting or deporting their enemies,
often to the far north for work in the forests or to northeastern
Siberia for work in the mines and in the more remote parts of the
wilderness.[1]
[1] A graphic account of this dekurkulization was given in a DP camp by
Sh., a former peasant of the district of Kharkiv:
“On May 22, 1929, all my property, tools, cattle, building and clothing
were confiscated. I and my family (my wife, six small children and my
mother), were left without means of livelihood; we stayed with people
like old folks, ate what we were given, although people were forbidden
to give to us. On November 27, in spite of the fact that there was snow
on the ground and 15 degrees of frost, I and my entire family, without
clothes and half-naked, were put out of the house. Until February,
1930 I lived in another house which was half fallen down. On February
28, I, my wife and six children (my mother had disappeared; I do not
know where) were arrested and with other dekurkulized persons were
sent to the railroad station. There we were packed into freight cars
as sardines in a barrel and travelled for 11 days, without knowing
our destination. We were fed once every two days. Many perished from
cold and exhaustion. We finally reached the station of Makarikha near
Kotlas, district of Archangel, and in 40 degrees of frost, we were
detrained in the woods in the snow.
“Then all those able to work were driven to forest operations 300
kilometers from Kotlas. They drove us half shod in the intense cold.
They fed us on the way 300 grams of bread, 5 grams of barley and 3
grams of salt per person a day. Many died on the way. Many, unable to
walk further, were shot on the spot. There we cut wood and they treated
us very badly. The norms of work were abnormally high. We lived in huts
which were holes we dug ourselves. Of the many thousands of people who
came there more than half died of exhaustion, hunger and cold.
“Of the members of the families of kurkuls who remained at the station
of Makarikha, more than half froze. Among these were my sons Ivan and
Fedir; a third son Hryhory died of exhaustion. Later all the children
up to 14, including three of mine, were returned to Ukraine but I have
no further news of them. They probably perished. In 1932, first my wife
and then I escaped by hiding in cars loaded with wood. I found work in
the Don Basin. In 1937 my wife was arrested suddenly and shot in the
prison of Artemivsk in the Don Basin. I escaped because I was living
under an assumed name. Now I am a DP and living in Germany in an IRO
camp.”
They followed this up at the end of 1929 by providing for the
compulsory collectivization of all the land. Private holding of
land was abolished and so was private use. The peasants were forced
into collective farms to which they had to contribute all of their
livestock, agricultural implements and tools. Then they were left
nothing that they could call their own except a small garden plot that
was assigned to each family for the purpose of raising those types of
vegetables that it was not profitable to raise in large quantities,
because the collective farms were occupied with those types of
agriculture that were selected for them by the central authorities in
Moscow.
The immediate result differed in different places. In Great Russian
territory, where the principle of the community ownership of land
had definitely taken root, the peasants complied without too much
hesitation. In Ukraine and Kuban, where the older style of Ukrainian
agriculture had been long in vogue, the peasants became sulky. They
killed off large numbers of their cattle and livestock of various
kinds. The government, seeing this tremendous loss, then tried to
eliminate from the collectives and liquidate in one way or another all
of those who had been guilty of disobedience to the order requiring the
peasants to contribute all their wealth.
There developed almost a civil war in some sections of the country
as discontent rose and the peasants were prepared to die rather than
to yield. Nevertheless, this time the government was not prepared to
concede anything, as it had in 1921, and despite remarks by Stalin
that in some details the Communists had become dizzy from success, the
regime held its course and even continued to apply the screws more
tightly. The result was the famine of 1932 and 1933.
CHAPTER TEN
The Famine
In 1921, the great famine which had swept over Ukraine had been the
result of a failure of the crops, a prolonged drought and the excesses
of Militant Communism which had demoralized the country. The Soviets,
more or less unwillingly, allowed the despatch of foreign assistance
and this saved the lives of millions. There was to be no interference
in the punishment of the obstinate peasants this time.
In the fall of 1929, just as compulsory collectivization was being
introduced, the government in Moscow made an important change in the
agricultural set-up, for it transferred the Commissariat of Agriculture
to the central group by establishing an All-Union Commissariat which
was to be in control of all agriculture in the Soviet Union. This
meant that in Ukraine all of the work which had been previously done
by the local authorities was now transferred to Moscow. The republic
commissariats ceased to have the power to pursue individual plans for
improving the conditions of the soil, for varying the crops as their
own advisers decided or as the population felt it necessary. Everything
was to be done from the centre and the Ukrainian Soviet Government
was compelled to hand over all of its research stations and other
institutions to Muscovite control. This put a stop to the intensive
development of Ukrainian agriculture which had been fostered by the
Ukrainian land code and introduced the new system in which the peasants
were in the same position as the workers in the factories.
At the same time the central regime ceased to make public the actual
figures of production on the ground that they might betray to outside
nations important facts as to the Soviet development. From this time
on estimates and achievements were given only in terms of percentages
in reference to a prior date. Still the already published data were
so scanty and incomplete that it became increasingly more and more
difficult to secure an actual picture of the progress in the Union as
a whole and still more so in any of the separate Soviet Republics, for
the central regime rarely broke down what little information it gave
out among its constituent parts.
It was not long before another change was made in the methods of
collecting the products from the collective farms. Under the new
system, the farms did not contribute according to their crop but
according to the amount of land which they proposed to sow. This amount
was due to the government, even in those cases where there was a
complete failure of the harvest not under the control of the workers.
In other words, if a crop failed because of bad weather conditions, the
peasants were compelled to hand over just as much produce as if they
had had a bumper crop.
It can be easily seen that such a measure was merely another device for
weakening the economic position of the village and the independence of
the collective farm. At the same time the establishment of official
tractor stations in place of the old locally controlled centres which
sent crews and machines into the countryside gave the government
another weapon for the exertion of pressure upon the peasants and even
the Communists who were in charge of the farms and these crews likewise
were paid not on the basis of their work but of the theoretical area
which was to be sown. Later this was again changed to the total area of
the farm whether it was suitable for any special kind of agriculture or
not.
These measures only increased the discontent among the peasants
who once again began to limit their work to the minimum necessary
to maintain themselves on a steadily dropping scale of living. To
counter-balance this the Council of Commissars in Moscow passed a
decree in February, 1930 allowing the local authorities who were, of
course, handpicked by Moscow to resort to extreme measures against
the kurkuls, to confiscate their property and then to dispose of them
by sending them and their families to concentration camps, to special
settlements in the far north or eastern Asia or merely by expelling
them from their home district. These measures were so vigorously
applied that it has been estimated that by the end of 1932, some
2,400,000 persons had been removed from Ukraine to parts unknown. These
were naturally the more prosperous, the more progressive and energetic
persons who had profited by the New Economic Policy and had accumulated
some capital.
The forcing of the peasants into the collective farms and the
prohibition of almost all possibilities for the securing of raw
materials had a further effect. Under the older system, the Ukrainian
peasants had time, during the winter especially, to work at home and
to supply themselves most of their need for manufactured articles.
They were able to work in leather and in cloth and wood. This was now
rendered impossible, for the individual plots were too small to furnish
the necessary raw materials and the peasants were forced, if they would
satisfy their most immediate needs, to rely upon the goods turned out
by the state factories. These goods were always inferior in quality and
short in quantity, for the whole point of the Five Year Plan was to
develop heavy industry as rapidly as possible and the government took
no interest in seeing that the villages were supplied with consumers’
goods. It concentrated its attention on those branches which could
be of use in military preparations. Even when petitions were made by
the Soviets in Odesa and Kharkiv for permission to establish textile
factories, they were peremptorily told that the plan provided for the
establishment of such plants only in selected parts of the RSFSR. Thus
to the local shortage was added the costs of distant transportation,
which made the price prohibitive even for the goods that were received.
In 1931 almost the entire grain reserves were removed from Ukraine and
the peasants had nothing to carry over, and when in 1932 there came a
drought in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, the peasants had no supplies.
This did not bother the authorities. During 1931 and 1932 they
collected from the peasants all that they could. The next step was to
tighten the laws.
On August 6, 1932 the TsK VKP/b and the Soviet of Commissars issued
a decree for the “protection of socialist property.” Under this law
the stealing of a single ear of grain from a kolhosp granary could be
punished by confinement for ten years in a concentration camp. It was
so interpreted that if a peasant picked up a single stalk from the
field after the harvest, he was liable for the same punishment. In
other words, the peasant could only secure his grain legally from and
through the administration of the kolhosp.
With this law on the books, the Ukrainian collective farms could be
punished either for failing to protect “socialist property” or they
could be attacked for failing to present to the government crops and
grain in an amount equal to that foreseen by the plan. This was the
easier because there were few of the kolhosps that had been able to
sow the area required of them. Lack of intelligent and competent
leadership on the farms and the exigencies of the weather made it
almost inevitable that there would be deficiencies, especially since
the schedules were made up in Moscow and took no account of the local
conditions.
As the grain deliveries lagged, the demands increased and on January
24, 1933, the Central Committee of the VKP/b issued a new resolution
that “it was regarded as proved that the party organization of Ukraine
had not carried out the tasks assigned to it in organizing grain
deliveries and executing the grain plan.”
To remedy this, the central authorities ordered the formation of
political detachments in the machine tractor stations, “the chief basic
tasks of which were the insuring of the unconditional and immediate
execution by the kolhosps and their members of all their obligations
to the state and especially the decisive struggle with the stealing of
kolhosp property, the struggle with the manifestations of sabotage of
the income of the party and the government in the sharing of the grain
supplies and the meat products of the kolhosps.”
The leaders of these detachments were given the obligation “to secure
the constant lawful and accurate fulfilment of the laws of the Soviet
government by administrative and criminal measures against the
organizers of the stealing of Soviet property and the sabotage of
the income of the party and the government in the branch of village
agriculture.”
The machine tractor stations were staffed by men largely alien to the
Ukrainian countryside. The more fanatical Communists were placed in
these political detachments and were, in effect, told to supplement
or replace the local administration in the exercise of pressure and
terror upon both the heads and the members of the kolhosps. To aid
them in their work Moscow sent to Ukraine a Russian Pavel Postyshev as
a special plenipotentiary of the Central Committee with 7,000 party
workers from the Russian Republic.
The work of these special “commissions” and “brigades” was marked by
the utmost severity. They entered the villages, and made the most
thorough searches of the houses and barns of every peasant. They dug up
the earth, broke into the walls of buildings and the stoves in which
the peasants tried to hide their last handfuls of food. They even in
places took specimens of the fecal matter from the toilets in the
effort to learn in that way by analysis whether the peasants had stolen
government property and were eating grain. Wherever they found any, the
peasants were severely punished, while the detachments carried off not
only grain but everything edible.
The same reports came from every corner of Ukraine. “They requisitioned
everything that could be eaten” was the report from the village of
Zorich in the district of Poltava. In one village in the district of
Odesa, “they collected all the grain, potatoes, beets to the last
kilogram” and in other places they even took half-baked loaves of bread
from the stove. In at least one of these commissions, Molotov, then
head of the Council of Ministers, took a personal part.
The natural result was a famine of unprecedented severity. The villages
had been hungry in the autumn. After these searches commenced,
they literally starved. An Englishman, M. Magridge, wrote in the
_Fortnightly Review_ for May, 1933: “During a recent visit to Ukraine,
I have seen a little of the war which the Soviet government is
carrying on against the peasants. The fields were waste as in a real
war and the poverty had spread still further. On one side there were
millions of peasants with bodies swollen from hunger; on the other
side, soldiers, members of the GPU, carrying out the orders of the
dictatorship of the proletariat. They hurled themselves on the region
like a pack of locusts and seized everything edible. They shot and
hung thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they made of the
richest country in the world a melancholy wilderness.”
Reports from all sections of Ukraine have listed with depressing
regularity the articles of food that were eaten. They included grass,
weeds, bark, dead animals, field mice, dogs, cats. Finally, cannibalism
broke out and in many places sausages were found that were made of
human flesh, either of people who had died or who were killed for food.
The extent of this last is shown when in 1936, among the prisoners
of Solovki, there were three hundred twenty-five persons guilty of
cannibalism, seventy-five men and two hundred and fifty women.
An observer in the spring of 1933 gives this picture of a Ukrainian
village: “In the centre of the village, beside the ruins of the church
which had been blown up was the bazaar. All the people in it had
swollen faces, they were not talkative, but were silent and speechless.
Their movements were unsteady, for their legs and arms were swollen.
They sold or bought cornstalks, pounded corncobs, a black powder made
of Russian thistle, roots, and the lower parts of water plants. This
assortment of village wares was a diet which did not save the people
from death by starvation but merely by increasing their sufferings,
postponed it a little.”
The agronome A. S. who in March and April, 1933, was in the villages
of Izbinske and Starytsya, Vovchansky region, Kharkiv district, wrote:
“The people daily died in dozens. The corpses lay in the houses for
several days for there was no one to bury them. Pits were dug in the
cemeteries with great difficulty, large enough to hold several persons.
The corpses were piled on carts like wood and carried to the pits and
thrown in like logs without any of the customary or religious rites.
They fell as they would, head down, or on their side or standing--a
terrible sight. The gravedigger of to-day might be a corpse to-morrow.”
The bodies of the dead lay in all the villages, along the roads and
in the fields. Special brigades were formed in the villages to bury
the dead but they were too weak to collect all the corpses and these
were devoured by those dogs which had escaped being eaten and had gone
savage. The roads were deserted for it was dangerous for one or two
people to walk together because of the danger of attack by robbers who
sought to rob them or to kill them for cannibalistic purposes.
Under such conditions many of the people closed up their huts tightly,
lighted their stoves and inhaled the fumes to commit suicide.
In the spring, when those who had survived broke from the fields the
unripe ears of grain, they were seized by the government agencies
on the charge of stealing socialist and government property, while
the “light cavalry,” the armed Comsomols and the members of the
Communist Party, shot these “barbers,” as they were called in the press
contemptuously, like hares.
Thousands tried to secure work in the state agricultural enterprises
(the radhosps). The agronome B. B. wrote: “In going around the
experimental station in Poltavshchyna, I saw under a haystack a number
of people. To my questions, the manager of the station, a Russian in
origin, told me that they were peasants of the neighborhood who had
come in large numbers to the radhosp, hoping to find work and thus have
the money to buy food. Since they did not have the strength to return
home, they lay down under the haystack. Many died there and he added,
pointing to fresh earth, ‘There are the mounds where we buried those
individualists. What trouble the Khakhals have been.’”
The younger and more venturesome fled to other Soviet Republics in
search of work and food. Thousands departed from Ukraine without
permission, for this was not given, and crowded the offices of the
railroads, the wharfs and the junctions. They often found a tragic
end. Prof. O. O. tells of a case of which he was a witness. “In March,
1933, at the station in Vladikavkaz (Caucasus) there gathered a mass
of peasants with bags on their backs, waiting for a freight train.
Agents of the NKVD held them up and took away their grain. They begged
together and singly and prayed but it did not help. Then one peasant
climbed out on a high tree near the station and began to cry out about
all the horrors of the famine in Ukraine. He cursed the party, the
government, its leaders and the NKVD. A crowd quickly gathered and
soon came the agents of the NKVD who began to harangue the hearers and
urged the ‘orator’ to come down quickly, threatening him with life
imprisonment. He was immovable; then the NKVD called for the local fire
department who were told to turn their hoses on the tree. The peasant
climbed higher and then suddenly threw himself down like a stone.”
In the spring of 1933 the starving masses with their gray faces moved
into the large cities. They formed lines for the “buying of bread”[1]
or, begging, they surrounded the mills. They died by thousands in the
streets of Kharkiv, Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, and the other cities. In many
cases the police cars simply picked up the dead and dying every morning
and carried them out of the city where they were thrown into pits.
There were established in the cities and their environs “therapeutic
hospitals” near which were vans covered with tarpaulins. These were
used to collect the sufferers and the hospitals were simply places to
separate the dead and the dying.
[1] In the beginning of 1933 at the height of the famine in Ukraine,
the USSR opened shops in the cities where grain was sold at a doubled
price, i.e. commercial prices--4 karb. for 1 kg. of white and 3 karb.
for 1 kg. of black bread. The peasant received from the government
for the obligatory “sale” of grain 90 kop. for 16 kg. of wheat. These
commercial prices had to be paid for in foreign currency or in gold or
silver.
The children suffered terribly and thousands were picked up on the
streets. Parents often abandoned their children, usually near police
stations, in the hope that they would be picked up and taken to refugee
camps but here they were little better off. Prof. M. M. testified that
near Kharkiv the “NKVD opened a large children’s concentration camp,
the ‘Barracks of death’ as it was termed” and here by poor treatment
at least forty percent of the ten thousand gathered in, died.
The urban population felt the shortage because of the reduction of
the bread ration for the unemployed to two hundred grams a day. The
majority could not patronize the commercial shops for they had nothing
with which to pay and the legal allowance of other products as fat,
sugar and barley were either reduced or omitted. Even the more highly
qualified of the intelligentsia were obliged to sell all their trinkets
and gold teeth to secure some food. The prices allowed were ridiculous.
One teacher at these stores received for a silver dollar “500 grams of
sugar, a piece of soap and 200 grams of rice.”
Physicians were forbidden to enter “hunger” in the records of illness
and death. They were ordered to give as the cause of death “BBO”
(absence of white corpuscles). Sometimes it was recorded as “childish”
or “old age” weakness, “paralysis of the heart,” “diarrhea,” all
symptoms of death by starvation.
It is impossible to estimate accurately the number of deaths, for even
the indefatigable NKVD gave up the attempt to list the deaths along the
roads, in the fields, and in the streets of the cities. Villages died
out and this was indicated by the use of black flags on certain houses.
In these cases no attempt was made to keep the records in order. The
so-called “therapeutic hospitals” did not turn over their records or
admit to their files the workers of the ZATS (The Records of the Acts
of the Civil Population), who were the collaborators of the NKVD. Thus,
in one of these therapeutic hospitals in Kiev there were at least
5,000 deaths from starvation that were not recorded in the official
statistics.
Of course, none of these hardships were felt by the highly placed
Communists and party officials. They received their food through party
channels which were not accessible to the ordinary residents of the
city or the kolhosps.
It is difficult to estimate accurately the number who perished in
the famine, but it was approximately 4,800,000. This is certainly an
underestimate, although certain other calculations will place the
number between five and six million.
There is the frequent idea that the famine was specifically directed
against the rich peasants and the kurkuls. This is utterly false, for
these had been liquidated earlier. The blow of 1933 fell chiefly upon
the poorer classes who had always supported the Soviet regime and who
regarded their suffering in the beginning as a mistake which Moscow
would do its best to correct. In the same way it was the Ukrainian
workmen of the smaller cities who bore the brunt of the hardships. It
was the direct triumph of the Russian Bolsheviks over the Ukrainian
poor.
Another proof that the famine occurred in connection with the plans of
Moscow was the fact that Postyshev, besides his official post, held
that of general inspector of the Ministry of Grain Production for
resettlement. It turned out later that he was given the general task of
preparing a plan for an immigration into Ukraine from various portions
of the Soviet Union. The dislocation of the population was worked out
in detail. Millions of Russians, Byelorussians, Uzbeks, etc., were to
be sent in to complete the work of rerussification. Especial pains were
devoted to the regions close to Russia on the Left Bank of the Dnieper
and there was talk at one time of annexing to the Russian Republic the
Kharkiv-Donbas industrial region, but this did not fall in with the
plans of Stalin.
The result of the famine was the final stabilization of the collective
system of agriculture and the breaking of the old mode of life
throughout the whole of Ukraine. More than that, it established the
fact that in the economic sphere Moscow could direct Ukrainian life
as it would. It overawed the population for the moment but it did not
reconcile them to their fate and it went hand in hand with the attempt
to exterminate the old Ukrainian cultural life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Famine, the Soviets and the World
It is impossible to overestimate the significance of this artificially
induced famine in what had been one of the richest portions of the
Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Taken in connection with the
collectivization of agriculture which had served already to uproot and
exile or liquidate many of the most industrious and successful parts
of the population of the Ukraine, it was distinctly noticed that the
history of the Soviet Union had entered a new phase which might be
glossed over for public consumption but still represented a formidable
menace to the general development of the entire area.
During the years of the New Economic Policy and the period of
Ukrainization, much had been accomplished, not only to repair the
damages of the Civil War and the period of Militant Communism, but
great strides had been made in the development of Ukrainian culture.
The collectivization of 1929-31 had, in a sense, menaced some of the
economic gains but while the menace of Moscow was being felt on the
material field, it had not hitherto been regarded in the same way
culturally. It is true that there had been going on a great debate
between Khvylovy and his rivals but it is doubtful if either Khvylovy
or Skrypnyk had fully appreciated the forces that were now unleashed.
There had never been any question that every few decades Ukraine had
undergone severe droughts which had produced local famines, especially
in the Ukrainian steppes. The disorders of Militant Communism had
coincided with one of these periods and had produced the situation
in 1921-2. Still, at that time, for his own purposes, Lenin had
allowed relief to be sent from abroad to the victims. The agricultural
situation in 1931-3 was not so serious and the country might have
escaped, had it not been for the methods of the government in draining
off from the population the last possible reserves of food.
There can be no doubt that this was done deliberately, for every
measure taken by the government was intended to increase the
difficulties of the population and to prepare for the final crushing of
the Ukrainian renaissance that had been proceeding with ever increasing
force. Every measure, too, was intended to render it more difficult
for the outside world to secure any actual knowledge of the conditions
in the country until it was too late for the world to do more than
register vain protests, for it was very definitely at this period that
the censorship methods of the government and its apprehensions of what
knowledge might bring to the world actively commenced to draw an iron
curtain around Ukraine. Foreign correspondents were forbidden to visit
Ukraine on one pretext or another and they were forced to send out such
news as the government wished or to leave the Soviet Union.
The collectivization and the famine had coincided with the beginning of
the attack on Ukrainian scholarship and the arts, as we shall see, but
these attacks by their very choice of victims had been directed against
those men who had not been closely connected with the Communist Party
in the past, even though they had not been entirely hostile. Along with
the famine the tide turned, and soon the victims were those persons
who had dared to hope for an equality of treatment (with the Great
Russians) in the Soviet Union.
The famine was obviously intended not only to crush the population
already impoverished by the collectivization but to administer a sound
chastisement to all classes who were interested in the preservation and
development of local and republic interests.
The famine was at its height in the winter and spring of 1933 and was
only somewhat alleviated after the harvest of that year was brought
in. It was only natural that, despite the efforts of the authorities,
word of it would gradually seep out, in spite of the censorship. The
news was most accessible to the Western Ukrainians, for as yet all
communications had not been satisfactorily broken, and early in the
summer they began to seek permission to organize relief abroad for the
benefit of the sufferers. On July 14, 1933, such a body was already
formed in Lviv and soon in the other sections of Western Ukraine, while
their appeals were heard by the Ukrainian emigrés abroad.
In August, Theodore Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna had been convinced
of the truth of the famine and he appealed for aid for the starving.
In the same month the General Secretary of the Congress of European
Minorities published his summary of the conditions, as gleaned from
all available sources, and the League took action at its meeting
in September. In the same month the matter was brought up before
the League of Nations in Geneva and relief was referred to the
International Red Cross.
The movement spread to the Ukrainians in North America and on November
3, 1933, the sixth convention of the United Ukrainian Organizations
of the United States appealed to the government of the United States,
urging that an impartial commission be sent to Ukraine to report on the
truth of these reports.
This growing wave of protests among the Ukrainians and the emigrants
from Ukraine was met by a stony silence on the part of the Soviet
authorities, by absolute denial or by charges of unfriendly propaganda.
The Soviet government refused to lift its barrier on any visits to
Ukraine by foreign journalists or by any foreign visitors until
after the harvest of 1933 was brought in and then they induced such
journalists as Walter Duranty to recant previous statements as to the
extent of the famine and report on September 18, 1933, that the harvest
of that year was excellent “and all talk of famine now is ridiculous.”
Almost the first detailed account of an American journalist was given
by William Henry Chamberlin on May 29, 1934, on his return from the
Soviet Union, when he estimated that between four and five million
peasants were starving and he also quoted the speech of President
Kalinin of the Soviet Union, made the year before, “The collective
farmers have passed through a good school. For some, this school was
quite ruthless.”
This was a polite hint again that it had been the policy of the
government to allow the famine to run its course in the hope of
breaking any possible opposition on the part of the collective farms
and the individual peasants.
The famine then on the domestic scene marked a definite turning point,
a definite shift of emphasis in the relations between the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union, and that shift was
extended to the individual Ukrainian. Yet, the very reports that
emanated from the stricken country were not without their significance
for the world.
1933 was a fateful year for Europe. The order to apply the maximum
pressure on the Ukrainians came on January 24th. On January 28th, just
four days later and before the news could have leaked out, Kurt von
Schleicher resigned as Chancellor of Germany and was succeeded by Adolf
Hitler. Within a month came the Reichstag fire and all the turmoil
connected with the advent of the Nazis to power.
A world that had still not been fully convinced of the dangers of the
Communist regime was only too ready to magnify its benefits and its
possibilities for good as compared with the apparently more pressing
menace of Hitler. The period of the popular fronts began in all the
European countries and it coincided with the coming into power of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the American bank crisis.
Under such circumstances, the rumors of the Ukrainian famine were
heavily discounted by all except the most bitter anti-Communists
and they obtained short hearing before world public opinion. No one
wanted to believe these reports, and the troubled conditions when the
reaction to the right seemed the menace to a world desirous of peace
made it seem logical that the democratic world could secure some aid
in its struggle from the Communist regime. All the old talk of the
artificiality of the Ukrainian struggle that had circulated in 1918 was
now reburnished and repropagandized.
The result might have been expected but it showed Stalin and the
Soviet leaders that they had played their course well. They secured
recognition by the United States in November of the same year, just as
the real news of the extent of the tragedy was beginning to leak out.
Anger and disgust at Hitler was the dominant mood and behind that veil,
the Soviet leaders were able to plan their further actions.
It is hard to tell what might have been the result, had the world
awakened in that year to a realization of the dangers from the two
totalitarian leaders, who were later to unite and start World War II.
Yet already the evidence was there, if men would only understand.
In the period of Militant Communism the victims had been chosen more or
less at random and the world was largely aghast at the results, even
though they did not understand. Now, by deliberate action the same
thing was being done on a larger scale and under the guise of law and
order. This method proved successful and advanced the Soviet Union to a
place of preeminence among nations, while it enabled the authorities to
dupe many idealists in other countries.
From this point of view the deportation of the kurkuls in 1930-1 and
the famine of 1932-3 represented the use of new methods of terror as
an instrument of national policy. That policy was continued in the
massacre of the Polish officers in Katyn and the Ukrainian peasants in
Vinnytsya. It was continued in the purges that marked the thirties and
in the show political trials that have marked the history of Communist
rule in the satellite countries. They were the inauguration of a new
policy that was not to meet with failure until its extremes began again
by their ruthlessness to disturb an uneasy world in the days of the new
cold war.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Early Trials
The change of economic policy which had ushered in the collectivization
of agriculture seemed at first to offer no threat to the cultural
movement which was going on in Ukraine. Despite the open criticisms
that had been made of Khvylovy and the more secret opposition that
Skrypnyk was meeting, the cultural work continued in all its aspects.
Politically the Commissariat of Education was still continuing its
work, the new literature was proceeding with more and more important
works being produced, and outside and somewhat apart from the political
life of the day, Ukrainian scholarship was producing ever more serious
works.
No one openly thought of overthrowing the regime although latent
discontent could be discovered among the entire population. It had been
years since there had been any open opposition. The unruly leaders who
had appealed to arms had either gone abroad or quieted down and there
was no one who was even suspected of the kind of disloyalty that had
been widespread during the period of Militant Communism.
Then, in 1929, just as the compulsory collectivization was being
prepared, the Ukrainian Soviet government announced that it had
discovered the evidence of the existence of a secret society, the
Society for the Liberation of Ukraine, and it commenced a series
of arrests of some of the outstanding intellectual leaders of the
scientific world. This resulted in a public trial and condemnation
of the accused but for the most part they received relatively light
sentences.
Who were involved? For the most part they were individuals who had
played more or less important roles in the Ukrainian National
Republic, who had gone abroad after its collapse and who had been
invited back to take part in the work of the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences. The government produced what seemed to be definite evidence
against these people but the curious fact was that this evidence was
strangely inconsistent with all of their previous activity. On the
prisoner’s bench were such men as Serhey Yefremiv, the leading scholar
of Ukrainian literature and a relative conservative, the academician
Mykhaylo Slabchenko, a former Social Democrat, Prof. Joseph Hermayze,
a former member of the Executive Committee of the same party, and the
well-known writer L. Starytska-Chernyakivska, who was close to Efremiv
and who had more or less dropped out of the modern literary movement
and was living in practical retirement.
The Soviet record of the trial strongly suggests that all those
factions which, during the existence of the Ukrainian National Republic
had utterly failed to come to any agreement, had somehow or other
composed their differences in the days when Ukrainian sentiments seemed
to be dominant in the ranks of the Communist Party and when there
were outstanding Communists, like Khvylovy and Skrypnyk, pleading
the Ukrainian cause. Yet, as was to be the case in almost all of the
later trials, the court record based upon the testimony of the NKVD
did not give any clue to the treasonable acts of which the defendants
were accused and if they did, the stories passed belief. There was,
likewise, no indication of the serious plans on which the organization
was working or any details of its formal organization.
All the information that was revealed suggested that it was a
definitely anti-Communist movement engineered by a group of Ukrainian
bourgeois nationalists who objected to the Communist program of
Ukrainization. There was no hint that the accused had any connection
with the derussification program of Skrypnyk or the demand of Khvylovy
and his friends of the _Vaplite_ for the development of a definite
Ukrainian Communism. The Society for the Liberation of Ukraine appeared
like a ghost from the past and the prosecution seemed to have the tacit
support of even those elements which were working for Ukrainization.
Up to this moment the only open manifestation had been the demand
of Skrypnyk that Communists be included in the Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences but this had apparently been answered satisfactorily and,
with slight changes, the Academy was working as before. The most that
could be said was that the leaders of Ukrainian thought in the Academy
had not properly in their old age kept pace with the development of
Marxo-Leninist thought but even this was hardly sufficient for the
outburst which was loosed against a group of widely respected scholars.
Another curious aspect of the situation was that the most severe
sentences were not given to the announced ringleaders and chief
culprits but that there was unearthed on the occasion another society,
the SUM, the Society of Ukrainian Youth, which consisted of relatively
obscure students, village intelligentsia, peasants and workmen who were
shot by the hundreds and thousands without being brought before any
tribunal. The head of this group, Mykola Pavlushkiv, was involved in
the trial but once again there was no indication that any members of
the SUM had been engaged in any form of sabotage or anti-governmental
work. Members of the organization who have escaped abroad have
testified that the SUM was organized only on the basis of personal
friendships and never undertook or planned any deliberate acts of
sabotage.
The discovery of the Society for the Liberation of Ukraine with its
assumed anti-Communist tinge was the signal for the opening of a
campaign against the most respected older non-Communist members of the
Academy. The usual method was by the device of demanding Communist
self-criticism, and criticism. Its practice was brutally simple and
effective.
The Communist organs, especially the GPU-NKVD, decided which of these
scholars were to be broken ideologically (and morally) and which were
to be removed without fanfare. The latter disappeared. The former
group were forced to appear for public “self-criticism.” This was
preceded by a series of attacks in the newspapers as to the mistakes in
Marxo-Leninism which the victim had committed.
Then, on an appointed day, a meeting was arranged in a large hall to
which the public was invited by the display of large placards and other
notices. Selected speakers attacked in the most scurrilous and abusive
language various aspects of the work of the accused and ascribed to
him the grossest errors. Then came the (obligatory) speeches of those
who “wished to speak,” i.e. his collaborators and students. These were
carefully prepared by the Communist nucleus in the Academy or the
Committee. The accused was then compelled to admit his mistakes and
promise hereafter to work “in the spirit of Marxo-Leninism and the
decrees of the Communist Party.” These performances usually lasted for
two or three sessions and then the critical “testing” of the work went
on in special scientific meetings or scientific publications or in the
torture chambers of the GPU. If the accused did not humiliate himself
sufficiently or if the collaborators showed themselves insufficiently
critical, “rotten liberal,” “compromising,” “opportunistic” or
leaving “ideologically (or class) hostile loopholes,” the process
was repeated with still more bitterness against the main culprit and
his collaborators or witnesses who had attempted to defend him were
attacked with equal ferocity and their testimony was sent to the proper
places for “consideration.”
This was the treatment accorded to Prof. Hrushevsky who, in 1930, was
criticized publicly and then arrested and deported to Moscow where he
was prevented from doing any work and only after he was completely
broken was he sent to a rest-house in the Caucasus to die in 1934. With
his removal, the old historical studies almost came to an end. The
Academy was reorganized as the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic, and nearly all the work in the humanities
were stopped. The Historical-Philological Section was combined with
the Social-Economic Section and nearly all of its special fields were
abolished, while at the same time there disappeared a large number of
valuable books and collections which were ready for publication.
This destruction of the older scholars in the Academy was justified by
grouping Hrushevsky with his historical studies in the same category
of public enemies as Mazepa and Petlyura, and the three came to form a
trinity subject to constant attack. Their leading crime was declared
to be bourgeois nationalism, the object of which was to separate the
Ukrainian from the Russian people and to deny the great significance of
the teachings of Marx and Lenin.
In 1931 the Soviet authorities found traces of another organization,
the Ukrainian National Centre. This is even more mysterious than was
the preceding case, for it involved a number of apolitical figures
who were living in retirement, as Holubovych, but at the same time it
commenced the liquidation of the leaders of the former Borotbisty and
Ukapisty. Still heavier sentences were imposed upon these men and large
numbers were deported.
Then came an announcement of the extension to Soviet Ukrainian
territory of the work of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
under Colonel Konovalets, and a number of more prominent Ukrainians
were executed or deported for reasons that were never satisfactorily
explained.
At the same time the Soviets seem to have spread rumors in connection
with collectivization that there were movements for an uprising
against the regime. They endeavored to have pseudo-Ukrainian patriots
from Poland establish contacts with former officers of the Ukrainian
National Republic who had dropped into obscurity and then, at a given
signal, called for a revolt and easily overpowered their dupes.
Thus these trials eliminated from Ukrainian life the older scholars who
had been trained before the period of Communist rule. They justified in
the minds of the emigrés the correctness of their position in refusing
to listen to the blandishments of the Ukrainian Soviet government
during the apparently rosy years of the New Economic Policy, when it
seemed as if there was to be a rapprochement with the West. How far the
activity of these men, who had put themselves into the lion’s mouth
and perished, served to renew the Ukrainian courage and self-reliance
has been much debated, especially in view of the fact that they were
all destroyed as bourgeois, long before any serious danger seemed to
threaten the position of the various groups of Ukrainian Communists.
Khvylovy, despite the attacks upon him and Skrypnyk, still continued to
work for the greater Ukrainization of the population and of the cities
and, so far, he had not been subjected to any too severe criticism.
That was to come next.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Turning of the Cultural Tide
The Ukrainian Communists did not realize what they were doing when
they launched their campaign against the bourgeois intellectuals and
the aged scholars in the Academy of Sciences. For the first time since
the period of Ukrainization had started, they had definitely called
the attention of Moscow to the existence in Ukraine of a survival of
the old independent mode of thinking which had animated the Ukrainian
leaders in the struggle for an independent state of their own and they
had coined a name for it, bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism. That was to
recur again and again and lead to their own ruin.
It is remarkable that neither Skrypnyk nor Khvylovy realized this
earlier. Both men in their own way were seriously threatening the unity
of the Soviet Union, to which as an ideal they were loyal. Both men,
Skrypnyk in the political field and Khvylovy in literature, realized
the danger to Ukraine of substituting Russianism for Communism. Both
men accepted in different senses the basic ideals of Communism and
both believed in a Communist International which would offer all
peoples full rights of cultural and political development. Neither one
understood that the Comintern was a shadow structure which was totally
dependent upon the forces operating in Moscow and that the situation in
1928 and 1929 was basically different from that ten years before.
In the RSFSR the charter of liberty for the fellow travellers which
had been promulgated in 1925 was practically abolished by the granting
of extreme power of control to Averbakh and the RAPP (the Russian
Association of Proletarian Writers) which, to all intents and purposes,
was issuing orders as to how the writers should support the Five Year
Plan.
It was perfectly natural that a similar situation should develop in
Ukraine. The various schools of serious writing, as the _Vaplite_,
stood out against this regimentation and ably defended their position,
but that position was indefensible in the face of political pressure
and without being conscious of any inconsistency, Skrypnyk, as a good
Communist and a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)
was willing to exert pressure to bring the literary organization of
Ukraine in line with that of the All-Union Communist Party at the very
same time when he was deliberately thwarting the unifying tendencies of
that party.
The first sign of the changed order came with the arrest and
deportation of M. Ivchenko for his novel _Working Powers_ because it
endeavored to express in a concrete form the problem of fitting the
ideals of the various national groups into the stereotyped formula
which was now fashionable. Next came the difficulties of Khvylovy
over his novel _Woodsnipes_, despite his willingness to secure an
opportunity for further work by the destruction of the second part of
the novel.
It must be remembered that the groups which were now being attacked
were not by their essential declarations anti-Communist. They
reflected, rather, the disillusionment of many people with the
prevailing manifestations of Communism, the growing realization that
the Communist regime was not giving the people that ideal reality which
its teachings indicated they should easily win. That was the gist
of the drama by M. Kulish, the _People’s Malakhy_, which reflected
the contrast between the ideals of a high-minded but somewhat simple
village Don Quixote and the realities of life on any particular level.
This, as other of his plays, was well presented in the Berezil Theatre,
directed by Les Kurbas, a Western Ukrainian who had developed in Kiev
into one of the great producers and had pushed the Ukrainian theatrical
art to its highest development. Writings of the same character had
marked some of the early Russian works of A. N. Tolstoy after the
revolution but, being a Great Russian, he was not involved in the
endless controversies over the national questions and, like most of the
Russian authors, he was able to work out a satisfactory agreement with
the Stalin policies. This was not true of the Ukrainian authors who
felt a steadily increasing pressure from the Communist authorities.
The vast majority of the more mediocre authors who had sought to
follow unhesitatingly the party line found it very natural to form
themselves into the VUSPP (the All-Ukrainian Society of Proletarian
Writers) in 1927. They published a monthly journal, _Hart_ and the
_Literary Journal_, and to show their real internationalism they
supported a Russian proletarian journal, the _Krasnoye Slovo_ (the Red
Word) and a Jewish paper, _Di Royte Welt_. It was only natural that
this group should seek support by applying for membership in the VOAPP
(the All-Union Society of Proletarian Writers) which, of course, was
completely under the domination of the Russian Section, the RAPP. They
thus became the thinking or unthinking agents by which the Russians
could direct their blows against Ukrainian literature.
On the other hand, there came during these years a similar
concentration of those writers who rejected bourgeois ideas but who
still were working to develop a Ukrainian Communism in the true sense
of the word. Yet they were forced to shift their positions constantly
and hence there came a hectic but yet vital series of publications.
The Futurists who denied the value of the past and worked in
experimental efforts were naturally the opponents of Khvylovy and the
_Vaplite_ and finally, in 1927, they united with some of the other
radical groups (in the literary sense) to form the _New Generation_
which continually published declarations of policy and of adherence to
Communist ideas, but this group also drew upon itself the criticism
of the VUSPP because it aimed for the adaptation of literature to the
Ukrainian scene.
On the other hand, the _Vaplite_ was very soon compelled to disband.
It did so voluntarily but the bulk of the abler writers immediately
started to publish the _Literaturny Yarmarok_ (The Literary Fair) in
which, under the guise of apolitical writing, they poured out scarcely
veiled criticism of their opponents. This, too, was soon under attack
and then it was reorganized as the _Prolitfront_ (the Union of Studies
of the Proletarian Literary Front). This device was also too obvious,
for the new journal continued to criticize the Russian policy and in
1931 it was forced to disband and most of the members who wanted to
continue to write passed into the VUSPP, which, with all its rigid
adherence to the party line, could not be too sure as to what that
party line really was.
At one point in his career Skrypnyk, who was in many ways opposed to
Khvylovy, dreamed of the establishment of a Federation of the Unions
of Revolutionary Writers of Ukraine. He succeeded in forcing this
upon the Futurists and many smaller leftist groups and also the _New
Generation_, but his failure to make this real in 1931 was but a sign
of the future.
By this time the VUSPP, along with the RAPP, had become the dominating
force politically and Skrypnyk was forced to give up his endeavors and
to allow most of his Federation members to join the VUSPP. This was but
another step in the decay of all literary schools and it reflected the
period of uncertainty and of a definite degree of opposition to the
domination of the RAPP.
By the end of the twenties, the opportunities for independent thinking
in literature had grown exceedingly few and scattered. There were
still, in general, only the two currents of Ukrainian and Russian
Communism, and the former was definitely beginning to wane under the
continual attacks that were delivered both by its opponents and the
Communist Party through its official organs. Still, up until 1931,
Ukrainian literature continued to develop and the literary disputes,
often over minor points of literature, thought and culture, animated
society and lent a zest to the various writings. These now more than
ever began to reflect a growing apprehension over the conditions as
they were and the impossibility of equating the ideals of Communism and
the realities of the Russian domination of the country.
A more decided blow was given by the decree of April 23, 1932. This
ended all literary discussions and abolished all literary societies
and groups throughout the entire Soviet Union. In place of these,
Stalin announced the establishment of a single society throughout the
entire Union, the All-Union Association of Soviet Writers, and turned
this over to Maksim Gorky, perhaps the most prominent Russian writer
of the day but a man who was bitterly anti-Ukrainian and scornful of
the national cultures of all the Soviet Republics. His object seems
to have been in Ukraine to force the literature to accept the Russian
pattern. The new doctrine of socialist realism was promulgated and it
was very soon made clear that the destruction of the VUSPP and all
the old groups was not a step toward the restoration of freedom for
creation but a new move to strengthen, on a somewhat different basis,
the government’s control over everything that was published.
It was highly significant for this that at the early meetings of the
Ukrainian Section, its organizer, I. Kulyk, appeared in the uniform of
a frontier guard of the NKVD as a silent warning to all of those who
might be regarded as heretical in any sense. Furthermore Zhdanov as a
member of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party, explained the
situation. In his keynote speech, he declared:
“Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What
does that mean? What obligations does it lay upon them? It means first
that they must know life, so as to represent it faithfully in artistic
works, to represent it not scholastically or in a dead way, not simply
as an objective realism but to picture reality in its revolutionary
development. In this the truth and historical concreteness of artistic
representation must coincide with the tasks of the ideal reworking and
development of the working people in the spirit of socialism. This
method of artistic literature and of literary criticism are what we
call the method of socialist realism.”
Whatever might have been the effect of the new organization on Russian
literature, which had been handicapped by the domination of the RAPP,
its effect on Ukrainian literature could not fail to be disastrous.
In effect, it standardized all literature on the Russian model and
it indicated that henceforth literature and literary men were to be
treated as organs of the Communist Party and of the Moscow regime. It
was the definite answer to the efforts of the Ukrainian writers of
nearly all the conflicting schools to adapt literature to their own
purposes and ideals. It took away from the writers all inspiration and
desire to use their talents for their own artistic enjoyment and it
rendered it possible for the central government to abolish that sense
of republican patriotism which had been so marked during the preceding
period in all the non-Russian republics.
In place of the ideas of the old Ukrainian life which was being brought
to an end by the compulsory collectivization and the establishment
of the collective farms, in place of the old visions of the unity of
the Ukrainian people and those ideals of a new national life that had
dominated Ukrainian literature from the time of Shevchenko, in place
of the efforts to establish in Ukrainian literature all those branches
of art and culture which were stirring in Western Europe, there was
now given to the writers, young and old, the command to celebrate and
to glorify the actual process of socialist construction in Ukraine, as
elsewhere. By 1934 Kulyk, as the organizer of the Ukrainian section,
could write of the definite end of the old bourgeois nationalist
sentiment as preached by Yefremiv and of the efforts of Khvylovy to
reorient the psychology of Ukrainian literature on that of Europe.
In his article on the modern Ukrainian literature in a volume on the
_Literature of the Peoples of the USSR_ published in 1934, he could
pass over in silence, for obvious reasons, all of the great names which
had appeared during the preceding ten years and shower his praise upon
the young proletarian writers who were willing to follow blindly and,
to the best of their ability, the new course.
There were, of course, some of the older and even of the more prominent
men who were willing to compromise with the new regime. Among them
the outstanding figures were Tychyna and Rylsky. Both of them, after
consideration and treatment by the authorities, tried to bend their
works to the new ideas but there were many who were unwilling or unable
to be untrue to their artistic faith and for them there was not even
the choice of silence or writing. They were compelled to conform or
vanish and it was not long after the organization of the All-Union
Society of Soviet Writers when this was made abundantly clear.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Debacle
The Ukrainian Communists, as Skrypnyk and Khvylovy, could not fail to
be horrified at the spreading famine which broke out in the autumn of
1932 and raged throughout the winter. Whatever they might have thought
in the beginning of the compulsory collectivization, they were aghast
at its results. They could not fail to recognize that it meant the end
of the old Ukrainian life which they had tried to remodel in accordance
with their own ideals and that it meant a widening breach with the
outside world. They could not fail to see that it meant the ending of
that world Communism in which they had tried to believe and in which
they saw the hope of humanity and justice.
They could hardly fail to recognize almost immediately how they had
played into the hands of the enemies of Ukraine by their attacks on the
older scholars, for they were now to learn that they had unwittingly
forged the tool that was to be used against them.
Postyshev arrived in Ukraine in January, 1933, to superintend and make
more rigid the rules for the collection of grain. He brought with him
his own staff, his own detachments of the NKVD, and while he nominally
had the post of second secretary, he had the instructions from Stalin
that made him the complete dictator. He soon showed what that meant.
Among his earliest acts was the removal of Chubar from his post as
head of the Soviet of People’s Commissars and he replaced him with the
more pliable P. Lyubchenko, a former Borotbist. Skrypnyk was forthwith
demoted from Commissar of Education to Chairman of the Ukrainian State
Planning Commission, a position of no special importance, once the
conduct of all Ukrainian life was to be administered in accordance
with a plan drawn up in Moscow. He was replaced by Volodymyr Zatonsky,
who had been one of the foremost advocates of russification.
The axe was used still more widely on the entire Communist Party in
Ukraine. Within ten months, Postyshev removed two hundred thirty-seven
secretaries of regional party committees, two hundred seventy-nine
heads of regional executive committees, and one hundred and fifty-eight
heads of regional control commissions. Nearly one thousand prominent
Communists were removed, not to speak of lesser members. Since there
were little more than 125,000 Communists in Ukraine, it is easy to see
that a large proportion of the Party was unceremoniously eliminated.
Elimination meant not only demotion but it was practically a death
sentence, for those expelled were charged with that most serious crime
against the state, bourgeois nationalism or sabotage, and the vast
majority were either shot or deported.
Postyshev turned his attention to the Academy of Sciences which had
already been purged of its leading members. Here he found some two
hundred and fifty more who were removed on charges of Ukrainian
chauvinism or sabotage. In their place, he introduced ordinary
Communists or Russians with more regard to their reliability and their
loyalty to Stalin than to their capability or scholarly qualifications.
Postyshev’s object was the rerussification of the country, for it
had already been commented in Moscow that there were too many of the
young Ukrainians who were securing an education only in Ukrainian
without knowing the master language of Russian. Skrypnyk had paid no
attention to these complaints, for he retorted that in Moscow the young
Russians were not learning Ukrainian and he assumed that all the Soviet
Republics had the same rights. He was soon to learn differently, for
from now on Russian was to be the official language of widest use.
In every considerable city Postyshev established Russian newspapers
which had almost completely vanished during the period of
Ukrainization. He opened Russian schools in the leading cities and he
introduced Russian into all the other schools on an equality basis
with Ukrainian. He established Russian theatres in the larger cities
and sent them Russian companies from Leningrad and Moscow to show the
greatness of Russian art, while at the same time he had Les Kurbas
arrested at the end of the year and closed the Berezil Theatre, the
leading company in Ukraine, and even abolished its name as Catherine
the Great had abolished the name of the Zaporozhian Sich one hundred
fifty years before.
The fundamental object was to re-Russianize Ukraine as rapidly as
possible. In pursuance of this idea, Zatonsky even suggested that
the students should be encouraged to talk a mixture of Russian and
Ukrainian in the hope that they could thus be more quickly induced to
accept the alien tongue. That was a rash thought, for as soon as it
was reported to Moscow, there came a strong protest from Gorky that
such a procedure could only injure the purity of the Russian language
by mixing foreign elements in it. Zatonsky hurriedly withdrew his
suggestions but it was too late and only a few years later he was to
pay the penalty for his rash proposal.
It was small wonder that Khvylovy, who knew well that he was threatened
with arrest and execution, committed suicide in despair on May 13,
1933 and he was followed on July 6, by Skrypnyk who was too familiar
with the workings of Russian Communism not to realize that he would be
steadily demoted until he could be finished off without comment as a
fallen idol.
The terror and the destruction proceeded apace and after the murder
of Kirov in Leningrad on December 21, 1934, new investigations were
ordered and it was discovered that the bulk of the Ukrainian authors
were involved in the conspiracy. In a very short time their ranks
were almost completely decimated. In the same month H. Kosynka, O.
Vlyzko, I. Krushelnytsky, K. Burevy, and D. Falkivsky were shot on
various pretenses. Nearly all the former members of the _Vaplite_, the
Neo-Classicists, the groups connected with the MARS in Kiev and the
_New Generation_, were liquidated in one way or another, either by
execution or deportation and deportation was practically the equivalent
of death, for scarcely one of the deported ever returned to the Ukraine
or made his presence or his present place of dwelling known to any of
his friends.
It would be too long to mention the list of names, but among them were
all the outstanding names of the preceding years, Kulish, Yalovy,
Yohansen, Epik, Zerov, Dray-Khmara, Kosynka, Pidmohylny, Semenko,
Vuzko, etc. These men were not only put out of the way but every
attempt was made to prove that they had never existed. Their books were
removed from the libraries and bookstores and, so far as possible, even
references to them and their work were expunged from encyclopedias and
reference books and the movement which they represented and which,
but a short time before, had been patronized by the Commissariat of
Education was rendered non-existent. Only the name of Khvylovy remained
as an example of anti-Russian work and he was presented as a pupil of
Petlyura, Hrushevsky and the Western imperialists and a believer in
bourgeois nationalism, a term which was now extended to cover anything
hostile to the general line of the Party.
Faced with the certainty of sharing the fate of their colleagues, some
of even the more prominent authors began to waver. Among this number
were Tychyna and, a little more reluctantly, Rylsky. In fact, it
required a term in prison to bring the latter to an appreciation of the
beauties of the new order. Both proved themselves valuable converts,
even if they were compelled to forget all their old mannerisms and
perfections of style and produce tasteless propaganda poetry, while the
official organs boasted of their slow but steady growth in realism.
Thus, in 1934 Kulyk could say of Tychyna, “The collection of _The Party
Leads_ represents an unquestionable achievement. Nevertheless we should
be rendering poor service to Tychyna himself if we failed to point
out the uneven tenor, and sometimes even hesitation, in the artistic
expression of themes and ideas new to him. Stronger organizational
ties with the realities, emancipation from artificial, at times purely
bookish culture, such are the conditions on which depends further
progress by Tychyna along the new road chosen by this great Ukrainian
poet.” Rylsky and Bazhan were treated in the same way, while such
writers as Panch and Holovko were told it was their task to get over
the old notion that “Mother Ukraine” had the same interest in all
her sons, whether they were working men, peasants or intellectual
nationalists. Both of them later revised their works under the kind
leadership of the Party.
The proletarian writers and those who were content to write upon the
prescribed or recommended themes were in their element. Kyrylenko and
Mykytenko wrote glowingly and woodenly about collectivization and the
elimination of the kulaks, “the dregs of society.” Korniychuk, a young
dramatist, presented in his plays all the appropriate Five Year plan
subjects and gloried in the defeat of the old in the factories and on
the collective farms. Everything in the literary field that glorified
the Communist Party and rejected those ideas which had flourished under
the preceding regime was applauded and the successful received honors
and wealth and Stalin prizes for literary achievement.
The same development or retrogression was to be noted in the more
purely scientific fields, especially where they touched studies
dealing with the Ukrainian language, history or culture. Skrypnyk
had removed some of the more distinguished members of the Academy of
Science. Postyshev purged most of their followers and then he went on
to reorganize the institution in the Communist way. The Academy was
changed into a series of separate institutes, each of which was subject
only to a carefully chosen Presidium.
Then, at the end of 1934 all of those institutes connected with the
old Historical Section and which dealt with such subjects as Ukrainian
archaeology, history, history of law, Western Ukraine, etc. were
abolished. The study of the humanities was practically ended and the
old staff was excluded. There were left only institutes of language
and material culture to care for the past and all other subjects
were handed over to the network of the VUAMLIN, the reorganized
and strengthened network of Marxo-Leninist institutes, which could
serve as a more reliable means of spreading Communist doctrine in a
pseudo-scientific form. They created a new complex of societies as the
Society of Marxist Historians, all of which had the avowed purpose of
glorifying the regime at the expense of any form of scientific truth.
In the field of studies in the Ukrainian language, under the leadership
of A. Khvylya who had already distinguished himself by his attacks on
the entire process of Ukrainization, new steps were taken to counteract
all that had been gained by any school of thought.
In the beginning Naum Kaganovich had tried to show that the scholars
of the preceding period had worked under the influence of “populist”
theories of language. He was soon forced to change this to a statement
that the work had been “bourgeois nationalist,” the favorite slogan for
anything that was not Russian. In his article, _The Language Theory of
Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalism_, he wrote: “Here under the conception
of the people emerge the kurkul circles; the bourgeois nationalists
have shaped the development of the Ukrainian language on the speech
of the kurkuls.” In another passage he declared: “By this approach to
the people the bourgeois nationalists understand the removal from the
language of everything that is connected with the October revolution,
the removal of all features which bring it closer to the language of
the Russian proletariat and the workers of the other republics of the
USSR and the implanting of everything that is outmoded, conservative
and permeated with the nationalist bourgeois spirit.”
It was easy to see at what these new “scholars” were aiming. The old
arguments as to whether the local dialects of the peasants or the newer
literary language which had been developed for over a century was the
better Ukrainian were now replaced by the definite statement that the
proper form was that which was the language of the more “advanced”
classes, i.e. the Communists and their sympathizers, who were the least
connected with any special area and were the least affected by any
considerations of locality or traditional culture or usage. Even during
Ukrainization the Communists of high rank coming from Moscow had been
officially relieved of the task of learning Ukrainian. Now this was
expanded and those who, of their own volition, learned a few words were
adjudged the best authorities on Ukrainian because of their Communist
knowledge and standing.
The new authorities set themselves the task of rooting out those
attempts which the “bourgeois nationalists” had made to bring together
the Ukrainians of the east and of the west. They declared that the
preceding group had sought to bring back capitalism and to separate
Ukrainian from the “brotherly” Russian and to remodel it on Polish
and German standards. They attacked any system of orthography and
transliteration which differed from that used in Russian and in their
attacks on Polonisms in Ukrainian they went so far as to call Polish
any Ukrainian form which differed from the Russian, even when the
Polish word in fact had the same form as the Russian and differed from
the Ukrainian.
In the small dictionaries that were printed only those words were
admitted that revealed Russian relations and the academician Krymsky
once remarked of one of these that it was merely a Russian-Russian
dictionary, so far had the process been carried.
In 1933 Khvylya published a new orthography for Ukrainian. This
repudiated the work that had been done earlier to bring together
Eastern and Western Ukrainian and sought to take as the standard those
Ukrainian dialects that had been most thoroughly russianized, although
at the same time he carefully avoided explaining the policy on which he
was working.
Thus, during these years there developed a definite policy of
disintegrating the language from within. It was based very definitely
upon the old theories of the nineteenth century, that Ukrainian was
merely a corrupt form of Russian and could not have any independent
development, but such a statement which would have satisfied Nicholas
I and Belinsky was not expressed clearly. It was enveloped in a mass
of Communist jargon which appealed to the great names of Bolshevik
ideology and covered a complete ignorance of any of the facts of
language or of popular usage.
At the same time in another field Postyshev saw the opportunity to
deliver further blows under the guise of progress and of satisfying
Ukrainian aspirations. He moved the capital of the Ukrainian Republic
back to Kiev from Kharkiv. There were good reasons for this. The Soviet
regime had been established at Kharkiv, because it was nearer to the
Russian boundary and hence could more easily receive support from
Russian military sources during the civil war. Kiev, as the centre
of traditional Ukrainian life, was more liable to sympathy with the
Ukrainian national movement, as the Russians had found on more than one
occasion. Now, with the country prostrate, it seemed advisable for the
Communists to mark their triumph and endeavor to identify themselves
with the masses by recognizing Kiev.
Yet, it brought with it another blow to Ukrainian prestige. Of all the
cities in Ukraine, Kiev was the richest in the monuments of the past.
Therefore, to mark the Communist triumph, they decided to rebuild large
portions of the city and to erect buildings that would be worthy of the
new regime. It was easy to find as the proper sites the areas where the
old Kiev had stood.
From the very first days of Bolshevism and Communism, the regime,
with its atheistic trends, had devoted itself to the robbing of the
churches. Even the ikonostasis of St. Sophia had been melted down
to recover the gold ornaments with which it had been decorated. The
museums had been largely pillaged. Some of the contents had been
removed to Moscow on various pretexts, but still more had been wantonly
destroyed.
Now work began in earnest to wreck the surviving monuments of the
past. In quick succession the Communists ruined, blew up or levelled
a large number of churches which spoke too strongly of the past
greatness of Kiev and the Ukrainians. These included the Cathedral
Church of the Golden Domed Monastery of St. Michael of the twelfth
century, with a bell-tower of the seventeenth, the Church of the
Three Saints of the twelfth century, the cloisters of the Monastery
of St. Irena of the eleventh century, the finest monuments of the
period of Mazepa at the end of the seventeenth century, including
the Cathedrals of the Theophany of the Brotherhood Monastery and the
“Great Nicholas” of the Ustyno-Mykolayiv Monastery, the work of the
architect Joseph Startsev, with a bell-tower of the late eighteenth
or the early nineteenth century, the “Little Nicholas” and the Church
of St. George of the eighteenth century, a large number of structures
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the Kievan-Mezhyhirye
Monastery of the Transfiguration, the Church of Sts. Peter and
Paul in Podil of the eighteenth century, the bell-tower of the
Kiev-Kiril-Troitsky Monastery of the eighteenth century built by the
architect Ivan Hryhorovych-Barsky, the Church of Sts. Borys and Hlib of
the eighteenth century, the Church of the Birth of Christ and the “good
Nicholas,” built by Andry Melensky at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the Church of the Tithes, the celebrated statue of Samson by
Hryhorovych-Barsky, and a long series of other monuments and buildings.
Almost all of these buildings came from those periods when the
Ukrainians were the most free from Russian influence or, as in the case
of the Mazepa baroque, had the closest contacts with the West. It was a
deliberate part of the Communist attempt to rewrite the Ukrainian past.
Of course, their excuse was that the old primarily ecclesiastical
culture stood in marked contradiction to the modern era of
industrialization and collectivization, the “glorious age of Stalin”
which called for the development of a new type of architecture. Still,
in a surprising number of cases these new buildings did not make their
appearance and the ground was left empty or covered with insignificant
structures which could better have been placed on the site of those
half-ruined shacks and hovels which were the real expressions of the
Communist paradise.
The primary object was the annihilation of the Ukrainian spirit and
represented part of the broad general movement which had been launched
for the rerussification of the country and the stopping in every way
of that spontaneous outburst of development which had been called into
being by the downfall of tsarism and the founding of the Ukrainian
National Republic. The general debacle was now complete.
Within four years, before the ending of the first Five Year Plan a
situation had been brought about which seemed to the Soviet authorities
a guarantee of their final victory over what they were pleased to call
bourgeois nationalism but which was, in reality, the logical outgrowth
of the Ukrainian aspirations throughout the centuries.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Thirties
With the completion of the compulsory collectivization, the ending of
the famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance,
the country entered a new phase. The position in which it found itself
was almost the opposite of the twenties. As, at the end of Militant
Communism, the land was ruined and exhausted, so it was again. The
number of domestic animals had dropped almost to the level of the
earlier period, agriculture had been rendered prostrate, and material
well-being had disappeared as the peasants were forced to labor on the
collective farms.
On the other hand, there was none of that excitement and desire for
work that had accompanied the introduction and development of the New
Economic Policy, when the relaxation of the restrictions and the end
of the lawlessness of Militant Communism had restored the possibility
of profit to the people and when they could hope to see the results of
their own labor.
More than that, the earlier period had been marked by the belief of
the Ukrainian Communists that they could find an independent place in
the Communist International. Then there was a conflict between those
who wished a development of Ukrainian ideals and traditions, a union
of the old and the new, and those who adopted a strictly Russian point
of view. Now there was only one dominating force--the Russian. It had
been made clear that there was to be no open antagonism. The Russian
point of view was the only one that could hope to find acceptance in
Communism, the Communist International had become a mere adjunct of
the Russian Communist Party, all Ukrainian sympathies and expressions
were banned, and the Ukrainian spirit was forced on the defensive and
compelled to fight a rearguard action for maintaining its existence.
Step by step, Stalin and the Russian Communist Party was changing
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a Russian empire with
its non-Russian dependencies and, despite the Constitution of the
Union and of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it was becoming
ever more and more clear that the latter was to be treated merely as
a geographical colony of the new Russian-dominated union, with no
attention to its wishes or its needs.
This had been evident from almost the first days of the Five Year Plan.
Whatever might have been the original blueprint of this, it early
became evident that the Soviet Union could only carry out its work
of industrialization and collectivization, if everything were forced
into a single plan. In connection with this, the various republic
commissariats had been reduced to All-Union commissariats and all
independent power of judgment or planning had been removed from the
local organs. If it were a question of developing a mine, of building
a new factory, of introducing a new and more profitable crop, of
constructing a new road or railroad, the authorities of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic had to refer the matter to Moscow and receive the
permission to act from the central authorities of the Union. How could
it be otherwise?
The central government had assumed the responsibility for the
development of the country and it could not carry this on, if the
local communities or republics had the power to meet any but the most
primitive needs without consultation and permission. Moscow had decided
how industry was to be developed, which branches were to be built in
the RSFSR, which in Ukraine, which in the other republics. That plan
was almost absolute and, warned by the fate of the fallen Communist
leaders, the new successors were ultra-cautious in venturing to express
an opinion.
The OGPU had been remodelled into the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat
of Internal Affairs, but this was placed under the same Yagoda who had
been the head of the OGPU and he merely assumed greater powers and
greater responsibilities for the safeguarding of the Soviet order.
The crying need of the Ukrainians was for consumer goods. Odesa and
Kharkiv requested that they might be given the power to build textile
mills to supply the needs of the local population. The request was
denied, for the authorities had decided that the textile industry was
to be concentrated in the RSFSR. The iron and steel cities requested
that they might be given the permission to build factories to complete
the fabrication of certain delicate types of machinery. The request was
refused because it was to be only in the Moscow area that such articles
were to be made. It was to be the task of Ukraine to furnish the raw
material, the iron ore from Kryvy Rih, the coal of the Donbas, and to
prepare the semi-finished pig-iron and other forms of semi-fabricated
material that were needed by the central plants.
The plan not only provided for construction. It went even further and
specified the exact amount of products that were to be turned out by
each individual plant. While it was possible to secure some profits
from the over-fulfillment of the plan, regardless of the effect that
this might have upon the plan as a whole, any under-fulfillment was
treated as a gross failure of obligation to the state.
This led, in turn, to additional restrictions on the freedom of the
workers. Punishments were ordered for tardiness, for absence from
employment even for a single day without a satisfactory reason, for
an attempt to change the place of employment. These regulations were
not the product of the governing bodies of the republics but of the
Union authorities themselves and they were transmitted from Moscow
to the national republics through the liaison between the All-Union
commissariats and their subordinate organs.
It was the same with agriculture. Moscow knew what each collective
farm, each kolkhoz, each sovkhoz was to furnish, and woe to the group
that failed. The famine had been the result and that had been used
to break the spirit of resistance of the Ukrainian villagers. The
government specified the acreage that was to be devoted to wheat, to
barley, to all of the crops that could be raised and it did no good
if the local agronomists pointed out new methods, new possibilities.
Their actions were interpreted as merely a defiance of the central
government, a new case of wrecking or of sabotage and were treated
accordingly. In the first rush of collectivization, the network of
agricultural centres that had been developed in Ukraine during the
twenties as a responsible answer to the local appreciation of the
problem was wiped out and most of their leaders paid the penalty
for their temerity in standing by their own studies and their own
achievements.
There were only the slightest concessions finally made to the peasants.
They were allowed to sell a certain amount of the surplus grain to the
government at a somewhat higher price. The individual families were
allowed to possess about an acre of land on which they could raise
their own produce, provide their winter food as a result of their own
labors and they were allowed to sell their own produce in what may
best be described as a legalized black market, but this meant merely
the privilege to sell themselves in some of the larger local centres,
and to many of these they were allowed to go only if they secured the
appropriate permits from the heads of the collective farms and the
local representatives of the NKVD.
Even these slight concessions, while they could not bring prosperity
to the peasants on the collective farms, rendered it possible for them
to keep body and soul together despite the steadily dropping standard
of living and the almost complete lack of consumer goods which were
furnished in quantity only to the inhabitants of the more favored
regions, as Moscow and Leningrad. At the same time, the peasants
felt, ever more bitterly, the fact that the new conditions of living
prevented almost all those home manufactures which in the earlier
period had enabled them to compensate in some degree for the lack of
proper articles of industry.
There was thus a growing material impoverishment of the village
communities and a loss of the old spontaneity and gaiety that had
marked Ukraine even under the hardest conditions of the past. Attempts
were made to utilize this for forcing peasants to leave the villages
and join the industrial masses in the cities and work in the new
plants. Others were encouraged to leave the country for less populated
districts in the east, while, on the slightest suspicions, whole
families were deported, separated and exiled, and their places taken by
people from other Soviet republics who were brought in to destroy the
racial unity that formerly existed in the villages.
To appreciate the difficulties of the peasants on the collective
farms, we must remember that the involved bureaucratic system had
ample opportunities for extorting the grain for little or no payment.
Thus the Motor Transport Stations which controlled all the machinery
were supported by payments from the collective farms of grain and
other products in kind and this usually approached 21.5% of the total
yield, while the Stations took over 23% of the crop for the government.
Another 15% was retained by the kolhosp for sowing and for various
insurance funds that were prescribed by law and another 18% was kept
for fodder and for the compensation of the full-time administrators.
Thus, there was barely a quarter of the produce left to be distributed
among the working population and this was the variable quantity since
all of the payments and collections were based not on the actual
harvest but on the harvest as planned by the central authorities. Thus,
in the case of a bad harvest, the share allotted for distribution
was the part that was cut and the government, so far as possible was
provided with its expected supply.
This amount was divided among the individuals and families on the basis
of the labor days which they had worked. In the beginning a labor day
meant labor for a day, no matter how many hours of labor were required,
but even before World War II, this simple definition was replaced by a
specification that it covered a definite amount of work and it might
very easily happen that a slow or poor workman would have to work more
than one day to make a labor day. Thus, there was the possibility
of still further exploitation of the workmen, who could not know
accurately until the end of the year on what they could count.
There was also distributed, likewise in proportion to labor days, a
certain sum of money which the kolhosp received from the government
in return for the sale of grain over the amount collected for the
tax in kind. This was a negligible sum and the average member rarely
received more than one ruble per labor day. This sum was, of course,
insufficient to provide for the goods which the family needed to
purchase, and since their share of the grain was rarely sufficient to
feed them, their situation became hopeless, while of other products
the individual received about one litre of oil, fifty kilograms of
potatoes, thirty-five kilograms of fruit, and five-tenths kilograms of
meat and fat.
The real significance of these figures is shown in the prices that were
charged in the state stores. There a kilogram of bread cost ninety
kopecks, ten eggs brought eight rubles, a kilogram of beef twenty-four
rubles, and a pair of boots four hundred and fifty rubles, while a
farmer’s suit of clothes cost five hundred rubles.
It made the peasant really dependent upon his individual plot of land
if he was to secure any necessities. This was far too small and its
use was bound with many restrictions. Thus, no family was allowed
to hold more than one cow and two calves, one sow, up to ten goats,
an undefined number of chickens and up to twenty beehives. In the
beginning it was possible for the peasant to secure a certain amount
of food for these animals from the common store. He was allowed to
retain the manure and it was thus possible for him to improve his own
individual plot and thus to secure larger returns. It was a liberal
application of such principles that had rendered possible the general
improvement which was noticeable during the years 1934-6, when the
government was endeavoring to make the system of collective farms
workable.
It can be easily seen that the system of allowing individual incomes
was based on a principle opposite that of the New Economic Policy,
for it would require scarcely a legislative enactment to reduce these
amounts while the New Economic Policy presented a norm of profit to the
workers. Yet with each year, once the government was convinced of its
success, it found it possible in various ways to tap this new source of
income for its own purposes.
The favorite method was by taxation. Thus, by 1939 if we should assume
that the average family received in cash four hundred and eighty
karbovantsy, they would be required to pay twenty-two and a half karb.
in taxes, twenty in rent, fifty as a special tax and they would be
required to volunteer to take at least two hundred in government bonds.
Even this did not cover the total payments to the government. With
its usual love of double-talk and subterfuge, the government, which
controlled every branch of human activity in the USSR, talked
of the establishment of socialism and levied indirect taxes on
all transactions so that the actual cost to the villagers of any
manufactured article was about three times what it cost the government
as producer. The whole subject was carefully veiled as a state secret
to protect the Soviet Union against capitalist intrigues but the
unfortunate population were the unwilling contributors to this new
order of life.
Under such conditions it is extremely difficult to pierce the
veil of percentages as to cost and production and give a reliable
estimate as to the amount of money received for the government or the
relationship between the sums spent in maintaining the operation of the
Moscow-controlled factories in Ukraine and the amount spent upon the
needs of the population either individually, as families or as citizens
of the UkSSR or of the UkSSR as a governmental unity within the Soviet
sphere. From those figures which the Soviet has let out, it is possible
to see that the yearly budget of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic has run
from 2½%-5% of the budget of the USSR while the population has been
at least 18% of the total population.
With the villages compelled to yield the last pound of grain, etc.,
that could be extracted by force, and receiving in return almost
no manufactured goods, the position of the city workmen and the
intelligentsia was little better. The wages of the workmen were always
insufficient, the housing conditions were hardly endurable, and the
only point of betterment was that the larger places and some of the
plants especially favored by the regime received more manufactured
goods of a poor quality and at a high price which the fortunate people
might be able to secure. They could also, if they still had preserved
any valuables, dispose of them through the Torgsin stores which sold
imported wares for foreign currency and precious metals.
Of course, neither in city or village did any of these restrictions
apply to the more important Communists who possessed their own stores
at which the government supplied them with the necessary articles to
allow them to live in comfort and luxury as a welcome investment for
the regime. The line of demarcation between the poor and the rich, the
ordinary people and the Communists, became steadily greater, until it
was often wider than it had been in the old tsarist Russian empire.
All these measures which had been adopted in Moscow were in theory
supposed to apply to all sections of the USSR equally, but it was not
long before the natives of Ukraine realized that however impartial the
laws might seem, they were not sufficiently flexible to take account
of local and republican differences. The central regime was interested
in advancing and developing the Moscow industrial area and it expended
on this in various grandiose efforts, as the Moscow subway, enormous
sums of money. It is safe to say that the expenditures in that one
area alone equalled the entire budget and money spent by the central
government in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It classified Ukraine as
one of the regions where the supply of manufactured goods was less
necessary.
The crushing of the Ukrainian Communists, the suicide of Khvylovy and
Skrypnyk, no less than the complete altering of the land code of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the substitution of the new
policy of collectivization, showed perfectly well where the real power
of the USSR lay in the thirties and it was accompanied by such acts as
the introduction of Russian as the standard language of instruction and
of the army. This was followed by the formal transfer of the Ukrainian
divisions to the Red Army and a number of other acts which completed
the subordination of the UkSSR. Already in 1930, during difficulties on
the Soviet-Manchuria borders, the Red Army had not hesitated to greet
the Communist Party with news of its victories and allowed this even
to take precedence over a notice to the Soviet government which had
hitherto claimed to be predominant.
To regularize all these changes of practice, Stalin ordered a new
constitution and this was approved on December 5, 1936. It was a marvel
of inconsistencies, for it was drawn up to express all of the old
slogans and the modern facts.
Here was, in Article 17, the old talk of the right of free withdrawal
of any Union Republic from the USSR but there was also a provision
that the Supreme Soviet could annul any action of any Union Republic
contrary to its wishes. There was a careful definition of the three
classes of Commissariats but when the book is read critically it is
easily seen that the only subjects within the competence of the Union
Republics were Education, Local Industry, Communal Economy and Social
Security and their decisions could legally be upset by Moscow. Article
15 provided for almost full independence, subject to Article 14, which
made the Presidium of the Moscow Communist Party and of the USSR the
almost undisputed master of the Union Republics, and Art. XIII, read in
conjunction with this, made it possible for the Presidium to amend or
change any article of the entire Constitution.
Along with all the democratic phrases in many articles was the
confirmation of the unified state budget and the provision that any act
of any subordinate Soviet could be easily nullified.
At the moment the democratic nations of the west were so preoccupied
with the threat offered by the Nazis that they were thinking only of
efforts to make a common popular front with the Soviets. They found a
convenient possibility in the new Constitution and they were little
disposed to pay any attention to all those phrases which formally and
almost explicitly nullified all that they wished to see.
Thus, the legal basis was provided for the extension of the power of
the Moscow government. Once the new Constitution was adopted and in
force, the last rights of the Union Republics were nullified _de jure_
as well as _de facto_ and the central government was given a free hand
in its work of bending all the Union Republics to its will. The stamp
of state approval was set upon the new system of administration and
with that accomplished, there was small reason why the regime should
not go further with its work of russification and unification.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ukraine in the Late Thirties
With the power of Moscow thus defined and reasserted by the free vote
of the Moscow-controlled Communist representatives of the various
independent republics that formed part of the USSR, the way was open
for the next step. Stalin had not only prepared himself legally at
home by a clever use of contradictory expressions but he had taken
advantage of the good will of the liberals and progressives of the rest
of the world by exploiting the distrust which they felt for Hitler and
the Nazis and had infiltrated Communists through the media of popular
fronts into nearly all the governments that boasted of their democracy.
Next came the bewildering series of trials which were now held in
Moscow. In quick succession Yagoda, the dreaded head of the NKVD, was
removed from his post, arrested and shot by his successor Yezhov,
whose name was soon to become even more detested. Then, in a series
of three public trials which extended from the end of 1936 to 1938,
nearly all of the old Bolshevik leaders who had played important roles
in Soviet life during the period of Lenin’s domination were condemned
for counter-revolutionary activity and either shot or sentenced to long
terms of deportation, from which they did not return. The list included
such names as Bukharin, the former theoretician of the Party, Zinovyev,
the master of the Leningrad Soviet, the leading supporters of Trotsky,
Rykov, etc. At the same time Marshal Tukhachevsky, the commander of
the Red Army in its unsuccessful drive against Warsaw in 1920, Marshal
Yegorov, the leader of the southern wing of that army with which Stalin
himself had served as political commissar and most of the other leading
officers were removed and suffered the same fate on the ground that
they were intriguing with Hitler or with the capitalist imperialists.
The Yezhovshchina, as it was called, raged over the entire territory
of the Soviet Union and was directed with especial fury against all
the leading men in all walks of life, directors of government offices,
directors of factories, directors of collective farms, and army
officers, if they could possibly be suspected of being disloyal to the
Stalinist regime or of having independent thoughts.
The world looked on in amazement, for the Moscow regime seemed to have
gone completely mad in its accusations and suspicions. The charges that
were made against the outstanding personalities seemed fantastic and
contradicted everything that any one knew of the character and actions
of the outstanding Communist leaders. To some it seemed as if the
revolution were devouring its own children, for Stalin was executing
men for proposing policies which he had later adopted himself, as he
had in the case of both the right and left deviationists from the
general line of the party. To others it seemed an alarming example of
the infiltration of all forms of life by the agents of Nazism. All
agreed that the actions were extreme and far reaching.
As the purge of the administrative machinery went on, its range
increased. Once the head of a bureau or a factory were implicated, the
way was open to charge all of his subordinates who had not denounced
him with being accessory to his crimes and they were called up and
punished or, in rare cases, were acquitted and promoted. The storm
continued until late in 1938 when Yezhov himself was removed and
suffered the same fate at the hands of the Georgian Beria, who guided
the NKVD through World War II.
If such was the fury in the RSFSR, it can well be imagined what were
the results in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Communists had set the
fashion of accusing their opponents of bourgeois nationalism. When
the storm broke, Postyshev, who had been sent down in 1933 to wipe
out bourgeois nationalism, to organize the famine and to break the
Ukrainian renaissance, was among the first to go. He was removed and
disappeared at the hands of Kaganovich, who reemerged for a while as
the strong man of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lyubchenko,
who had been appointed the Prime Minister of the UkSSR on the single
program of suppressing Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, was called to
Moscow to confront the self-confessed leaders of the nationalists and,
on his return to Kiev, he shot himself. His successor, Bondarenko,
disappeared without a trace.
Who were these self-confessed leaders? Prominent among them was A.
Khvylya, who had been the champion of the general line against Khvylovy
and Skrypnyk and who had been the dominant figure in the attack on
the Ukrainian literary men and scholars. For years he had resorted
to all kinds of attacks to bring Ukrainian grammar and language
closer to Russian. He now “voluntarily” confessed that he had worked
against the “elder brother” and had joined and aided in developing a
secret military force several million strong for the sole purpose of
separating Ukraine from the USSR and he swore that in this he had the
active aid of Lyubchenko and most of the officials of the UkSSR. Finis.
Zatonsky, the Commissar of Education, was accused of another crime. He
had drawn years before the fire of Gorky for suggesting that a mixed
language be introduced into Ukrainian schools as the means of absorbing
Ukrainian into Russian. He had speedily withdrawn his recommendations
under fire and all had seemed forgiven. It was not, and Zatonsky
disappeared in the holocaust.
It then came the turn of the writers. Men like Kulyk, who had run
roughshod over the older writers and had called for their liquidation,
were now found guilty of bourgeois nationalism and with them most of
the authors who had emerged during the shattering of the Ukrainian
renaissance and who had celebrated the turning of the Ukraine into a
collectivized and industrialized state. Each and every one of them
confessed that they had been guilty of bourgeois nationalism and they
received the due reward for their crimes.
There was hardly a family in Ukraine which did not suffer the
accusation of at least one member. The survivors who have escaped
abroad have given lurid tales of the extent to which the feeling of
distrust and suspicion spread among all classes of the population.
Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters hardly
dared to speak to one another, to say anything lest their closest
friends and relatives had been compelled to join the NKVD or had turned
informers for their own selfish purposes. For one arrest of a guilty
bourgeois nationalist, a hundred people who had done nothing amiss and
had scarcely dared to think, were deported.
The Ukrainians were taken out of Ukraine in large masses and the
concentration and labor camps in the far north and in eastern Asia
were filled to overflowing as the Soviet authorities continued their
policy of developing their industrial centres east of the Urals. The
places in the cities and the collective farms thus emptied were, in
turn, filled by the importation of Russians and citizens of the other
Soviet republics as a means of producing not Ukrainian or Azerbaijanian
Soviet loyalty but as a means of establishing a new universal Soviet
patriotism and of separating the nationalities from their republics
which were henceforth to be mere administrative and economic
subdivisions of the Soviet state.
The object of these purges and these changes was the breaking up
of the population into individual entities who would recognize no
bonds of attachment to anything except the state. It was in a sense
the culmination of the efforts to break the sense of national or
even racial or clan unity which had been so strong in 1917, when the
Ukrainian National Republic had been established. The Communists had
broken this by playing upon class feelings; they had broken down the
class into families and now, under the relentless pressure of Yezhov,
they tried to go further and to break the families into individuals.
In line with this policy there came a complete ending to the interest
in the Ukrainians in the RSFSR and the other Soviet Republics. Skrypnyk
had done his best to educate the several million of these in Ukrainian
and at the moment of his fall the UkSSR was sending papers, books, and
theatrical companies, as well as teachers, to educate and maintain
their Ukrainian feelings as loyal members of the Soviet Union. That
was abruptly changed in 1932 and the pressure upon them to declare
themselves as simply Russians was constantly increased. It was almost
forbidden to mention the name Ukrainian in connection with the older
settlers in Kuban, along the Don, in the Green Wedge along the Amur,
etc. and it was a matter of perplexity as to what language they could
be said to speak or what dialect in connection with later studies of
the dialects of the Russian language. It was inadmissible to regard
them as speaking a peasant dialect in view of the attitude of the
authorities in recognizing some sort of Ukrainian, but it was even
worse to believe that Ukrainian could exist in those regions and so
they were simply passed over and forgotten, while the newcomers,
usually being under some kind of a ban, were simply treated as Russian
deportees.
Even this was not the whole story, for in such cities as Vinnytsya
during these same years, the population was slaughtered by the
thousands and buried secretly in carefully hidden burial places which
were then turned into parks and playgrounds to conceal the extent of
the crimes. This was repeated in many places but the situation in
Vinnytsya attracted especial attention because during the War, the
Germans found the places of burial and revealed the thousands of bodies
of the victims, many of whom had been buried alive. The extent of these
massacres was as great as was the killing of the Polish officers in
Katyn, which was likewise brought to light during the war.
By the time the census of 1939 was taken and this was the last one
published, the growth of the number of Russians and the diminution of
Ukrainians showed clearly that there was a large scale transfer of
nationality which completely reversed the figures in some sections of
Asia without regard for the natural laws of reproduction and mortality.
In this atmosphere the nature of the intellectual and literary work
in the UkSSR can well be imagined. The Ukrainian scholars were forced
to accept the full Russian theories of the Ukrainian past. This led
to a complete revaluation of all the “outstanding figures.” In 1933
the career of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was condemned on the ground that he
was a typical representative of the noble classes. By the outbreak
of World War II he became a Russian patriot for signing the Treaty
of Pereyaslav and bringing the Zaporozhian Kozaks under Muscovite
domination. It was so in every branch of historical study. In back of
the conception of the Soviet man and Soviet patriotism began to emerge
with ever greater clarity the conception of Russian patriotism, as the
doctrine of the “elder brother” who had given culture and civilization
to the other nations of the Soviet Union became clearer and clearer.
It was the same thing in language. Khvylya and his friends had been
working on a Ukrainian-Russian dictionary but this was immediately
criticized by _Pravda_ for its divisive tendencies, and the guilty
compilers were liquidated. A new edition was started in 1938 on still
a new principle. The Ukrainian and Russian words were to have the
same number of synonyms and these were to have identical value. If,
in any particular case, this did not prove to be true, it was so much
the worse for the Ukrainian. If there were more words in Ukrainian to
express various shades of one idea that there were in Russian, the
words were banned. If there were fewer, the Russian words were supplied
in order to show the influence that Russian had had upon the cultural
development of Ukrainian.
The result was the reverse of what Zatonsky had proposed. He had
suggested a mixed language with the idea that the Ukrainians would
develop by practice toward the use of standard Russian. Now the new
Commissariat of Education was introducing Russian into Ukrainian,
forbidding the use of Ukrainian syntactical constructions which had no
parallel in Russian in order to train the Ukrainians to speak Russian
by infiltrating it into their native speech. The result would have been
perhaps the same, but the important difference was that it preserved
the supremacy of the Russian language in a pure form and corrupted the
Ukrainian beyond recognition.
This procedure was too violent, even for many of the poets and writers
who were most ardent in their support of the Stalinist regime. Men
like Bazhan, who had put his pen entirely at the disposal of Moscow,
continued to use some of the forbidden words and even obtained rewards
for their obsequious phrases couched in this taboo language. It was
necessary if the whole theory of the USSR was not to fall by the
wayside and the authorities in Moscow were becoming aware of the
growing danger of Nazism.
They encouraged the writers, as Tychyna and Rylsky, to write narrative
and other poems on themes of the old hostility of the Ukrainians to
the Polish nobles and to stress the assistance which, in those ancient
days, the Ukrainians had received from the Muscovite authorities. They
fanned again the fires of the civil war when the Ukrainian Communists,
backed by their Muscovite friends and masters, were warring against the
Ukrainian National Republic and Petlyura.
In fact, during these fantastic years, Tychyna, Rylsky, Yanovsky and
similar writers, as well as Korniychuk, found it easier to maintain
their freedom by this fanning of Ukrainian chauvinism into flame than
did those authors who, following the narrow interpretation of socialist
realism, sought to trace the transformations in the contemporary life
and the growth of confidence in the Russian ideas of industrialization
and collectivization. Again and again these men were called to account
for allowing their local and national sympathies to run away with
them and to include descriptions which were perhaps nostalgic but
which could be twisted in the perverse logic of the NKVD into hidden
criticisms of the great Stalin, the leaders of the people, and the
all-wise and beneficent rule of Moscow.
By 1939, the situation in the Ukraine had changed entirely from what it
had been in 1929 when the first five year plan was getting under way.
The salient features of the Ukrainian economic life had been destroyed.
Yet Moscow was not yet satisfied.
Despite the increased taxation and the reduction in the income of the
average dweller on a collective farm, the Communist Party demanded each
year a larger part of the grain and of the cash income. The voluntary
donations for the benefit of the armed forces were increased and steps
were begun to demand taxes in kind from the returns which the peasants
received from their individual plots. Thus a peasant was required to
contribute so many eggs per year to the government, which did not
concern itself as to whether or not that peasant was raising hens. The
government demanded its share of the manure from the private cattle and
it made no difference as to whether or not the individual raised cattle.
At the same time the heads of the Communist Party sought high and wide
for misuse of state property. Again and again they discovered that on
collective farms the administration and the peasants were in agreement
that the best way to allow some improvement in the general economic
situation was to permit the peasant to cultivate and have the income
from a slightly larger plot of land. The increased productivity in this
way often more than covered the apparent use of state income from the
operations of the farm but to the leaders of the Communist Party this
was as severe an offence as was the failure to fulfil obligations, for
it dared to question the superiority of the policy of collectivization.
During 1939, the Party made strenuous efforts to stop such abuses and
they even went further in urging and commanding a reduction in the
individual allotments of land, which had been the only means of winning
even a grudging approval of the Ukrainian peasants for the idea of
collectivization.
Of course, with the outbreak of World War II there came a slight
relaxation of this pressure, for Stalin and his friends apparently
became aware that an excessive attack upon the peasantry might lead
them to make common cause with the opponents of the Soviet Union. Yet,
this relaxation of pressure was very slight during the years 1939-1941,
when the alliance of Stalin and Hitler seemed to be firm and steady and
when the Soviet Union was expanding in accordance with its own powers
and its own intrigues. In all this the Ukraine remained aloof, closely
guarded against the importation of new ideas and the population dragged
on their weary existence, scarcely daring to dream that anything could
happen to change their unhappy lot.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The First Occupation of Western Ukraine
After the expulsion of the Soviet Forces from Western Ukraine in
1920, the territory, including Eastern Galicia and Lviv, had remained
under Polish rule and had been subjected to a policy of Polonization
and colonization by a Polish population. There had been during the
period between the wars many clashes and much unpleasantness between
the two nationalities and the ill will thus generated promised
disastrous consequences for Poland in case of a new war. At the same
time the Polish domination had never threatened the fundamental forms
of Ukrainian social life, as had been the case in the UkSSR; the
Ukrainians had a certain representation in the Polish Parliament,
and they had been allowed, despite hindrances, to develop their own
economic life. With the possible exception of the one district of
Boryslav, there was very little Communism among the population, who
were well aware of the handicaps under which their brothers in the
UkSSR were living. At the same time the Nazi refusal to support the
Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine in the spring of 1939 had placed them on
their guard against the Nazis.
Thus, when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, the revolt of
the Ukrainians which many Poles expected did not take place. However,
the Polish government in the first days arrested and placed in
concentration camps many of the Ukrainian leaders but they were freed
by the rapid advance of the German forces and the Polish retreat, which
forced into Lviv and the neighborhood many thousands of refugees.
On August 23, 1939, when the Nazis and the Soviets signed a
non-aggression treaty, it was provided that if Poland were
disintegrated, Germany and the USSR would divide the territory roughly
along the line of the Narev, the Vistula, and the San. This gave to the
USSR the bulk of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian territories included
in pre-war Poland and Germany also expressed her disinterest in the
fate of Bukovyna and Bessarabia, where there was a Ukrainian population
under Rumanian rule.
The collapse of the Polish forces before the German onslaught was so
rapid that by September 17, 1939, the city of Lviv was practically in
German hands. Then the Soviets, hiding their aggressive designs under
the pretext that they were liberating their Ukrainian and Byelorussian
brothers from the rule of the Polish lords and capitalists, declared
that the Polish government had come to an end and that the Red Army was
crossing the Polish border to restore and unite the population with
the Soviet republics. At the approach of the Red Armies the Germans
withdrew, and Lviv and the old Eastern Galicia remained in Soviet hands.
The Soviet army had advanced with either anti-Polish or anti-capitalist
slogans without any opposition, but it was met with little real
enthusiasm, for the Western Ukrainians were apprehensive as to what
the future might bring. Some of the more openly anti-Communist leaders
dropped out of sight or made their way into German-occupied territory.
The bulk of the population remained passive, for they remembered
the Russian invasion of 1914 and knew what those Ukrainians who had
cooperated suffered when the Austro-Hungarian government returned the
next year, and they could not believe that this time the Soviets would
be any more fortunate.
The first days of the occupation were devoted to a conscious
Ukrainization of the territory. The bulk of the population assisted in
rounding up of the Polish police and security forces which had made
themselves objectionable during the Polish domination, and without any
hesitation unfurled the old Ukrainian blue and yellow national flag.
The co-operation of the old Ukrainian political leaders was politely
rejected but there was a large number of young, educated Ukrainians
without special political experience whose aid was welcomed.
The old newspapers ceased at once to appear, but the new occupants
started in all of the main cities new Communist newspapers as the _Free
Ukraine_ in Lviv and the _Soviet Ukraine_ in Stanyslaviv. They allowed
also a Communist Polish newspaper the _Red Flag_ and a similar paper in
Yiddish.
The old officials were at first encouraged to return to their posts,
whether they were Polish or not but in a very short time they began to
disappear and they were replaced by Ukrainian-speaking persons, some
from the neighborhood and some from eastern Ukraine. At almost the
same time, while preparations were begun for the proposed plebiscite,
the authorities quietly picked up and incarcerated most of the old
political leaders, especially those of the UNDO, the Ukrainian National
Democratic League, the representatives of those parties that had sought
a normalization of relations with the Poles.
In the same slow and unobtrusive way the Polish police of the different
cities were replaced by a “national militia.” This was composed of
armed groups of young men who more or less volunteered for the work
of maintaining order. The Ukrainian and the Jewish organizations
tried to bring these self-appointed groups under control but this
proved a difficult task for, in many cases, the new Soviet authorities
had encouraged some of the more lawless and tumultuous elements to
undertake the work so as to profit themselves by the resultant chaos
and to facilitate the calling in of their own people.
This era of anxiety on the part of the population and of extreme
moderation on the part of the occupying forces lasted for almost
a month, while preparations were being made for the election of
representatives of all organizations, factories, and groups to a
National Assembly for the consideration of reunion with the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic. Meetings were held everywhere, at which
attendance was compulsory, and everywhere there was expressed by
selected speakers the gratitude of the people for their liberation
from the Polish lords and the imperialistic capitalists. Khrushchov
and other high functionaries arrived from Kiev to conduct these
elections and to superintend the preparation of the lists of
delegates. Yet it was almost at once noted that while there were a
few well-known persons on the various lists of delegates, the vast
majority were either completely unknown or were definitely recognized
as representatives of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic or of the occupying
forces.
The election on October 22 was carried on in the regular Bolshevik
fashion with no opportunity for any choice of candidates. Over 90% of
the people were marshalled to the polls and it was made clear that they
had no choice but to approve the selected list. The response was, of
course, practically unanimous and the next step was then in order.
On October 26, the National Assembly met in Lviv. The delegates, acting
under definite orders, elected a presidium which included Stalin and
the officials of the UkSSR. The first act was to pass a resolution of
gratitude to Stalin and the Soviet leaders for their liberation of the
country. Then there were a few laudatory speeches and the resolution
was adopted to apply for membership in the USSR, to nationalize trade,
industry and the banks, to divide the land of the state, the large
landowners and the church among the landless and poor peasants, and to
send a delegation to Kiev and Moscow to ask for the incorporation.
All this was a cut and dried performance to satisfy the Communist love
of paper democracy and to justify their occupation of the country under
the guise of liberation. There was no discussion allowed and once again
the resolution was accepted unanimously.
On November 1, the selected delegation met Stalin, and the Presidium of
the USSR in Moscow formally welcomed the liberated brothers and annexed
their territory to the UkSSR. It was noteworthy that the action of
Moscow completely overshadowed any reception at Kiev but this was only
natural in view of the nature of the entire enterprise. There were none
of those demonstrations that had marked the union of the two sections
in the Ukrainian National Republic in 1919, when the vote and the union
represented the will of the people.
Once these formalities had been accomplished, the Soviets felt free to
act and, at a steadily increasing tempo, they went through in a few
months a refined version of what they had accomplished in the eastern
Ukraine in the course of twenty years. At first their actions were
moderate but with the passage of time they began to develop and to
reveal those tendencies which had marked their course in the east.
The first task was the reorganization of the country geographically.
On September 28, they had come to a new agreement with the Germans,
whereby Germany had given up her claims to Lithuania in return for
the area between the San and the Buh Rivers. So the Soviets assigned
Wilno and its territory to an independent Lithuania; they annexed the
region further south to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
and the rest to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This left
to the Germans four sections of Western Ukraine, Kholmshchyna,
Pidlyashshya, Posannya, and Lemkivshchyna, which were included in the
Polish Government General and were governed directly by the Nazis, who
allowed the appointment of a Ukrainian Central Committee to represent
the Ukrainians before the higher authorities, especially in question of
relief, etc.
The Soviet territory was divided into six districts with their centres
at Lviv, Drohobych, Stanyslaviv, Ternopil, Rivne and Lutsk. Each
of these was then divided into rayons or regions with about 25,000
population. The centres of these regions were often small towns but the
division was made quite arbitrarily and each centre was amply provided
with bureaucratic machinery.
The economic condition of the country was extremely bad and the only
saving feature was that the harvest had already been gathered, so
that there was a good chance for a large part of the agricultural
population, even of the poor, to survive during the winter. Yet the
influx of refugees fleeing before the German advance filled the cities
and the severance of connections with the west prevented the arrival of
any more manufactured goods or supplies and, of course, none came from
the east.
On the contrary, there came a new swarm of Soviet officials who were
themselves amazed at the wealth of goods in what, to the natives,
seemed impoverished markets. They brought with them liberal sums of
money to buy whatever they wished and they were the more favored
because the Soviets equated in value the Polish zloty and the Soviet
karbovanets. When we take into consideration the fact that prior to
the war a pound of meat in Poland cost four zloty and in the UkSSR
twenty-five to thirty karbovantsy, the vast purchasing power of the
Soviet officials can be seen. Then in December, to ruin the native
population, they arbitrarily stopped the zloty as legal tender, so
that the Ukrainian population lost everything, except those fortunate
persons who had succeeded in exchanging their Polish money for German
marks by clandestine trade across the border.
This swarm of officials was of various kinds. Those who were attached
to fields like military affairs, the railroads, the posts and
telegraphs, etc., i.e. those branches which were directly under the
All-Union Commissariats, made no concealment of the fact that Russian
was from now on to be the chief language. Other sections which were
under the Commissariats in Kiev first adopted Ukrainian as their
official tongue, but by the middle of 1940 they, too, had passed over
to the use of Russian, exactly as had been done in all the offices in
Kiev.
By the end of November, when the supplies in the stores were already
becoming exhausted, the actual work of nationalization commenced. The
former owners were often thrown out, if their establishments had been
of any size, and as former wealthy individuals they were refused food
tickets and other privileges on the ground that they belonged to the
non-laboring element and were enemies of the people. This meant that
they were compelled to sell upon the black market everything that
they had been able to save or which they possessed and which had not
been confiscated, and during the winter many of them, like the Polish
landowners and the police who fell into Communist hands, were deported
under atrocious and inhuman conditions to Kazakhstan and Central Asia
to disappear.
On the other hand, the Soviets introduced at once the idea of dining
halls for the workers and special stores for Communists and higher
functionaries where they could secure easily and cheaply whatever there
was to be obtained in Western Ukraine.
At the same time the nationalization of the land was commenced and this
gave a good excuse for the elimination of another class of formerly
prosperous people, whether they were Poles or Ukrainians. At first
this was carried out along the lines of the Ukrainian land code of
1922, for the authorities were eager to get crops in when spring came.
Still, during the summer of 1940 they began to urge the formation of
collective farms. The peasants in some of the more backward regions
listened to these ideas willingly, but in the better areas where
agriculture was on a far higher and more efficient plane than in large
sections of eastern Ukraine, they were very cool and meetings had to
be postponed again and again if disorders were to be averted in the
middle of the war. Still the Soviet authorities felt that they could
waste some time until a real peace was restored and their hands were
definitely free.
In regard to the educational establishments and all questions of
organization, they acted without delay. In the first days of the
occupation, the Soviet commissars seized the property of the Shevchenko
Scientific Society and prevented all further work by confiscating the
building and its contents and preventing all further publications. On
January 14, 1940, they forced the complete self-liquidation of the
Society. The president, Prof. Rakovsky, at once fled to the west and
during the next uncertain months a large part of the active members
made their way to Krakow in the Polish Government General, where they
endeavored to resume their work. The Society was then turned into a
branch of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR and was placed under the
control of the administration in Kiev, while part of its collections
and its work was placed under the University of Lviv, which was now
ostensibly Ukrainianized and given the name of Ivan Franko, the great
Western Ukrainian scholar and writer. This was not for long, for very
soon here, too, the lecturers to win Soviet approval began to switch
over from Ukrainian to Russian.
All other societies of every kind were abolished and fitted into the
Soviet scheme of things. The cooperative network, especially such
great societies as the Maslosoyuz (Dairy Cooperative Society) and the
People’s Trade were made governmental organs. Various firms were
turned into branches of one commissariat or another. By the spring,
while there had not yet been a full communization of the country, the
process was well advanced and no resident of Western Ukraine could
doubt as to the future of the area.
In Eastern Galicia, where the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite
was the predominant religion, the Metropolitan Archbishop Andry
Sheptytsky was not personally touched. He was placed under more or
less surveillance and found it impossible to exercise his normal
activity. However, all the religious schools and seminaries under his
charge were closed, the church and monastic lands were seized, and
all ecclesiastical printing was suppressed. Finally, the clergy were
compelled to hand over to the representatives of the government all the
baptismal and other records which were incorporated in the work of the
ZATS, the Soviet bureau of vital statistics. The clergy were treated as
a non-working class and were thus deprived of all means of livelihood,
except for the free-will offerings of their impoverished parishioners.
In the eastern sections, where the Orthodox Church predominated, the
same regulations were put into force with the additional proviso that
the clergy had to transfer their allegiance from the Polish Orthodox
Church to the locum tenens of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of
Moscow. This was a first step in improving relations between the locum
tenens and the Soviet government and in making the authorities of the
Russian Orthodox Church a definite instrument of the government in the
spreading of Russian Communism.
On the other hand, there was a considerable patronage of Ukrainian
art. Certain scholars were rather favored. The Ukrainian theatre was
supported on a more liberal scale than it had been under the Polish
rule and there were in some quarters hopes that there might be a happy
future. It was again a short dream, for as 1940 came to a close, there
began again the insistent but unobtrusive attempts at russification.
Russian theatrical companies began to visit Lviv and other cities.
The publications of the publishing firms of Lviv fell off and once
more they found it necessary to produce Russian books. The libraries
were carefully purged of those authors who had fallen under the
displeasure of Moscow during the crushing of the Ukrainian renaissance
and their works were forbidden, just as in Eastern Ukraine. The books
that were sent from Kiev were chiefly in Russian. Furthermore, those
authors, poets, and artists who were still in Western Ukraine now found
themselves regimented. They were given elaborate projects but they
found that their success depended upon their ability not to express
themselves freely but to satisfy the demands of the Soviet authorities.
As a result many of them endeavored to get, in one way or another, to
the west where even if they were under Nazi rule they still had more
possibilities at the time than they did under the highly organized
system sponsored by Moscow.
It was thus abundantly evident that the “liberation” of Western
Ukraine was but the exchange of one master for a still sterner rule.
The realization of this fact came quickly and it very soon evoked a
corresponding reaction which began to unite the entire population,
the more so as even those few Communists in Western Ukraine who had
remained true to their convictions were now seized by the Soviet
authorities and punished on the ground that they were Trotskyists
or were believers in one of the various deviations from the general
line of the party. There were to be no Communists except those who
had passed through the Soviet training school and those people who
had believed that their Communist faith would be of profit to them
found themselves in as wretched a position as had Eastern Ukrainian
Communists like Khvylovy and Skrypnyk who had gained nothing by their
independence, except death and destruction.
Thus, by the spring of 1941 conditions in Western Ukraine were rapidly
assuming the same form that they had taken in the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic. Any hopes that there would be any exception or any
toleration for the area were once and for all annihilated when the
Soviets attacked Finland and, still more, when, in the summer of 1940,
they absorbed and turned into Soviet Republics the three Baltic states
of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Soviets were shown clearly to be
on the march and it was for the people to protect themselves as best
they could.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Western Ukrainian Reaction
To appreciate the next step in the relations between the Western
Ukrainians and the Soviets, it is necessary to go back and look briefly
at the conditions that existed under Polish rule. The two peoples were
distinctly hostile but their relations were very different from those
between the Eastern Ukrainians and the Russians.
The old Austro-Hungarian Empire, unlike the Russian, had not denied the
existence of a Ukrainian people, even though it had not favored their
development save as a counterbalance to the Poles in Eastern Galicia.
Yet there was a considerable number of Western Ukrainians who had been
trained to fill the lower offices in the old Hapsburg system. They had
the right of voting for the provincial diets and when the Hapsburg
Empire disintegrated, they immediately voted for the establishment of
a Western Ukrainian Republic. When this failed to establish itself and
to win recognition by the Western powers and the League of Nations, the
vast majority of the Western Ukrainians under the leadership of the
UNDO voted for representatives to the Polish Parliament and continued
the struggle in a legal and parliamentary manner to win rights for
themselves.
A minority which was finally organized into the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists under Col. Evhen Konovalets continued the
illegal and revolutionary struggle through sabotage and terroristic
attacks on outstanding anti-Ukrainian Poles. It was in vain that the
Polish government endeavored to suppress this group by the forced
pacification of Eastern Galicia and by other violent tactics and, after
the murder of Colonel Konovalets, his place was taken by Colonel Melnyk.
In 1932, in connection with the suppression of the Ukrainians in the
UkSSR, the claim was advanced that the OUN had commenced work in
eastern Ukrainian territory. However that might be, the small group
continued to operate in Poland. It trained young men in secret military
organizations, in operating without detection, and in undercover
political education. In this work it was opposed and imitated by some
of the legal political bodies, usually of a more leftist but still
anti-Communist type, which likewise prepared their own cadres of
semi-trained men who would be ready to act, if need arose.
The events of 1939, with the rise and fall of the independent
Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, won many adherents to these groups and
organizations, and after the outbreak of the war and the occupation
of Western Ukraine by the Communists, the latter advertised their
existence by their talk of an active Ukrainian underground.
With the first months of the occupation the network of these groups
spread throughout the country but even under these conditions there
was little or no cooperation between them and similar Polish groups
which persisted in maintaining the Polish supremacy and waited only
for the Soviet defeat to reassert their hegemony in the area. Some of
the leaders went abroad and there was considerable confusion aroused
in their ranks but, by the spring of 1940, when the full weight of the
Soviet changes was beginning to be felt by the population, the attitude
changed toward these groups and they began to be looked upon as the
leaders of the Ukrainians who objected to the introduction of the
Communist regime.
The general turmoil that existed with anti-Nazis fleeing to the east,
the outstanding Ukrainians trying to get to the west, the sending of
members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to the villages as teachers and
the general disorganization, gave them relatively good conditions for
developing and making their principles and knowledge available to the
villagers. These were made aware of the fact that any opposition to the
new regime would be instantly punished and as their normal pre-war life
was now converted into a criminal existence, they showed themselves
more ready to cooperate.
Unfortunately, during this preliminary period discord broke out in the
OUN. One faction under Stepan Bandera objected to the leadership of
Colonel Melnyk and demanded the change of several prominent leaders.
When this was refused, a split came in the organization with Melnyk at
the head of one faction and Bandera in control of the other. It is very
possible that this split was the result of German intrigue to prevent
the formation of a strong Ukrainian movement but it had the result of
weakening it, even though both Bandera and Melnyk fell into German
hands and were imprisoned during the rest of the war. Their followers
continued and intensified the feud and even came to armed clashes.
Both factions of the OUN and similar groups strengthened themselves
first along the borders and commenced to smuggle arms and ammunition
from the west, so as to be prepared to act in case there came an armed
clash between Germany and the USSR. Then, as the months passed, the
network extended further into the country and the OUN became organized
on a territorial basis under a Country Executive and the Country
Leader, who were assisted by expert advisers on military affairs and
propaganda.
While the two imperialistic powers were still friends, there was
little possibility for open sabotage. The chief work of the Ukrainian
patriotic underground was the spreading of the national spirit,
the encouraging of the spirits of the oppressed, and the secret
education of the masses in the hope of later action. They sought to
counter-balance the Soviet propaganda and their efforts to enlist the
young people in the Komsomols and train them as Communists. They worked
upon some of the eastern Ukrainians who were moved by the Soviet regime
to the west and they brought it about that some of these remained
behind and joined their ranks when the break finally came in 1941.
Despite the efforts of the leaders to hold their followers in check,
they were not always successful for some of the younger members were
so enraged by the Bolshevik tactics that they could not be restrained
from attempting individual acts of reprisal. These usually failed and
involved not only the punishment of numbers of the innocent but also
called the attention of the Communist leaders to the existence of the
organizations and made them more vigilant in tracking down suspects.
Some of the members, to secure more adequate military training, even
enlisted in the Red Army, sometimes with the approval of the heads of
the underground but this proved an expensive process, for the alerted
Communists usually moved these candidates for training well to the east
where they would be harmless in case of a general conflict. Numbers of
them were sent to the Bashkir ASSR and to the central Russian areas.
By the spring of 1941 there were many members of these underground
associations hiding in the forests of Eastern Galicia and Volynia and
the Soviets sent out armed detachments to pursue them and to locate the
caches of arms which they had not only smuggled in but had taken from
the Poles during the last days of the Polish opposition and which they
had seized from small and often unsuspecting Soviet detachments. These
searches often resulted in armed clashes in which the Red forces often
emerged victorious, thanks to the ever greater numbers of soldiers who
were assigned to them.
The work of the courriers between the different units and sections
became more arduous and dangerous as the Soviets tightened their
control over the population and strengthened the border guards on
one pretext or another. What had once been a relatively open border,
the area between Sokal and Turka, was now guarded by barbed wire and
the Ukrainian population, which was suspected of complicity with the
underground, was removed.
In the same way, the Soviets prepared one device after another to
attack the Executive of this underground movement. They succeeded three
times in capturing and trying many of the leading members and in the
spring of 1941 they were starting a fourth trial in which they hoped
to assert their power and to crush the movement finally. Yet, their
plans for this were finally upset by the opening of hostilities between
Germany and the USSR.
It was no easy task to organize this movement under the very eyes
of a ruthless invader. Many of the agents who were engaged in it
fell into the enemy hands and were executed ruthlessly. It was still
harder to bring together the groups that were working for the various
Ukrainian parties and to arouse them to a realization that, in the
face of the threat from the east, those differences which had seemed
so important during the parliamentary struggle against the Poles
were to be forgotten in the face of the common danger to all those
things which the various parties had in common. Yet they persevered
despite heavy losses and by the spring of 1941, while their position
still seemed hopeless, they had succeeded in creating a nucleus of
organized opposition to Soviet rule which was really widespread and
had some repercussions in the ranks of the Red Army, especially among
the eastern Ukrainians and some of the other non-Russians who had been
mobilized and sent for service in the area.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania
The agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union had stated that
the former was not interested in the fate of Bukovyna and Bessarabia,
both of which contained a large Ukrainian population. It was therefore
obvious that once the Soviet hands were freed from the Soviet-Finnish
war, they would endeavor to acquire these additional territories.
In both Bukovyna and Bessarabia the Ukrainian cause had been less
developed, although there had been far more work in Bukovyna than in
Bessarabia, which had been under Russian rule. The Ukrainian uprising
in Chernivtsy had not been successful in 1918 and when the territory
was added to Rumania, that country put a stop to all Ukrainian work,
including education although a Ukrainian theatre had developed and
there was considerable secret work being done.
As a result, there was a sense of stagnation which was very different
from the situation in the lands under Poland. There was less sense of
coordination and when in June, 1940, the Soviets requested Rumania
to hand over the new provinces, Rumania had only to submit. Most of
Bukovyna and the part of Bessarabia inhabited by Ukrainians were
annexed to the UkSSR. The rest of Bessarabia was added to the Moldavian
ASSR, which was later raised to the dignity of a Union Republic and
intended for propaganda use against Rumania.
The Soviet policy was then much the same as it had been in the area
taken over from Poland. There was the same amount of propaganda
declaring the “liberation” of the country from the Rumanian nobles
and from international capitalism. There was the same voting for
annexation to the USSR, the same enthusiastic reception in Moscow,
and the same process of nationalization, of the arrest of outstanding
figures, and the same destruction of the established forms of life in
both areas.
The Soviets were, however, less advanced in these provinces for the
application of their system required time and their stay in the area
was eight months less than it was in the territory taken from Poland.
The anti-Communist leaders fled either into Rumania proper or Germany
or made their way to the Polish Government General in Krakow. On the
other hand, despite the attempts to seal off the country, the OUN found
ways of extending its influence into Bukovyna and appealed to the more
alert classes of the population.
In general the Ukrainians in these two areas formed rather a secluded
enclave in the general mass of Ukrainian history and they did not play
a role in proportion to their numbers. They thus scarcely enter into
the account, although for a while, in 1941, there was organized a force
of some 2,000 who sought to impede the Rumanian return to the country.
Yet, their opposition was fruitless and when they endeavored to cut
their way out, they were either destroyed by the Germans or dispersed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The German Attack on the Soviets
During the period from 1939 to 1941, the German policy toward those
Ukrainians who had escaped from the Soviet occupation into the Polish
Government General was not too severe. It was possible for the
Ukrainians in Krakow and elsewhere to carry on a considerable amount of
educational work, to form themselves into relief organizations and, in
general, to work for the establishment of normal relations.
When the breach between the two totalitarian states came on June 22,
1941, the Germans pushed ahead rapidly not only in the Baltic area but
also in Ukraine. By June 30, they had occupied Lviv with the aid of
some Ukrainian units, both from Carpatho-Ukraine and from Galicia.
During these days the Ukrainians had high hopes that the Germans would
seriously liberate them from Bolshevik tyranny and wherever they had
the slightest possibility, they endeavored to seize the cities so as
to put a stop to the massacres which the Communists were perpetrating
before they fell back. In some places they were successful but in Lviv,
the Communists killed over 10,000 prisoners, before their bloody regime
could be brought to an end.
In the first days of the war, although there were no clear promises
made to the Ukrainians, the impression grew that there would be
established some form of a Ukrainian administration. The political
leaders set up a Ukrainian government and appointed Yaroslav Stetsko as
the first head of the state on June 30, 1941. A short time later this
was broadened by the appointment of a Committee of Seniors under the
leadership of Dr. Kost Levytsky, who had been the Prime Minister of
the Republic of Western Ukraine in 1918. These developments had the
support of Metropolitan Sheptytsky, although he knew that they did not
yet rest on organized public sentiment.
It was well recognized by the influential Ukrainians that the situation
was very different from what it had been at the end of the Hapsburg
monarchy, but they went through the motions of setting up a government
on the possibility that the Germans would allow them some real
concessions and that it would be mutually advantageous to be already
prepared for all eventualities.
It is perhaps possible that a part of the German armed forces looked
with a certain toleration at these developments, for at least a part
of the officer class realized that the task of the German government
would be greatly facilitated, if they were able to normalize the
situation and win some support from the population, as they had in
the Polish Government General. This did not suit the Nazi element who
believed that the advance of the German forces was only to secure more
_Lebensraum_ for Germany. This faction struck and struck hard at the
new regime and secured the arrest of Stetsko, Levytsky, Bandera and
Melnyk, all of whom were taken to prison in Germany where they were
kept for nearly four years.
The arrest of the leaders, while it was a crushing blow, still was not
completely fatal. The advance of the German troops was so rapid on the
way to Kiev that the Ukrainian leaders continued for some months to
inspire the population not to resist the Germans, the more so as the
western regiments of the Red Army surrendered in large masses. Thus
when Kiev fell, some 675,000 of the Red Army surrendered with scarcely
a blow.
On the other hand, the Soviets attempted to devastate the country
before they withdrew, shooting the Ukrainian intelligentsia
indiscriminately and trying to seize as many as they could for
evacuation beyond the Urals. They demolished factories, tried to remove
finished articles and mined the cities before they abandoned them.
Then, when they exploded the mines, they spread the story that the
total work of demolition had been carried on by the Germans.
On August 1, the Germans made a new division of the country and
assigned the whole of Galicia to the Polish Government General. At the
same time they returned Bukovyna and Bessarabia to Rumania and then set
up a new section around Odesa under the name of Transdnistria which
they likewise placed under Rumania. It was in vain that the Ukrainians
who tried to organize their own national rada in Kiev protested against
such actions, for their protests were not received and the Nazis went
on with their policy of ignoring all the wishes of the population.
Later in the month, the Germans established the Reichskommissariat of
Ukraine and placed it under the control of a fanatical Nazi, Erich
Koch, who set himself during the next years to crush anything and
everything that was done to aid the Ukrainians and to win for himself
the detested title of the butcher of Ukraine.
In the early months of the German occupation and especially during the
period of rapid military movements, much was done for the rebuilding of
the country after the ravages of the Bolsheviks. Nearly 115 Ukrainian
newspapers were established, plans were made for the opening of schools
and during the transition from the military rule to the rule of Koch,
the Ukrainian agents were in the front ranks of the German army,
spreading their propaganda and trying to rouse the population against
the Bolsheviks.
Yet this work did not please the Germans. Everywhere in eastern Europe
the old governments that had been suppressed by the Bolsheviks tried
to recreate themselves but everywhere there came the arrests of these
leaders and their deportation, so that it was not many months before
the sober thought of the liberated peoples turned against the new
occupants and the people realized that their hopes were going to be in
vain. By the end of 1941, it had been made clear to them that there
would be no relaxation of the pressure exerted upon them.
In the Reichskommissariat which, in fact, represented little more
than the right bank of the Dnieper area, for the army retained the
control over the regions to the east of the river, it speedily became
impossible for the Ukrainians to improve their own condition. The
Germans were guided by a strictly logical program. Inasmuch as all the
land was organized in collective farms and the title to these rested in
the Soviet government, they as conquerors merely took over the land of
their defeated rivals. They continued the same kind of collectivized
agriculture, since it brought them the greatest advantages and they
had no intention of doing anything for the Ukrainian population. Koch
made it clear that the Ukrainians had no rights that the Germans were
bound to respect. Their property was not theirs but it was reserved
for Germans and once the system was in the saddle, as shown by Koch’s
Twelve Commandments for the regulation of the relations of the two
peoples, he did everything to destroy completely the Ukrainian
intellectual life.
By the winter of 1941-2, the Germans in Kiev were executing Ukrainian
writers as O. Teliha and Dr. Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych, who were accused
of plotting against the new masters. Soon there began extensive
deportations of Ukrainians to Germany for slave labor and the number of
victims from the ranks of the cooperatives rapidly grew.
These German actions naturally roused the Ukrainians to a more vigorous
opposition and resulted in the formation of numerous armed bands which,
from secure hiding places in the forests and swamps, raided German
convoys and at times extended their open control over large areas of
the country. Among the first of these bands to appear was that of
the Polyssian Sich under the command of Taras Bulba--Borovets which
operated in Polissya and Volynia. Other significant and important
movements were started by the followers of Bandera (the so-called
Banderivtsy) and of Melnyk. Yet these groups were not alone for almost
spontaneously there sprang up many other local units, all interested
in the same goal of Ukrainian independence. Some of these units were
organized primarily to fight against Soviet irregulars. Others had seen
from the beginning their most dangerous foe as the Germans but whatever
their origin, the overbearing brutality of the Germans swung these
groups to a determined warfare against them.
This process continued during most of 1942 with the Ukrainian forces
taking over more and more control from the Germans, menacing their
lines of communication and rescuing young Ukrainians who were being
deported for labor service in Germany. It was during this year that the
leaders came to feel the need for closer cooperation and a unification
of their efforts. This was hard to achieve and there were even
clashes between different groups of Ukrainian patriots. Yet, toward
the beginning of 1943 the more important groups had effected a rough
union in the U. P. A., the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which took on the
characteristics of an organized military force.
By the middle of 1943 this army had acquired considerable strength and
it was able to deal shattering blows to isolated German detachments and
to drive out both the local German administration and any Red partisans
that tried to operate in the area around the Pripet marshes. In May,
1943, they were even strong enough to ambush and kill the head of the
Nazi S. A., Viktor Lutze, in the neighborhood of Kowel-Brest Litovsk.
The policy of the U. P. A. was to destroy the local German
administrations which were scattered in the smaller communities and
to avoid battle with the greater concentration of forces in some of
the leading centres. In this way the Ukrainians were able to take over
the practical administration of large parts of the Ukraine and to
restore a considerable amount of normal life, while they checked the
deportation of thousands or released them from the slave trains. The U.
P. A. during these years had its own training schools, it set up on a
small scale its own factories for arms and some of the most necessary
manufactures, and it governed with the approval of the Ukrainian
population.
At this period it had its own printing presses and put out a large
number of journals and books of various kinds. These were not only in
Ukrainian but, as the U. P. A. grew in size and strength, it attracted
the attention and won the sympathies of all the other nations oppressed
by the Russians. It formed units of Byelorussians, Azerbaijanians,
Uzbeks, etc. and finally on November 21, 1944, it called the First
Conference of the Oppressed Peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia, which
was attended by some thirty-nine delegates representing thirteen
peoples. The Germans tried to break this up but they were unsuccessful
and the police battalion which was assigned to the operation was
destroyed. Out of this Conference developed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of
Nations which adopted as its program, “Freedom to peoples, freedom to
the individual.”
It would take too long to describe the actual nature of the military
operations which the U. P. A. carried on. At the height of its power it
controlled more than 200,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory and
numbered some 220,000 soldiers divided into four main bands: the U. P.
A.-North, operating in Polissya and northern Volynia; the U. P. A.-West
in Eastern Galicia and Kholmshchyna; the U. P. A.-South in northern
Bukovyna and the provinces of Kamyanets Podilsky and Vinnytsya; and
the U. P. A.-East north of Kiev and Zhytomyr. There were separate
detachments in most of the cities and important towns.
To oppose its operations, the Germans resorted to mass executions and
on more than one occasion detached forces of one or two divisions to
try to destroy its centres. These attempts failed and the U. P. A. by
its constant efforts played an important part in isolating the German
forces, upsetting their communications and sapping their strength. All
this was very costly, for after every major blow the Germans executed
large numbers of innocent Ukrainians as their one weapon against the
movement.
At first there was relative peace in Galicia, but in the summer of 1943
a Soviet partisan detachment entered the province. The Germans took
little action and the U. P. A. came to the support of the population
and soon had established strong centres in the Carpathian Mountains,
where the difficult terrain facilitated their maintenance of strong
positions.
The Germans in the beginning did not want to admit that their policy
toward the Ukrainians had evoked such a strong response. Koch and his
associates were only too willing to believe that the Ukrainians were an
inferior race, undeserving of education or of consideration and they
went out of their way to label the U. P. A. the product of Communist
intrigue and a movement of support for the Jews, etc.
In general, the military unification of the armed groups proceeded
more rapidly and favorably than did the political concentration. Here
the followers of Bandera established in March, 1944, a temporary
committee and at a general assembly in June appointed a Supreme
Council of Ukrainian Liberation (the UHVR) which assumed the
functions of a government. At the same time, through the agreement
of the representatives of the Ukrainian National Council in Kiev,
the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv and the National Council
of Carpatho-Ukraine, there was formed in September in Kiev the
All-Ukrainian National Council (rada) which appointed as its president
Prof. Mykola Velychkivsky, the Rector of the Kiev Polytechnic. This was
rather under the control of the Melnykivtsy, and was opposed to the
UHVR. Yet these differences tended to become academic, in view of the
strengthened position of General Taras Chuprynka, the commander of the
U. P. A.
The opposition of the U. P. A. to the German forces was therefore in
a sense an opposition behind the lines. It had been facilitated by
the German tendency to base their hold on the country through various
strong points, while their main forces were advancing to the east and
fighting against the Red Army. With the German defeat at Stalingrad in
the RSFSR, they began a new retreat and this brought the Soviet forces
back into the picture and placed new burdens upon the U. P. A.
In Galicia there had been formed with German toleration a regular
Ukrainian division, the Galician Division, on the condition that it
would only be employed against the Bolsheviks and would be maintained
as a distinct unit. Yet the Germans had no intention of allowing this
division to gather strength. They soon replaced the higher officers
with Germans and officially called it the 14 Waffen Grenadier Division
der Waffen SS., even though in no other case were Slavs of any kind
assigned to the SS. This division took part in some battles with
the Bolsheviks in the Carpathians. With the breaking of the German
front, the German military men made renewed efforts to enroll this
division and to create other units in a regular Ukrainian army under
General Shandruk but it was already too late. There had been too much
bad blood created during the earlier years when the Nazi commanders
expressed their contempt for everything Ukrainian to accomplish
anything in the hour of German defeat. Germany had lost her chance and
in the last days of the war, the Galician Division made its way to the
west, surrendered, and was interned in Italy.
The development of the U. P. A., with its constant warfare against the
Germans, was a clear result of the German fantastic attitude, with
all of its arrogance. Had they been willing to cooperate in the first
days of 1941, they might easily have secured considerable resources
in men and supplies from these people who had been suffering under
the Bolsheviks. They avoided any such action and it was their own
stubbornness that kept them from receiving the help which they might
have had. For years they did not want any assistance from the Slavs and
by the time that they had learned their lesson the war was so nearly
over that they could not profit.
Yet the German defeat did not produce peace. No one of the Ukrainians
doubted that the receding of the German wave would produce a new Soviet
invasion and as the Germans retired to the west, the U. P. A. and its
associated organs prepared for a new struggle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Return of the Communists
The struggle of the U. P. A. against the returning Communists was no
less bitter than the struggle with the Nazis but it was under very
different conditions and the forces involved were more unequal. In the
first place, the bulk of the fighting came after the conclusion of the
hostilities of World War II and at a time when the Sovietophilism of
the Western democratic powers was at its height.
The Nazis were during the entire period engaged with the Soviet forces
beyond the borders of the Ukraine and while they attempted to maintain
their position in the Ukraine, they frequently counted upon their
ability to hold the chief road junctions and communities and exerted
less effort to keep their garrisons in every separate village. The
Soviet policy was to master the entire country and subject every aspect
of Ukrainian life to their own power and control. They could therefore
the more easily rely upon the use of overwhelming forces and endeavor
to maintain a steady and never-ending pressure, while at the same time
they could invoke every weapon in their propaganda arsenal to blacken
their opponents in the mind of the democratic world.
Then, too, with the ending of formal hostilities there was no longer
the possibility that the U. P. A. by its attacks upon one of its
enemies could secure the weapons that would serve it in good stead
against the other. This had been a marked feature of the earlier
campaigns, for the Soviets had reconquered Kharkiv in the late fall of
1942, only to lose it in early 1943 and to recover it again later in
the year. The Red Army recovered Kiev on November 6. In the spring of
1944 the Germans were forced to evacuate Lviv but they recovered the
city and held it until the end of July. Thus, during this period of
German retreat, the U. P. A. had been able to acquire large stores of
munitions, which they could not hope easily to replace, once the major
hostilities were over.
It was very soon evident that the efforts of the U. P. A. against the
Soviet forces would take quite a different shape from their attacks
on the Nazis. In the last stages of the war Stalin had organized many
of the mobilized Ukrainians into various Ukrainian armies, so as to
give the Western powers the idea that the Ukrainians were loyal to the
Soviet Union. This added elements of a civil war to the struggle and
the members of the U. P. A. decided to reduce their efforts against
these Ukrainian forces of the Red Army and to substitute propaganda for
a free Ukraine. In this respect they met with considerable success and
through their masses of printed material and through personal contact,
they more or less neutralized the Ukrainian divisions of the Red Army.
Instead, they concentrated their efforts against the NKVD detachments
which were brought in from remote parts of the Soviet Union and in
which the Russians formed the predominant personnel. It was the NKVD
and the staffs of the Motor Tractor Stations who were now the chief
part of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus in the country and so the
U. P. A. devoted its chief interest to working against these and
to encouraging discontent on the collective farms, for the war was
scarcely over when it was made clear that conditions were to be even
stiffer and harder than they had been in the past.
The war in the Ukraine had reduced the population to still worse depths
of poverty than had been the case after 1918. Nevertheless, almost at
once the villages were expected to make liberal gifts of grain to their
beloved Stalin and the elder brothers, the Great Russians, who had, in
the words of Stalin, won the victory over the Nazis and who would still
protect them from the capitalists and warmongers of the West.
The events of the last months of fighting had shifted many of the
organized forces of the U. P. A. to the Carpathian areas and this
section which had struggled for its freedom against Hungary in 1939,
now received a new master. As soon as the Soviet forces entered the
region in the autumn of 1944, they immediately began a campaign to
liberate this area from Czecho-Slovakia and reunite it to the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic. It was the same old story carried on in the
same way as in 1939. There was a mass of petitions apparently prepared
by the native population asking for liberation, but these were in
reality the work of a handful of carefully selected Communists.
They speedily reached their goal and on June 29, 1945, President Benes
of Czechoslovakia recognized the justice of their claims and by an
agreement handed over the entire province which was duly reunited with
their brothers in Moscow. This brought together under the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic nearly all the Ukrainians, except a few who
were still living in Poland and in a small stretch of territory which
the UkSSR voluntarily ceded to Poland to satisfy the increasing claims
of the Polish Communists and their needs in their efforts to cement
their power in that state.
At the same time the realization by the Soviet authorities of the
seriousness of the situation offered by the U. P. A. and the unrest
among the Ukrainians led them to act on both the foreign and the
domestic front. On the former they mobilized all of their friends and
dupes abroad to stress the connection of the U. P. A., the “Bandera
bandits,” and the Nazi criminals and they achieved considerable success
in closing the eyes of the west until they had won considerable
victories over the various U. P. A. groups, for too many Western
leaders failed to see the inconsistency that they preached. At one
and the same time the Soviet authorities boasted of their complete
control of the territory of Western Ukraine, thanks to the love of
the population for the Red Army and in almost the same breath they
declaimed against these armed forces which were holding up the advance
of the Red Army and the NKVD in the very areas where the people were
thirsting for liberation.
On the domestic front in the autumn of 1945 they sent a large force
of men into the Carpathian area under the command of Khrushchov as
Premier of the UkSSR and General Ryasny, the Minister of War, to
endeavor to suppress these bands. Despite unprecedented torture of the
population, the Soviets found that their progress was not so great as
they had expected, for few of the Ukrainian units in their forces were
enthusiastic about the campaign, when they saw the measures that the
government was taking against their own families.
In the spring of 1946, they made another attempt, this time using
some fifteen divisions of NKVD troops from the Far East, Siberia and
Leningrad under the direct control of General Colonel Moskalenko. The
authorities had been goaded to this renewed demonstration of force by
the fact that the town of Stanislav in the Carpathian area had been
seized by five battalions of the U. P. A. on October 31, 1945 as a
discouragement to the Ukrainians to participate in the Soviet elections
called for February 10, 1946. Despite the efforts of the Soviet guards,
a considerable portion of the population failed to vote and when the
attacks upon them were pressed, a detachment of the U. P. A. succeeded
on May 3, 1946, in ambushing Moskalenko and killing him and his chief
aids. This ended another campaign and still left the U. P. A. in
control of parts of the Carpathian area.
In addition to these operations on purely Ukrainian territory, the U.
P. A. undertook several raids across the borders in order to encourage
dissatisfaction with Soviet rule among some of the neighboring peoples.
Thus they established contact with similar groups in Slovakia,
Byelorussia and Lithuania, while others cut their way across Hungary
into Yugoslavia to join forces with the opponents of Communism in that
area.
The raids into Slovakia were especially successful throughout 1945
and 1946 and were continued on a smaller scale during the next years.
They served as an encouragement for the anti-Communist elements of
the population and, of far more importance in the long run, they
attracted the attention of Western journalists who for the first time
began to realize the extent of the discontent that prevailed in the
Soviet Union. More than that, with every step to the West, they were
brought closer to the Western Zones of Germany and Austria and several
well-armed detachments have during the past years fought their way
into the American Zone, laid down their arms and surrendered. These
brought the first really definite information to the West and while
they have not received the attention that they deserved, they have
undoubtedly encouraged the almost frantic desires of the Great Russian
emigrés to pretend that they have an efficient underground operating at
home.
The result of these raids produced an impression even upon the Czechs.
Before the Communist coup d’état which placed the Communists in
control of that country, the Czech Minister of War under Dr. Benes was
approached by the Soviet authorities and asked for joint action with
the Soviets and the Communist Poles to check the opposition to Soviet
rule and to project joint operations on a large scale.
On March 29, 1947, General W. Swierszczewski, the Communist Polish
Vice Minister of War, was killed near the town of Baligrod. This
again was too startling a revelation of the discontent and on May
12th of the same year, the three governments of the USSR, Poland and
Czecho-Slovakia concluded a treaty of mutual assistance against this
movement.
Faced by the increasingly organized power of the Communist regimes,
the U. P. A. has been obliged to proceed with more caution and it has
largely replaced mass movements with operations on a smaller scale
with the idea of keeping alive a spirit of resistance within the
country. It is becoming increasingly difficult for it to publish and
circulate pamphlets but it is still able, in case of necessity, to
impede seriously the Soviet attempts at deportation of the Ukrainian
population and again and again it is able to damage severely the Motor
Tractor Stations.
On March 5, 1950, General Chuprynka, the commander of the U. P. A.,
was tracked down and killed in the village of Bilohorska in the very
neighborhood of Lviv. He had proved himself a more than competent
leader and had been the soul of the U. P. A. since its foundation in
1943. His parents, his wife and his children had all perished in the
struggle but he had never wavered in his belief in a final victory and
he had become an almost legendary figure.
His death did not end the fighting, for he was succeeded in command
by Colonel Vasyl Koval. Even operations were not suspended, for it is
known that late in September of the same year, a detachment of the
forces seized the town of Mukachiv in the Carpathians and retired
to the mountains with the records of the MVD office there and two
prisoners who had made themselves particularly obnoxious by their
cruelty and their abuse of the local population.
Thus under the present circumstances the primary task of the U. P. A.
is to maintain itself in being as an armed underground, to encourage
the population, both of the Ukraine and the other groups oppressed by
the Russian Communists, and to carry on certain types of propaganda and
of terroristic work which will serve to keep on the anxious seat the
masters of the Kremlin. At the moment it does not have the possibility
of undertaking by itself those extensive operations that it has done
in the past but it is not idle and in the well-hidden bunkers and the
forests, it is fostering those traditions which can be again galvanized
into activity, if the moment for action arrives.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Soviet Ukraine During World War II
In the preceding chapters we have briefly traced the efforts of the
Ukrainians to profit by the clash between the two totalitarian powers
of Germany and the USSR and the Ukrainian hopes of being recognized
as an independent state. These hopes had been thwarted by the Nazi
refusal to treat the Ukraine as anything except a field for German
expansion and the Western refusal to recognize the Ukrainian struggle
for independence.
This, of course, does not tell the entire story. From the earliest
days of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, many of the leading
Ukrainian patriots, writers, artists and scholars, including a large
part of the staff of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, had
seized the opportunity to retire to the west into the Polish Government
General but there were many more who were picked up in the early
deportations and deposited along with the Poles in Central Asia. Some
of these, during the brief period of friendship between the Poles and
the Soviets, were again able to make their way to the west along with
General Anders and found themselves again at freedom, while those who
had retired to the west were forced to undergo increasing persecution
at the hands of the Nazis as these became more desperate.
On the other hand, when the break finally came in 1941 and the
Ukrainians, including those mobilized in the Red Army, began to
surrender in masses, the Soviets began to deport to the east all of
the outstanding people on whom they could lay their hands and whom
at the first moment they did not wish to exterminate. In this number
there were such Ukrainian writers as Tychyna, Rylsky and others who had
showed their loyalty to the regime by their tasteless flattery of the
regime in Moscow.
In the same way, the authorities gathered up in frenzied haste
machinery, finished products, and records and started them likewise to
the east with the hope of setting them up somewhere in a safe place and
using them to increase the Soviet war potential. All this was a hurried
and confused process, for it was contradicted by the Soviet orders to
reduce the Ukraine to a heap of ruins and to leave nothing available
for the invaders.
The clash between these two ideas was vividly reflected in the
destruction of Kiev. Some sections of the Academy of Sciences of the
UkSSR were hurriedly packed on trains and moved to Ufa. Other sections
for little better reasons were abandoned in the general confusion or
were mined for immediate destruction. Priceless books and records,
no less than boilers and lathes, shared the two fates, while Kiev,
thoroughly mined, was exploded and set on fire without regard for the
needs of the people. The Soviet authorities, well aware that they
could not evacuate the entire population, destroyed the food supplies
of those who were left behind while other detachments massacred the
helpless population indiscriminately.
The situation at Kharkiv and Odesa was far better and far more logical
for the Soviets had a few days longer to sort out what they wished to
remove and what they wanted to destroy, but even in these places there
was the same wanton destruction which conflicted with the avowed aims
of the Soviet authorities.
Then ensued a series of mutual recriminations, and it is still not
clear in regard to many buildings and institutions whether the bulk of
the damage and the losses were caused by Nazi or by Communist actions.
Some 3500 carloads of machinery were shipped alone from the city of
Zaporyzhzhya and most of this material was packed at night in utter
darkness with no special care as to where it was being sent.
The same situation confronted the workers, some 5,000,000 of whom were
evacuated from the Ukraine and landed in rough factories that were
hastily erected somewhere in Asia. These sometimes lacked even roofs
and means of heating when the mercury dropped to 45° below zero.
Under such conditions, if the chaos and the disorder were not to be
allowed to spread further, it was obvious that something had to be done
to improve the morale of the population. This was particularly evident
and necessary during the early months when it seemed as if the Nazis
might decide to make some concessions to the people. As a result, there
were a series of developments undertaken which superficially, at least,
offered some concessions to the spirit of the various non-Russian
nationalities.
Thus, in 1943 the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR was allowed to
celebrate its twenty fifth anniversary at Ufa in the Bashkir Autonomous
Republic and to list its institutes which were scattered throughout
Asia. Such an event rendered it possible to blame the Nazis for
the destruction of what had not been evacuated. It furnished good
propaganda for the Western powers who were already sending copious
supplies to the USSR and receiving in return from it only condemnation
and criticism.
In the same way, the various writers who had passed the approval of
the government were assigned posts as newspaper correspondents in the
Red Army where they could sing the praises of Stalin. Yet, at the same
time, they were encouraged to write articles and poems which would
reflect the hostility to the Nazis and again and again the censorship
was relaxed for men like Sosyura to write poems in praise of the
Ukraine, of its past, its present and its future.
Others like Yanovsky and Bazhan were allowed to emphasize the
separation between the traditional Ukrainian speech and the jargon
that had been put out in the various Ukrainian-Russian dictionaries
after the breaking of the Ukrainian Renaissance. They were allowed to
assemble collaborators to compile a more conservative dictionary and
to revamp the system of orthography which had been the work of such
pronounced Russian sympathizers as Khvylya during the preceding period.
Yet, these concessions were more apparent than real, for under the
wartime conditions, those Ukrainian scholars that had the apparent
confidence of the government were scattered far and wide. They were
living perforce under abnormal conditions and no efforts were made
to bring them together or to conduct a revival of the Ukrainian
work that had been so ruthlessly and needlessly shattered. It was a
wartime device adopted for a passing situation and the masters in the
Kremlin well understood that the fury of the war had done more than
they had ever dreamed possible for the disintegration of the various
Soviet Republics. Once, therefore, the evacuation had taken place,
the Soviet leaders had only to sit by and to reap the profits. There
would be plenty of time for that later and so the war years seemed an
intermission in the relentless pressure that had been exerted in the
past.
It was for the Soviet leaders a far more vital problem to recover the
masses of the people who had fled to the west or had been carried
away by the Germans and who might, even in case of a victory of the
democratic powers, reveal the full force of the Soviet pressure. That
was why they welcomed the Yalta Agreement which provided for the
compulsory return to the USSR of all refugees and deported persons
and why, once peace was restored, they showed such devilish ingenuity
in trying to recover the control of every one who could testify from
personal experience as to the nature of the Soviet rule.
It was with the greatest surprise and lack of comprehension that the
Western leaders became aware of this situation. They had listened
eagerly to the Soviet siren songs that it was only Nazi sympathizers
and criminals and traitors who did not want to return under the Soviet
rule and it required some months before supposedly serious statesmen
recovered their equilibrium sufficiently to understand the way in which
they had been duped in the middle of the war.
Yet, no sooner had Soviet rule been reestablished than the old
processes were revived with even greater energy and vigor. The last
masks of independence or of free thought in the cultural or economic
fields were torn away and the old persecution and charges were pressed
with ever increasing zeal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ukraine After World War II
At the conclusion of World War II, Stalin and the officials of the
USSR were ready for the next step. They had satisfactorily fooled
the Western powers, they had entered the UkSSR and the Byelorussian
SSR in the United Nations and they had secured from the President of
the United States and the Prime Minister of the British Commonwealth
of Nations the right to return (by force, if necessary) persons with
USSR citizenship. They had decorated the Allied leaders with medals
commemorating the Russian conquerors of the past and they were ready
to move ahead. They were sure that no one would care to ask about the
fate of the unfortunate victims of the German slave camps because every
American and Western civil or military authority of high rank had
become convinced of the humaneness of Stalin and his group.
The Ukraine had been thoroughly devastated, as we have seen. Its
factories and its fields had been laid waste. That part of its
machinery which had not been wantonly destroyed by one of the two
contesting invaders had been carted to work outside of the UkSSR. But
even so, Ukraine was not quiet.
The population, even that part which had been more favorably disposed
to the Soviets because of the persecution by the Nazis, had hoped
that with the return of peace and the Soviet victory there might be
an improvement in living conditions, an increase of consumer goods, a
relaxation of some of the austerity that had marked the years before
1941. They were almost at once to be disillusioned, for they very soon
found that out of the scanty stores of food which they had preserved
from the greedy Nazis they were supposed to make generous gifts for the
benefit of Stalin and the elder brothers, the Great Russians, the one
people that were loyal through thick and thin to the authorities of the
Soviet Union.
Yet instead of bringing in an era of peace and harmony, Stalin and
his associates, emboldened by their successes in central Europe,
immediately began a new campaign against the American “warmongers” and
“imperialists” to prepare the people for still more rigid controls. It
became clear almost at once that the return of the Soviet authorities
was to usher in not a relaxation but a tightening of the old controls.
These were bitterly resented. In Odesa and Kharkiv there were serious
disturbances and while there may be some question as to whether these
were directly inspired and organized by detachments of the U. P. A., it
seems perfectly clear that they were suppressed not only by the forces
of the MVD but by the Red Army.
On the other hand, as early as 1944 when the Nazi tide began to ebb
and the Western Sovietophile feeling was at its height, the Union
Council of Commissars in Moscow passed a resolution authorizing the
various Soviet Republics to enter into relations with foreign countries
by having their own Commissariats for Foreign Affairs and their own
national armies. Such devices completely fooled the Allied leaders.
They did not notice or want to notice that the Ukrainian Commissar
for Foreign Affairs, D. Z. Manuilsky, had long played a role as a
Russian Soviet representative in the Ukraine. Furthermore, the new
Ukrainian and Byelorussian armies did not adopt the language of the
country for which they were fighting. In theory after 1944 they were
the only Soviet troops engaged against the Germans but even Stalin
and the central authority did not pretend that there were no Great
Russians in these armies. On the contrary, they boasted of this fact,
whenever it was not necessary to hold before the world the shadow of
Ukrainian and Byelorussian independence. The ruse worked and both
Ukraine and Byelorussia were admitted to the United Nations, but
both countries have declined to enter into diplomatic relations with
any foreign country and have chosen, as was natural, to carry on all
their negotiations through Moscow. Still later, in 1951, to carry this
pretense of independence still further and deceive the Western world,
the Soviet Union conferred upon the Ukrainian Soviet Republic the right
to have its own anthem and its own national flag.
These actions were not to be interpreted as a concession from Moscow,
although they were presented in that guise. They were rather intended
to strengthen the Soviet position in international affairs and by an
appearance of generosity to facilitate the reduction of the satellite
states to the same position as that held by the Union Republics. In
this sense they were a response to the centralizing tendencies which
were now to be expressed in a still stronger form.
As soon as hostilities ended and even before the Soviets were assured
of all their hopes, they began to purge again the Ukrainian Communist
Party and within a few months some 38% of the high officials were
removed on the ground of bourgeois nationalism. All those who had
not retreated to the east or could not show that they were working
throughout the war as zealous Soviet partisans were summarily exiled
as bourgeois nationalists. In the same way, when the enforced return
of displaced persons began under the Yalta Agreement, very few were
allowed to return to their homes. The vast majority were either
executed for surrendering to the Germans or were sent to the labor
camps in the far north and east for reeducation.
The Fourth Five Year Plan which was commenced in 1946 was very
definitely devoted to the restoration of the country after the ravages
of the war and to the increase of the Soviet capacity for defense. It
was only in Ukraine and Byelorussia that the restoration had to absorb
the energies of a considerable majority of the population, for while
there were areas in the neighborhood of Leningrad and Stalingrad which
had been badly devastated, the situation in the Ukraine was far worse.
The cities and factories had been destroyed, the mines had been flooded
and the population were living as best they might among the ruins which
had been left by the two invading armies.
At the same time the work of restoration went very slowly. Less than
one third of the miners of the Donbas had returned to their posts
and the vast majority of those who were Communists received more or
less sinecures above ground. Their places were taken by forcing the
Ukrainian peasants, including a large percentage of young girls,
to work in the pits with the minimum of safeguards. Little money
was appropriated for the restoration of the damaged housing, for as
the writer Korniychuk declared in one of his works, “Ukraine was so
thankful for the success of Stalin that they did not care how they
lived, for if he had perished, life would not be worth living under any
circumstances.”
With this attitude prominently emphasized by the leading propagandists,
it is easy to see that the resources and energies of the population
were directed by force rather toward those items that would advance the
importance and the convenience of Moscow, than those that would be of
advantage to the local population.
The one exception was the necessity for rebuilding immediately and
strengthening the railroad communications between the Donbas, Moscow,
Leningrad and the Black Sea ports--in other words, the extreme eastern
part of the Ukraine which was slated for a special development with
roads and railroads linking the country up with the Russian centres
rather than with the other Ukrainian centres to the west for these were
regarded as exposed centres in case of a new outbreak of hostilities
and were to be neglected until they were masked by the extension of
Soviet power over the satellite countries.
The collectivized agriculture was in little better shape. In that part
of the Ukraine which had been under Soviet control before 1939, the
authorities revived the collective farms but they had been so badly
ruined that at first the authorities were often willing to be more
considerate of the members. Immediately after the war they allowed them
to group themselves into links or permanent sections of some eight to
ten people who would thus come to feel themselves a distinct unit in
the collective farm. It did not take long for the more rigid Communists
to decide that this sense of permanence was in a way a defiance of the
principles of collectivization, for very often members of the same
household, if it were at all numerous, would group themselves into a
link. In such cases the link became more prosperous, for it was in a
way a revival of that form of family agriculture which had long been
popular in the Ukraine before the collectivization. Furthermore, it was
soon suspected that the links varied in their delivery of supplies to
the government, sometimes in inverse proportion to their own readiness
to work. The peasants likewise as in the early days of the NEP devoted
more attention to their own private plots of land, a phenomenon that
had been noticed even before World War II.
The Soviet authorities had several answers to such developments. On the
one hand, they finally forbade the operation of the permanent links
which had developed to the point where they threatened the objective
of collectivization, the turning of the peasant farmer into a paid
proletarian worker in agriculture. On the other hand they reduced the
size again of the individual plot of land and they forced the peasants
to give up animal raising on their plots by charging them for even
the straw from the collective farms and the wild fodder that grew in
abandoned places. Then again, they levied a tax on the products of
these plots and this, plus the reduction of the allotment, rendered it
impossible for the peasant to improve his lot except through increased
work on the collective farm. In the meanwhile the steady raising of
the quota of work required for one labor day made it impossible for
the average peasant, unless he was a Stakhanovist (i.e. a person who
cooperated with the central regime and thereby received favorable
assignments) to complete one labor day within one calendar day, no
matter how long hours he worked. This had been a favorite device of
the Russian landlords as we learn from Radishchev’s _Journey from
Petersburg to Moscow_, a famous Russian radical work of the end of
the eighteenth century but a modern version of it was adapted by the
Russian Communist leaders and used effectively.
Even these measures were not the desirable solution. This was first
proposed by Khrushchov in 1947, and while it was at first looked upon
with some disfavor, it was finally deemed suitable by the slave-drivers
of the Kremlin, and Khrushchov, after a period of mild disfavor, was
promoted to the Politburo, and another Russian, Melnikov, placed in
charge of Ukraine. This was the creation of great “agro-cities” or
“agro-settlements” which would unite several collective farms in one
great centre which could be more easily controlled by the Communist
Party with a smaller number of qualified party members in charge. By
the end of 1950 the number of kolhosps (collective farms) had been
reduced from 33,653, as at the end of the war, to 14,443. The number
of households in one had grown from 163 households to 277. At the
same time the number of collective farms in which there were definite
party leaders had increased from 42% to 78%. This does not imply a
growth in Communist membership, for the number of Communist authorities
might, under the new ratio, be reduced by almost 3,000 in personnel.
This would be hardly likely but it explains at a glance the increased
control that the Communists could exert over the larger groups. It
also made it easier by destroying the separated villages to prevent as
effective help being given to the U. P. A. and the other anti-Communist
movements which lingered on, as the peasants saw that the new era was
to be not one of peace but of increased hardships. At the same time,
the peasant was made more helpless for his holdings in the neighborhood
of his home were reduced to 0.15 hectare or approximately a third of an
acre.
This area is roughly equivalent to the average American suburban lot
of 150 × 100 feet and on this the average peasant family was supposed,
no matter how many members it contained, to raise all the vegetables,
eggs and milk which the family required for the year and also any other
plant or animal requirement which was needed as a cash crop. Even this
was now burdened with taxes and the peasant was forbidden to secure
anything from the collective farm to assist in his economy, outside of
what he secured in his pay for a steadily diminishing number of labor
days and the accompanying cash and kind receipts which were apportioned
to him for his work.
Estimates based on figures from some collective farms show that the
average family receives for its year’s work, if three or four members
work, something in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds of grain,
four hundred pounds of potatoes and about one thousand karbovantsy in
money. When we remember that, as a result of the Soviet tax system,
a pair of shoes cost five hundred karbovantsy and a suit of average
quality a little more than one thousand karbovantsy, we can see how
dependent the average peasant is upon his small plot on which his
egg tax is, whether he raises eggs or not, two hundred per year. In
addition, from his cash resources he must buy the grain for his hens or
raise it on his own plot.
It is small wonder that the foreign visitor is not welcomed on these
collective farms except in a few places which are kept for show. In
all of them the Communist heads receive very satisfactory living
conditions with opportunities to purchase supplies at very moderate
prices in shops devised for Communist administrators, and it is these
administrators, and the Communists of the Motor Tractor Stations and
the MVD who receive almost the entire income that is allotted to the
collective farm.
The position of the city laborer is little better, although he receives
in connection with his plant the opportunity of securing whatever the
factory heads feel like giving him for food in the factory dining rooms.
In 1946-7, before Western Ukraine was fully Communized, there was
another drought in the black earth region and once again starvation
hung as a spectre over the entire population. Those who had the
strength and courage to get to Western Ukraine in search of food were
surprised how much food there was still to be found in those areas
where the peasants were still allowed to use their own energy, skill
and knowledge even on their own small farms which still looked like
paradise to those poor devils who had passed through the period of the
thirties.
Still later, collectivization was introduced into Western Ukraine
and the other accompaniments of the regime in the east were at once
apparent.
The Fifth Five Year Plan which was adopted in 1950 continued and
intensified the process. From the figures which has been revealed,
it is obvious that the increases which have been demanded of the
Ukraine in this period are relatively minor. There are a few large
projects planned in the eastern part of the country which can be made
immediately accessible to the Moscow Industrial area but which will
be of little value to the Ukrainian population, for even the resorts
along the coast of the Black Sea have now been definitely placed under
a Union Commissariat and are being improved to accommodate the higher
officials from the centre. The whole strength of the Soviet Union is
being exerted to build up the industrial centres in the Urals and
further to the east.
During these years there has been little progress made in many fields,
and few or none of the evacuated personnel which formerly managed the
factories have been returned. It is the same with machinery.
On the other hand, where factories have been restored, the new
directors have usually been sent down from Moscow to administer them,
and so have the responsible workmen. The deportation from the villages
still continues as the native population are removed to Siberia or
elsewhere and non-Ukrainians are sent in, in accordance with a definite
scheme for breaking up the homogeneity of the population.
Despite all this, there has scarcely passed a month in which the
central authorities in Moscow have not stressed defects in the working
of the Ukrainian branch of the party. They have found continued
failures to perform the required deliveries, a lack of ideological
work and definite wrecking and deliberate sabotage due to bourgeois
nationalist feelings on the part of the party leaders in the Ukraine.
There has been a consistent and unrelenting attack on everything
that has been done in the country, while the heads of the collective
farms and the other institutions have been attacked and changed for
nationalist deviations.
The conclusion is irresistible that it is not the intention of the
central authority in Moscow to relax its pressure until it has
annihilated the last point in the UkSSR which differs in the slightest
degree from the rules prevailing in the RSFSR and that in the meantime
it, despite its lip service to the cause of a federation, is working
for a complete standardization, not only in the field of economics but
in every other field as well.
The Ukraine is regarded as a profitable colony from which the wealth is
to be drawn in the manner of the old imperialism. It is to be absorbed
and assimilated to the last degree and, at the same time, the RSFSR and
the USSR, built around the elder brother, are working in desperation
to prepare within its own boundaries new sources of supply. Within
the last fifteen years, while the resources of the Donbas and Kryvy
Rih have increased, according to the five year plans, some 10-15%,
the actual percentage which the fundamental products of the Ukraine
bear to the total production of those same products in the USSR has
significantly dropped more than that.
Thus at one and the same time the Kremlin is planning to annihilate
all of the salient characteristics of the economy of the Ukraine and
its population, on the ground that the Ukraine is a necessary source
of raw material for the USSR and is striving to free itself of as much
dependence on that raw material as it can. This is typical of the
double-faced tactics of the leaders of the Union and it easily explains
the still smouldering discontent among the Ukrainian people.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Soviet Cultural Policy in the Ukraine After the War
The Soviet cultural treatment of the Ukrainians after World War II is
an inhumanly logical imitation of the making of the Russian Empire
during the course of centuries. As such, it is eminently sensible and
as an imitation it is unpardonably reactionary and resembles nothing so
much as the rise and flowering of Hitlerism.
There was something obscene about the Third Reich. The gatherings at
Nuremberg, the use of slogans that were progressive in the time of
Charlemagne, the sense of the unity of the Christian world, all were
prostituted to serve the cause of a narrow racism which could find no
better outlet than the extermination of the Jews and the barking at
Europe.
In the same way the liberation of Moscow from the Tatar yoke, the
marriage of Ivan III with Sophia Paleolog, a member of the Byzantine
imperial family, gave the tsar and the Muscovite Great Russians
the notion that they were the Christian people par excellence and
that Moscow was the Third Rome. Peter I secularized that religious
conception and drove Mazepa as Hetman of Ukraine, to a revolt.
Lenin, a descendant of the old aristocracy and of the Tatars, turned
Communist and dreamed of a Communist International. The defeat of
his armies before Warsaw and the failure of other plans for world
revolution turned the Communist International as a gathering of
equal Communist leaders into a Communist RSFSR supporting a group of
discredited plotters.
Skrypnyk and Khvylovy did not see this and it was their tragedy as
it was the tragedy of the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty, the Ukrainian
Communists who had sought independent membership in an ideal
organization. Stalin, by his policy in the thirties, blew away that
mirage but it required a World War for him to annihilate it.
Soon after the Germans attacked, Stalin dissolved the Comintern to
please his Western allies and to dupe them. He substituted the Slav
Congress and when he secured the assent of the Big Three to liberate
the Slavs, he highly developed this.
As the Red Army, now transformed by fiat of the Council of Commissars
of the USSR into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian armies, “liberated” one
Slav capital after another, they were followed by cultural missions
who talked to the enthusiastic multitudes on the Slav Brotherhood of
Nations in terms of 1848, Peter, the Third Rome and Stalin. Rylsky and
Tychyna, Korniychuk and Yanovsky, all the outstanding Ukrainian writers
who had yielded to the Russian cause and survived the purges, spoke.
They praised the new situation and the democratic powers admired this.
It was only a sham because soon there was established the Cominform.
Its seat was not in Moscow but its spirit was there. The object of the
Cominform was not to create a new and equal gathering of Communist
humanity, not the ostensible idea of the Comintern but it was to
inform the Communists among the Slavs and elsewhere of the approach to
Communism by the elder Communists of the world, the Muscovite Great
Russians.
In the purely cultural sphere the answer was the condemnation of
formalism, and still more of internationalism. Formalism was a
technical school of literary criticism which had contributed something
to the study of literature and culture. It was an attempt to put
technique above content, or rather to judge content by technique and
its advocates, sometimes great scholars in a narrow field, basked in
the light of the admiration of their friends, until they considered
themselves great.
Internationalism was something else. Its content had been expressed by
the Protopope Avvakum in 1666 when he announced at his trial in Moscow
that all Orthodox Christians had to come to Moscow to learn. Now it was
the same. History was to be periodicized between A. M. and P. M. (Ante
Muscoviae and Post Muscoviam, Before and After Moscow). If the before
was leading up to a Moscow discovery, it was good; if not, it was bad.
This was proclaimed by Zhdanov of the Politburo in 1946 when, under the
highest auspices, he began his attack. On September 4 of that year, at
a meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow, he lashed out at
various films which had been recently produced and at several Russian
authors, especially Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, for not producing
a true picture of Soviet reality. Then, warming to his task, he
explicitly declared that literature had to be entirely at the service
of the Communist Party and that it was the duty of every Soviet writer
to lash and scourge the decadent bourgeois west. He berated many of
the authors for wishing to learn from the bourgeois writers at the
very moment when Soviet literature, the most revolutionary literature
in the world, was a hundred times higher and more beautiful than the
literature of the bourgeois west.
The speech of Zhdanov was the open proclamation of war against all
foreign influences in Soviet literature and it was directed against
some of the most respected figures, who were apparently silenced. Even
Tikhonov was removed from his post at the head of the Union of Soviet
Writers for not having exerted himself more strongly against these
dangerous heresies.
Yet this speech was not really the beginning, for some weeks before
the question was fully brought into the open, at a meeting of the
KP/b/U, Khrushchov, the Russian who held the post as First Secretary
of the KP/b/U, had received from the Executive Committee of the
Communist Party in Moscow full and definite instructions as to the
means to be adopted for purging Ukrainian literature and science and
for suppressing all traces of bourgeois nationalism. His remarks were
reprinted in part by _Pravda_ in Moscow, which summarized them in these
words.
“The TsK KP/b/U had not paid sufficient attention to ideological work,
does not give enough weight to the selecting and the ideological and
political education of the cadres in the fields of science, literature
and art, has not organized in the press a wide criticism of the hostile
bourgeois-nationalist ideology. As a result in some books, journals
and newspaper articles and in the lectures of some Ukrainian historians
and literary men there are ideological mistakes and perversions,
and efforts to revive the bourgeois nationalist conceptions of the
historian Hrushevsky and his ‘school.’”
The weight of the attack fell upon the Institute of Language and
Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR for two books which
it had published. One was the first volume of a _History of Ukraine_
which had appeared in 1943 and the other was _An Outline of the History
of Ukrainian Literature_ which had appeared in 1945. The authors of
both books were accused of having failed to periodicize Ukrainian
history and literature according to the Marxo-Leninist tradition
and of having followed Hrushevsky and Yefremiv in being deceived by
external political events. They were charged with remarks that could
be interpreted as maintaining an early separation of Ukrainian culture
from Russian, when it was a fact that the three brotherly nations, the
Great Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians, had had a joint culture
until the fourteenth century, after which the Great Russians became
the truest heirs and interpreters of the whole. They were charged
with idealizing the old bourgeois nationalists as V. Naumenko and O.
Levytsky, of admiring the old state of patriarchal private property and
of failing to realize the great ideological gulf between Shevchenko,
who stood in the tradition of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, etc., and
Kulish who was a liberal and not a revolutionist. They were condemned
for having a good word for such nationalist counter-revolutionists as
Vynnychenko and Oles and for calling a competent poet, I. Steshchenko,
who had been a minister under Petlyura. They forced their own
flatterer, Rylsky, to leave his post as head of the Union of Soviet
Writers of the Ukraine for not having taken a sufficiently firm stand
in condemning the mistakes of the other writers, and for a while he was
in disfavor.
The accusations penned in Moscow and printed in _Pravda_ and the
_Literaturnaya Gazeta_ were reprinted in the Ukrainian papers with even
more vulgarity and abuse. They poured out their venom at nearly all the
writers and historians who regarded the use of the Ukrainian language
as expressing the feelings and the culture of the Ukrainian people.
They condemned nationalist praise of Kotlyarevsky for introducing
national pride and feeling into his _Eneida_, the first book in the
Ukrainian vernacular published in 1798. They accused the writers and
scholars of deliberately trying to drive a wedge between the Russian
and Ukrainian people and of refusing to see, because of their bourgeois
nationalist prejudices, that the great Ukrainian writers of the
nineteenth century had always drawn their inspiration and been close
to the progressive Russian writers, as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky,
and they denied the existence of any Western European influence on
Ukrainian literature, since all the influence had come from the
Russians. They found influences of Gorky on Lesya Ukrainka and cited as
her models Russian works which appeared after her works were in print.
All this made no difference, for the Marxo-Leninists were in sole
possession of the truth and their word was law.
Stalin had declared that the new Soviet literature and culture was
to be Communist in content and national in form but it was very soon
realized that even this was to be interpreted in a special sense. Any
excessive attention paid by writers to descriptions of the Ukrainian
landscape which did not bring a glorification of the new factories was
treated as an antiquated sympathy with the old patriarchal Ukraine
and its bourgeois nationalism. Any mention of the Zaporozhian Sich
and the Kozak past, unless it was connected very definitely with the
union and longing of the Kozaks for Muscovite rule, was declared to be
treasonable and bourgeois nationalist in essence. Thus, step by step
the authorities in Moscow and their mouthpieces in Ukraine limited more
and more closely the possibility of describing or singing of any of the
characteristic features of Ukrainian life and the historic past, while
the Great Russians were given free rein to glorify the past of Russia
even under the tsars, for it was there that the seeds of the Communist
Party were planted and flourished.
This process of tracking down bourgeois nationalism perhaps reached
the limits of its absurdity in 1951 when the Soviet critics discovered
dangerous thoughts in the war poem of Volodymyr Sosyura, _Love
Ukraine_. It was a graceful, but hardly a great poem. It had been
enthusiastically received in 1944, when it appeared, and the poet was
awarded for it a Stalin Prize. The poem was published and republished
by the state publishing houses and then it was suddenly discovered that
it was untrue, bourgeois nationalist, etc. and the unfortunate author
was forced to repent of his errors. As a matter of fact, even before
this, many of the Russian translators had gone out of their way to
insert in it various passages celebrating the Volga and the Kremlin as
part of the love of Ukraine but they, too, were reprimanded for trying
to improve the work instead of condemning it for its real quality.
In every field of scholarship, literature, art, and music, the same
charges have been brought with logical consistency. Anything which
would remind the readers of the old pre-Communist life is treated as
dangerous, but none of the authors, no matter how they have falsified
history or the present, has been able to express the great achievements
of the new Soviet Ukraine and to catch its spirit and show how it can
in any degree differ from Moscow. At the first sign of any independent
judgment, the cry is raised of bourgeois nationalism and the work is
suppressed.
At the same time the Ukrainian scene is being overloaded with things
Russian. Russian theatrical companies are continually travelling
around the republic so as to show the real charity and achievements
of the elder brother and inspire a desire for imitation of its life
and thought under that all-time world genius, Joseph Stalin. Russian
musical ensembles and exhibitions of the works of Russian artists are
constantly sent to all the chief cities of the non-Russian republics,
not only to acquaint the people with Russian achievements but still
more to give them the necessary patterns by which they should plan
their lives and work.
There are constantly published masses of Ukrainian translations of
Russian works and books translated from the other languages used in the
USSR and it is almost essential for an author to allude to these and
especially to the Georgian people as the people of Stalin, if he wishes
to avoid the charge of bourgeois nationalism and the attempt to sow
hostility between the brotherly peoples.
The situation is even more severe in the field of language. Korniychuk
after World War II emphasized that Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism
was not to be sought only by a consideration of the contents of books
and paintings. It was reflected in a still more dangerous form in the
language of the books themselves. Any author who showed a predilection
for the use of the older forms of the language or sought to develop
it in any way other than the Communist Party desired was thereby
convicting himself of holding nationalistic sentiments and of being
dangerously reactionary. He thus accused of bourgeois nationalism even
those writers as Yanovsky who had been most rigorous in following the
party line in content.
The real significance of this statement of Korniychuk’s is shown by the
_Ukrainian-Russian Dictionary_ which finally appeared in 1948 under
the editorship of L. A. Bulakhovsky and M. F. Rylsky. The work was
published in Moscow, although it bore the stamp of the Institute of
Language Study of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR.
In this the authors made no concealment of their program, for they
definitely stated that their work was based upon the “spoken” Ukrainian
of the government offices (where it was the most corrupted by Russian
words), and not the older Ukrainian language as spoken before the
introduction of the Bolshevik reforms. They added, too, that they had
supplied from Russian whatever was lacking in Ukrainian, for “thanks
to the Russian language, the Ukrainian has been able to acquire the
capacity to respond to the needs of socialist construction and to
satisfy the cultural needs of the Ukrainian people.”
Stripped of its Communist jargon, this passage merely means that
the Moscow authorities have decided to carry on their policy of
russification in a new way. They have recognized the gap between the
older Ukrainian language and the hodgepodge which they have produced
and they are now insisting on using the words of the older usage in
their most narrow and restricted sense, and by refusing to recognize
any possibility of development in Ukrainian or any changes in it, they
are forcing Ukrainian to become a dead language and by an inverted
purism are planning to compel the Ukrainians to recognize that Russian
and Russian alone is in a position to grow and develop.
This is entirely in line with the new philological policy dictated
by Stalin after his repudiation of the late Prof. Marr and what was
commonly known as Marrism, a theory that Stalin had sponsored for many
years. Now he was willing to argue that Russian as the language of the
USSR was not only the Russian language as the language of the Russian
people but it was also in a new sense a zonal language, the approved
language of Socialism and Communism and, as such, it had already
absorbed all that it needed and its mission was to replace all those
languages which were spoken by people who had awakened to the truth of
the Moscow doctrines.
Thus the new theories of language study that were officially accepted
in Moscow opened new vistas for cultural oppression and perversion of
the Ukrainian masses. They were a signal for renewed efforts, not only
to control the Ukrainian cultural life in the present and the future
but their efforts were extended to the past and the scholars were set
to carry out an artificial restatement of Ukrainian history, literature
and culture from the earliest known periods.
It is small wonder then that the modern post-war Ukrainian literature
is becoming more and more a pallid and bloodless imitation of the
stereotyped patterns required for Great Russian and that even those
authors who have sold themselves to the Stalinist regime are unable to
produce anything of real value or of even mediocre excellence. They are
turning out the average propaganda material against the imperialistic
Americans on the lines ordered by the Politburo with never a thought
except the income and perquisites which they are slated to receive and
the constant terror lest at some moment by an unfortunate slip they
may be accused justly or unjustly of that terrible crime of bourgeois
nationalism and lose in an instant all that they have worked for years
to win.
The cultural pressure exerted on eastern Ukraine is spread likewise
with even more force over those portions in the West which had been
formerly under Poland or Czechoslovakia. Here, as former parts of
the old Hapsburg monarchy, the writers had had more opportunity to
absorb the current thought of the west than they had had in eastern
Ukraine. Therefore, the pressure against them has been applied even
more strongly and still more Russians have been sent to remodel the
life in Lviv than was necessary for Kiev. The process of russification
was started later but it has been pushed more energetically. The net
result is the same,--the impoverishment of Ukrainian culture as a whole
and the substitution for it of a shabby form of Russian Muscovite
Communist culture, which is to be tolerated only until there can be a
full absorption.
Yet that process has not been so easy. Hardly a week passes that some
of the higher units in the Soviet service do not discover a new nest of
Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, and most frequently among the members
and officers of the KP/b/U. It has been made evident that the Russian
Communists cannot hope to achieve their goal until they have eliminated
the entire Ukrainian population. They are trying to do it, but despite
the millions of their victims and their attempts to separate the
Ukrainian children from their parents and to rear them as slaves for
Russian factories, they have not succeeded in winning the population to
their views.
From the cultural point of view, the post-war period has been even more
depressing than were the thirties. It has been drabber, like the lives
of the people, but it has not served as yet to eliminate that spark of
hope which alone preserved the Ukrainians during the hard periods of
tsarism when they were subjects and slaves on their own territories,
which were not their own to govern or to develop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Soviet Religious Policy
In any discussion of Soviet Russian-Ukrainian relations, the religious
problem is important for it touches many issues which are but dimly
understood in the Western world. The latter has been too long content
to think of the east of Europe only in terms of power politics, the
Eastern Question, and similar problems to bother about the details of
a discussion which has been often a matter of life and death to the
people involved and which might throw a real light upon the present
situation.
One fact stands out. Rus’-Ukraine was Christianized before the division
of the Eastern and Western Churches and the full results of that
division were not made evident until the dawn of the modern era. The
dominant religious type of religion was that of the Orthodox East and
the important See was that of Kiev. Yet Kievan Christianity was never
bigoted or exclusive and even after the great Schism of 1054, the
princes of Kiev continued to intermarry equally with the noble families
of both east and west.
After the Metropolitan, under political pressure, took up his residence
in Moscow, Kiev and the Western Ukrainian lands secured a new
Metropolitan from the Patriarch of Constantinople. Moscow became the
seat of a patriarchate but it was only in 1648 that the Patriarch and
the Tsar of Moscow became willing to have any contact with the Orthodox
Christians of Kiev. Already in 1596 this attitude had culminated in the
establishment of a Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite, acknowledging
the papacy but maintaining the Eastern Orthodox forms of worship.
In 1686, while the Tsar of Russia was beginning to absorb the
Zaporozhian Kozaks, he exerted pressure upon the Patriarch of
Constantinople to abolish this new Metropolitanate of Kiev, and in
1686, by the act of Moscow but not of Constantinople, this was done.
Once Moscow secured control, it applied the Muscovite usages and as
its power grew in Ukraine, so did its pretensions. The cultural power
of Ukrainian Orthodoxy disappeared in the Russian Sea, while the
Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite became the dominating religious
power in Western Ukraine. Nothing shows more clearly the Muscovite
attitude than the fact that it gave a lower rank to the Metropolitan of
Kiev than it did to the head of the Georgian Orthodox, when they, too,
passed under Russian sovereignty.
As Rus’-Ukraine under tsarist control became only a collection of
“Little Russian” gubernias, so the Ukrainian Orthodox became a
collection of “Little Russian” dioceses, in which there was nothing
Ukrainian and so it remained until 1917, while each time that the
tsar acquired more Ukrainian lands, the same form of coercion was
applied not only to the Ukrainian Orthodox but also to the Catholics
whose Byzantine Rite under the Hapsburgs and then under Poland and
Czechoslovakia, had developed into a distinct Western Ukrainian
religion. Under the leadership of Metropolitan Andry Sheptytsky, a
giant physically and intellectually, this process went on rapidly, much
to the annoyance of the Poles in the old province of Eastern Galicia.
Finally we must note that when Western Ukraine passed under Poland in
1920, that country forced the establishment of a Polish Orthodox Church
for the several million Ukrainians and Byelorussians who were in the
revived state. The language of this was Polish and its organization was
adopted to the Polish system as it developed in the revived state.
With these preliminary notes, we can now turn to the relations between
the Ukraine and the Soviet Russians.
A. +The Orthodox+
With the Revolution of 1917 and the revival and development of the
independence movement among the Ukrainians, there arose also a demand
for the revival of an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This was
stubbornly opposed by the Provisional Government, Patriarch Tikhon and
the Russian Orthodox in Ukraine, the same forces that had haggled and
debated the development of a Ukrainian independent state throughout
the period, until the Russian Communists secured control and were able
to maintain their assumption of power.
In the first stages, while the Communists still hoped for the success
of the world revolution, they emphasized their doctrines of atheism
and they stressed the conception that “religion was the opium of the
people.” At the same time they endeavored to disintegrate the Russian
Orthodox Church from within by giving their support to the various
schemes of reform as the Living Church, etc. They also gave especial
favor to various Protestant bodies, as the Baptists, who sought to
introduce their ideas, often with marked success.
It was a crucial period for eastern Europe, for the Western nations
and America which had been victorious in World War I were not inclined
to cement their victory. No matter what they thought of the Communist
regime, Great Britain and the United States were still convinced that
the victory of a democratic Russia was a certainty and they refused
to take any steps to help the non-Russian peoples who were being
over-whelmed by the Soviets, lest it prejudice their future relations
with Russia. France, obsessed with the fear of Germany, was seeking
to restore a greater Poland which would absorb as much as possible of
Ukraine. The memory of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk blinded everybody to
events as they were taking place.
It was no less critical for the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Allies
sympathized with his position but the successful revolt of Mustapha
Kemal against the Treaty of Sèvres produced a situation where the
Western powers had to fight or surrender. They wished to do neither and
with a certain Bolshevik sympathy for Turkey, the Patriarch was obliged
to be cautious, until his hands were in a way freed by the settlement
of Lausanne.
Hence the leaders of the movement for a Ukrainian Autocephalous
Orthodox Church were in a way powerless to regulate their relations
with Orthodoxy as a whole. They had been unable to secure the support
and assistance of any Russian bishops. They were turned down in an
appeal to the Bulgarian Church and they obtained no response from the
Patriarch of Constantinople.
Impressed by the sense of urgency and the justice of their cause,
the leaders of the movement held a synod in Kiev on October 11, 1921
and proceeded to elect as bishops Father Vasyl Lypkivsky and Father
Nestor Sharayevsky. Then, as they had no bishops available for their
consecration, the members of the Sobor laid their hands upon them and
consecrated them bishops without the participation of any bishops
save relics of the saints preserved in Kiev. Lypkivsky was then made
Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and he and his
associate soon consecrated some 27 other bishops.
Yet the uncanonical nature of this original action drove a wedge
between the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and the other Orthodox
Churches and made certain that it would not later attract any validly
consecrated bishops who would regularize the succession. On the other
hand, other reforms, as the introduction of Ukrainian into the services
in place of the old Church Slavonic, enabled the Russian opponents to
classify it with the various movements as the Living Church which the
Bolsheviks had fostered in their endeavor to disintegrate the Russian
Church from within.
Still later, when the Orthodox in the succession states began
to organize and came under the influence of the Patriarch of
Constantinople, whose position had grown less critical with the
strengthening of the new Turkey, it was too late for him to extend aid
to the Ukrainian Orthodox as he did to those living under Polish rule
by the recognition of a Polish Autocephalous Church in 1924. Thus the
Ukrainian Orthodox were left almost completely isolated to face alone
the atheistic Communist and imperialistic Russian Orthodox pressure.
Metropolitan Lypkivsky showed himself a very competent leader. The
number of parishes under his control multiplied rapidly and by 1927
the Church had nearly 3,000 parishes and some 10,600 priests. It was
no small achievement to establish and develop this under the harsh
conditions of Soviet reality and for several years during the height
of the movement of Ukrainization, the Church flourished and bade fair
to restore the traditions of the old Ukrainian Orthodox Church and
there were high hopes that sooner or later it would be able to heal the
defects in the original consecration.
This was not to be, for after the death of the Patriarch Tikhon the
power in the Russian Church passed into the hands of the Metropolitan
Sergy who showed himself willing to effect such a compromise with
Stalin and Communism as might be necessary. His offer was, to a certain
degree, accepted and the Soviet regime, without changing its policy
of persecuting all religious activity, began to throw a few crumbs
of favor to the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in Moscow. Slowly but
surely, the various Russian divisions, like the Living Church, slipped
back into the general organization, and the Soviets soon grasped
the possibilities of using Sergy and the Russian organization as a
political weapon in their struggle for world domination.
Even before the ending of Ukrainization, the Communists began to
put obstacles in the way of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church. The
Metropolitan was refused permission to visit the various parishes under
his control and to publish journals and other material for his flock.
This was followed by more active measures. Metropolitan Lypkivsky was
arrested and imprisoned. So were all of the other bishops and by 1930
there was not a single one of the bishops still in Ukraine who was not
in prison or dead. The church was broken up and all of its activities
stopped, but the spirit that had animated it continued to lie hidden.
When the Germans and the Soviets occupied Poland in 1939, a new
possibility was sensed. The so-called Polish Autocephalous Church
was composed ingly of Ukrainians and Byelorussians, with but a few
anti-Communist Russians. Even before 1939, some of these Ukrainian
clergy and laity had begun to take steps for the Ukrainianizing of the
Church, even though they had been forced to introduce Polish into the
services. When the storm broke, Russians like Bishop Sava made their
way abroad and joined the Russians in exile. Bishop Oleksy (Hromadsky)
in Kremyanets and Bishop Polykarp (Sikorsky) in Lutsk were forced to
recognize the Moscow organization, which was coming into favor with
Stalin because of its increasing subservience to the Soviet regime.
On the other hand, Metropolitan Dionysy, who had been in that part of
Ukraine that was included in the Polish Government General, now threw
off any attempt at concealment and revived the Ukrainian Autocephalous
Church, which this time was provided with canonical orders in all
grades. He consecrated two new Ukrainian bishops, Ilarion (O. Ohienko)
for Kholm and Podlyasie and Palady (Vedybida-Rudemko) for Krakow and
Lemkivshchyna.
This marked a new period and when the Germans attacked the USSR in
1941 and occupied it, Polykarp joined them, while Oleksy set up still
another group, the Ukrainian Autonomous Church, for he refused to break
his connections with Moscow.
The German permission for the formation in 1942 of a central
organization was frankly ambiguous. On the one hand, they were glad
of any movement that would rouse the people against Moscow. On the
other, in religion as in politics, they were opposed to any movement
which would prevent them from carrying out their policy of treating
the Ukrainians as a subject and inferior race. As a result, they put
every obstacle in the way of a reconciliation between the Autocephalous
and the Autonomous groups and threw their support to whichever was the
weaker in any given area.
The open support of the Soviet government by Sergy and his associates
now under the pressure of war paid off. His protestations of sympathy
for Stalin and the Russians were rewarded with medals and other honors.
Then, in the autumn of 1943, as the final step in the process, Stalin
gave permission for the restoration of the Patriarchate in Moscow and
Sergy was duly installed. On his death in 1944, he was succeeded by
Aleksey, the former Archbishop of Leningrad, the present Patriarch,
and under his leadership the Russian Orthodox Church has embarked upon
a policy of securing control for the Soviets of all other Orthodox
Churches.
In the meanwhile, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church during the war
displayed great activity in the occupied Ukraine. It speedily won the
support of most of the clergy who were not in the Soviet service. It
reopened churches that had been closed by the Soviets and it cooperated
with the Ukrainian patriotic movement.
With the return of the Soviet forces, the leaders of the Church
retired to the west with a large part of the priests, and the others
joined the underground. The Ukrainian Church was again suppressed and
brought directly under the Patriarch of Moscow and it is to be noted
that the head of the Orthodox Church in the UkSSR, does not hold any
special point of honor as does the Catholicus of Georgia, who is still
recognized as the head of a satellite Church.
It is thus safe to say that despite the continued existence of the
UkSSR as an independent nation for the purposes of the United Nations,
there is now no distinctive Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It has been
swallowed, as in the days of Peter I, by the great Moscow religious
imperialism. It has no independence and it is thoroughly and in all
points independent upon the Russian Patriarch in Moscow.
B. +The Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite+
When in 1939 the Soviet forces by their understanding with the Nazis
occupied for the first time Eastern Galicia and the Western Ukrainian
lands, they at once set to work to remodel the area on their own
standards and to eliminate all the characteristic features of Ukrainian
life and culture. This process was, however, rudely interrupted by the
German attack in 1941.
The dominant religion in the area was the Greek Catholic Uniat Church,
or, to be more precise, Catholicism of the Byzantine Rite. The
Metropolitan of this Church, Andry Sheptytsky, was the most respected
figure in the entire area and he was a religious and cultural leader
in every sense of the word. During this first occupation, Archbishop
Sheptytsky was not personally disturbed but he was deprived of his
liberty and forced into a semi-retirement. His schools and other
institutions were closed, the Church was deprived of its property and
a considerable number of priests were punished on various charges. Yet
there was no general holocaust.
In 1941, Archbishop Sheptytsky was one of the leading figures in the
attempt to revive a native and independent Ukrainian government. This
was, of course, prevented by the Germans and the Archbishop remained at
Lviv scarcely more free during the German occupation of Ukraine than
he had been under the Soviets. He continued his efforts to unite both
the Ukrainian Catholic and Autocephalous Churches without effect, but
he was able to do considerable for the well-being of his people. Still
he was no longer free to act openly, although his advice was sought
whenever and wherever it could be.
The Soviets reoccupied Lviv on July 27, 1944 and at once set to work
more vigorously to introduce their system. Archbishop Sheptytsky did
not long survive for he passed away on November 1 of the same year.
He was succeeded in his post by Joseph Slipy, who had been one of
his outstanding assistants and the rector of the Theological Academy
which Metropolitan Sheptytsky had founded in the late twenties, when
it had become evident that the Poles would not allow the creation of a
Ukrainian University in Lviv.
Metropolitan Slipy had barely been installed in office, when the
Soviets showed their hand and began to call for a condemnation of the
Vatican by the Ukrainian Catholics and for their union with Moscow. It
did not take long for words to turn into actions.
On April 15, 1945, the NKVD surrounded the Cathedral of St. George in
Lviv and arrested the Metropolitan, Bishop Budko and Bishop Charnetsky
together with many other leaders. They arrested all of the students
of the Theological Academy and they likewise seized the Cathedral and
turned it over to the Patriarch of Moscow as a Russian Orthodox Church.
At the same time, they informed the professors of the Theological
Seminary that the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite had ceased to
exist.
At almost the same time the NKVD gathered in the other Catholic bishops
in Western Ukraine, Bishop Khomyshyn of Stanislaviv and his vicar,
Bishop Lyatyshevsky, while at the same time the Polish Communist regime
seized Bishop Kotsylovsky of Peremyshl and his auxiliary bishop,
Lakota. Bishops Khomyshyn and Kotsylovsky soon died under the treatment
that they received.
The others were kept in prison and then in 1946, according to the best
available information, Metropolitan Slipy and his associates were sent
to labor camps in the far north in the Vorkuta coal mines. From that
time they have disappeared from sight.
In 1947, the last Catholic bishop of this rite, Bishop Romzha of
Carpatho-Ukraine, while travelling through his diocese “collided”
accidentally with a Soviet tank and was killed and this ended the
Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy in their own lands. The following year
the Rumanian government followed suit and likewise annihilated the
hierarchy of the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite in Transylvania.
In 1950 the Czech Communist regime arrested and sentenced to life
imprisonment Bishop Hoydych and his coadjutor Hopka of the diocese of
Prashev in Slovakia.
These actions were followed in each case by attacks upon the lower
clergy, who were ordered to accept the supremacy of the Patriarch of
Moscow. This was fully in the tradition of the old Russian Church, for
each time that the tsars had bitten off a slice of Ukraine, they had
applied the same methods to the Catholic hierarchy in the section, to
the intent that the Byzantine rite could be performed only under the
supervision of the Russian authorities.
In this case in 1945, on July 1, when the Soviet Ukrainian Commissar
for Religion, Khodchenko, called on the clergy to recognize the new
situation, the professors of the Theological Academy met in Lviv in the
Cathedral of St. George and presented a request that they be given the
liberties accorded to them on paper by the Stalinist Constitution. The
answer was their arrest and imprisonment.
Then the government set to work. They secured the apostasy of one of
the foremost of the Ukrainian Catholic priests, Father Kostelnyk, who
willingly put himself at the service of the Patriarch and presided over
a “sobor” which was called to ratify the switch from the Vatican to the
Patriarch. Many of the priests who attended were apparently members of
the NKVD in disguise. They willingly applauded Stalin and the Patriarch
and armed with this authority, the Soviet regime set to work to seize
all the churches and property of the Catholic Church of the Byzantine
Rite and preempt it for their own use.
This marked the end of the open existence of the Church. There were
still priests who escaped and took refuge with the U. P. A. (the
Ukrainian underground) but open worship was at an end. There has been
enforced at least a superficial agreement with the Kremlin on all
matters of religion. Nevertheless, the latent hatred still exists and
it can flare up at any moment when the situation warrants it.
The movements represented by the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and
the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite still flourish
in the emigration, where alone there is any opportunity for free
thought. In the meanwhile, the Kremlin is maintaining its position in
its traditional Muscovite manner and applying its savage punishments
and deportations and executions to prove that Ukraine is happy and
contented in following the example of the “elder brother.” Yet even so,
the number of episodes when Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism appears
make it seem as if the officials of both church and state were not too
sure that the Ukrainian people fully sympathize with the Patriarch
Aleksey in his deification of the foremost man of the ages, who still
forbids Communists to have anything to do with the Orthodox Church.
That has sold its soul for as little real value as did the Ukrainian
Communists in the early years of the struggle.
Conclusion
On March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin, who had been the dominant force in the
Soviet Union for 29 years, died in the Kremlin of a stroke. The man
who had superintended the transformation of the country, the Georgian
revolutionist who had espoused the claims of the Great Russians as had
none of the Russian tsars, died peacefully in his bed, almost the only
one of the Communist leaders since Lenin who has not died violently or
in the slave camps of the north and the east. It was the end of an era.
The next day, his successor, Georgy Maximilonovich Malenkov, was
installed in office with a complete realignment of the governmental
organization and a large number of shifts, promotions and demotions
among his associates. The announcement emphasized that the new
regime would follow closely the lines promulgated by Stalin. In this
new setup, Khrushchov, the former Russian tyrant over Ukraine, was
confirmed in his position in the Presidium of the Communist Party,
and his successor, another Russian, Melnikov, the present head of the
Ukrainian Communists, was made an alternate in the same Presidium.
The day before, as Stalin lay dying, the Kremlin government issued a
statement urging unity upon all the peoples of the Soviet Union and
reiterated the statement that success in carrying on the policy was due
to the loyalty to the Soviet regime of the Great Russians, the leaders
of the Union. They were the only one of the Soviet peoples or the
peoples under the Soviets mentioned by name.
Nothing in the careers of Malenkov or of Beria, who emerges with
increased powers as the head of the Ministry of the Interior (including
National Security), or any of the men mentioned for high office gives
any indication that the old process of russification and centralization
will be changed. Everything points to an intensification of it and
perhaps an intensification that will be less original and even more
mechanical. There seems little likelihood that there will be any
diminution of pressure or any return toward the relative liberalism
of the early years. We can only wait to see whether the transmission
of power can be handled without any of the discords that followed the
death of Lenin and whether Malenkov can succeed to the deified position
which was demanded for Stalin during his later years.
The mystery that the Kremlin has thrown around itself has succeeded
in hiding from the world the personal relations of the new leaders.
Yet, the almost immediate attacks on American and British planes in
all parts of the world reflect the determination of the new regime to
continue the militant policy of its predecessor. On the other hand,
the peaceful speeches of Malenkov and a few isolated acts of apparent
diminished hostility have served to revive the hopes of many of the
Western nations in the possibilities of better relations with the USSR.
This is quite in accordance with Soviet plans to split its opponents,
who still do not want to realize that gestures of friendship to the
peoples beyond the Iron Curtain mean nothing more than gestures of
friendship to the foreign Communists already dependent upon Moscow for
their support and guidance.
By Soviet definition, the Communists are the peace-loving leaders
of all the peoples of the world and the only ones entitled to speak
for those peoples, while non-Communist governments are something to
be deceived and overthrown from within, if possible. This has been
the cardinal principle of Soviet policy since 1917 and explains the
repeated failures of the free world to reach any definite settlement
with Moscow. It should lead the West to reexamine its relations with
the Kremlin and also those with the Great Russians who are now, in the
Kremlin language, practically equated with the Communists.
It should compel the West to forget the dream of a Russian unity and
the speeches and writings of the Russian emigrés should be considered
critically in view of their attitude toward Ukraine and the other
non-Russian peoples that were conquered by the tsars, reconquered by
the Soviets and now in the name of Great Russian Communism subjected to
a new period of russification.
At the same time, there is no new evidence that the regime of Malenkov
is any more tolerant of the national differences or feelings of the
non-Russian peoples than was the previous regime. The steady rise in
influence of Khrushchov suggests the opposite and a still greater
pressure upon Ukraine.
Since World War II, the attitude of the Kremlin toward the Ukrainians
has perceptibly hardened. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a
member of the United Nations. It has its own government, its own flag,
its own national anthem. Yet, by the orders of the Kremlin, no diplomat
from outside the iron curtain is admitted to its capital of Kiev. Its
government conducts all of its affairs through Moscow.
The Ukrainians are to-day the slaves of Moscow in their own country.
They are liable to be deported across its boundaries at any moment
and their places taken by Russians or persons from anywhere within
the Soviet orbit. They are compelled to think Russian thoughts,
to interpret their past, their present and their future in terms
acceptable to their elder brothers, the Great Russians. The slightest
deviation from that path is met with the grim charge of bourgeois
nationalism, the gravest offence in the entire list of crimes.
That same process in earlier stages is taking place in all the Soviet
satellites. Step by step, the culture of the other countries is being
remodelled on the Russian Soviet pattern. The Russian language is being
introduced and forced into the dominant place. Step by step, their
national traditions are being spurned, corrupted and altered, so that
they will be worthy members of the Soviet Union under Russian Communist
leadership. Their contacts with the outside world are being cut off,
while the Moscow radio blares out day and night the statements that
the Russians are the friends of peace while the nations outside are
warmongers and imperialists.
We might be tempted to believe that Moscow is right but we can
scarcely with normal intelligence and sanity believe that the millions
of Ukrainians who have been condemned for bourgeois nationalism are
anything but victims of a mania of persecution and of cruelty. We can
hardly believe in the criminality of the increasing role of victims
throughout the satellite states. We can hardly believe in the stability
of a regime which can find itself menaced by the flight of a single
citizen from its paradise.
When we add to this, the constant Soviet warnings of the danger
of espionage, their secrecy as to all matters of economics, their
isolation of foreign representatives, their unwillingness to let
travellers and observers view their great achievements, we must become
still more doubtful. We cannot give credence to the benign character
of a state which proclaims almost every day that it has discovered
new acts of disloyalty, of sabotage and of almost open revolt, which
annihilates whole groups and nations for disloyalty.
One thing is obvious. The situation calls for a firm and progressively
growing interrelation between the world outside, an interrelation in
arms and in economics and in culture. It needs an awareness of the
process by which this Soviet system has been built up. Then, perhaps in
time, we may secure the answer to the question whether the Soviet Union
will sweep the whole of humanity within its stereotyped laws because
of its real strength or whether the power of the Soviet Union is based
upon the disunion of the democratic world, its mutual jealousies and
antagonisms. Will the successors of Stalin dare to risk a war or will
their artificial structure fall apart, if it passes under too great a
strain?
Yet, to answer such a question, we must know as much as possible of
the methods by which that system is built up. It is here that the
fate of the Ukrainians comes in again, for we can follow in their sad
experiences the methods which the Russian Communists have ever employed.
In a very real sense Ukraine and the Ukrainians are the touchstone of
the system. If the Kremlin can win a lasting victory, it has a chance
of success. If it can persuade the Ukrainians to be happy in their new
slavery, it may win out. If it cannot stop their opposition except by
their total extermination, then we can be sure that the world can save
itself if it awakes.
There is only one thing certain. Before the United Nations can function
as it was intended, its members must be independent states and
peoples. That means that the Ukrainian representatives must be free
representatives of a free Ukraine who can contribute their part to the
common welfare. In one way or another, that must come and the Muscovite
domination must be ended. May it come soon and in a peaceful manner!
Then, with that, will come of necessity the ending of the process, the
restoration of liberty to the countries within the Iron Curtain and the
possibility of the cooperation of men for the elimination of suffering,
want, injustice and fear and the opening of a new and enlightened
period in human history.
Index
A
Akhmatova, Anna, 196
Aleksey, Patriarch, 210, 214
Anders, Gen., 181
Avvakum, 196
B
Bahaly, D., 75
Bandera, S., 159-168, 170, 173
Bazhan, M., 69, 124, 146
Belinsky, V., 127, 198f.
Benes, E., Pres., 177, 179
Beria, L., 142, 215
Blakytny, V., 37, 67
Bondarenko, 143
Budko, Bishop, 212
Bukharin, 68, 141
Bulakhovsky, L. A., 201
Bulba, Taras-Borovets, 170
Burevy, K., 123
C
Catherine II, Empress, 17, 123
Chamberlin, W. H., 105
Charlemagne, 195
Charnetsky, Bishop, 212
Chaykivsky, 63
Chekhovsky, V., 19
Chernyshevsky, 198f.
Chicherin, 27, 31
Chubar, 61, 121
Chumak, V., 67
Chuprynka, G., 65
Chuprynka, T., Gen., 173, 179
D
Denikin, Gen., 16, 30, 32, 41
Dionysy, Metropolitan, 210
Dobrohayev, V., Prof., 84
Dovzhenko, 83
Dray-Khmara, 124
Duranty, W., 105
E
Epik, 124
F
Falkivsky, D., 70, 123
G
Gorky, M., 26, 118, 199
H
Hantsov, V., 76
Hermayze, J., 110
Hitler, A., 106f., 141, 147
Holoskevych, K., 76
Holovko, 124
Holubovych, V., 39, 113
Hoover, Herbert, Pres., 44
Hopka, Bishop, 213
Hoydych, Bishop, 213
Hrinchenko, M., 76
Hrushevsky, M., Prof., 65, 74, 112, 124, 198
Hrynko, 60f.
I
Ilarion, Bishop (Ohienko), 210
Innitzer, Cardinal, 105
Ivan III, Tsar, 195
Ivchenko, M., 116
K
Kaganovich, L., 61, 82, 142
Kaganovich, N., 126
Kalinin, 105
Kandyba-Olzhych, 170
Kasyanenko, E., 37
Khmelevtsev, 32
Khmelnytsky, B., Hetman, 145
Khodchenko, 213
Khomyshyn, Bishop, 212f.
Khrushchov, 151, 177, 189, 197, 215
Khvylovy, M., 69, 79ff., 88, 109ff., 136, 157, 195
Khvylya, A., 84, 126, 143, 146
Kirychenko, S., 37
Koch, Erich, Reichskommissar, 169ff.
Konovalets, E., Col., 113, 159
Korniychuk, 125, 188, 196, 200
Kostelnyk, 213
Kosynka, H., 123f.
Kotlyarevsky, I., 17, 199
Kotsylovsky, Bishop, 212f.
Kotsyubynsky, G., 26
Kotsyubynsky, M., 65
Koval, V., Col., 180
Krushelnytsky, 123
Krymsky, A., Prof., 64, 76, 127
Kulish, M., 69, 83, 123f.
Kulish, P., 198
Kulyk, I., 119f., 124
Kun, Bela, 29, 35
Kurbas, L., 69, 116, 123
Kurylo, O., 76
Kyrylenko, 125
L
Lakota, Bishop, 213
Lapchynsky, Yu., 37, 63
Lebid, D., 59
Lenin, N., 15ff., 21, 27, 33ff., 45f., 51, 89, 104, 113, 141, 215
Lesya Ukrainka, 65, 199
Levytsky-Nechuy, I., 65
Levytsky, Kost., 167f.
Levytsky, O., 198
Lunacharsky, 68
Lutze, Victor, Nazi S. A., 171
Lyatyshevsky, Bishop, 212
Lypkivsky, Metropolitan, 208f.
Lyubchenko, A., 69
Lyubchenko, P., 37, 121, 143
Lyzanivsky, 39
M
Magridge, 98
Makhno, N., 32, 84
Maksymovych, 61
Malenkov, G., 215ff.
Mannerheim, K., Baron, 28
Manuilsky, D. Z., 30, 47, 186
Marr, N., Prof., 202
Marx, K., 113
Mazepa, Ivan, Hetman, 113, 195
Mazlakh, S., 29f.
Melnikov, 189, 215
Melnyk, Col., 159, 168, 170
Mikhnovsky, M., 19, 56
Moskalenko, 178
Muravyev, M., 26, 28
Mustapha Kemal, 207
Mykhaylychenko, H., 67
Mykytenko, 125
N
Naumenko, 198
Neronovych, 26, 30
Nicholas I, Tsar, 127
Nicholas II, Tsar, 20
O
Oleksy, Bishop, 209f.
Oles, O., 65, 198
Osmachka, T., 70
P
Palady, Bishop, 210
Panch, P., 69, 124
Peter I, Tsar, 195f., 211
Petlyura, S. Ataman, 19, 23, 30ff., 113, 124
Petrenko, S., 39
Pidmohylny, V., 84, 124
Pluzhnyk, E., 70
Poloz, 37
Polykarp, Bishop, 209f.
Postyshev, P., 97, 121f., 128, 142
Pyatakov, G., 28
R
Radishchev, 189
Rakovsky, I., Prof., 155
Rakovsky, Ch., 31, 41
Romzha, Bishop, 213
Roosevelt, F. D., Pres., 106
Rudnytsky, S., Prof., 63
Ryasny, Gen., 177
Rylsky, M., 67, 120, 124, 147, 181, 196, 198, 201
S
Samiylenko, 65
Sava, Bishop, 209
Semenko, M., 70, 124
Sergy, Patriarch, 209f.
Shakhray, V., 26, 28f.
Sharayevsky, Bishop, 208
Sheptytsky, Andry, Metropolitan, 168, 206, 211f.
Shevchenko, Taras, 120, 198
Shlikhter, 33, 64
Shumsky, O., 37, 60f., 79, 81
Skrypnyk, M., 22, 28f., 61ff., 77ff., 88, 103, 109ff., 136, 144, 157,
195
Skoropadsky, Hetman, 23ff., 73
Slabchenko, M., 75, 110
Slipy, J., Metropolitan, 212f.
Slynko, P., 37
Sophia Paleolog, Tsaitsa, 195
Sosyura, 199f.
Stalin, Joseph, 15, 29, 56, _passim_, etc.
Starytska-Chernyakivska, L., 65, 110
Stefanyk, V., 68
Steshchenko, I., 198
Stetsko, J., 167f.
Swierszczewski, Gen., 179
Synyavsky, O., 76
T
Teliha, O., 170
Tikhon, Patriarch, 206, 209
Tikhonov, N., 197
Tolstoy, A. N., 116
Trotsky, L., 16ff., 27, 35, 56, 68, 79ff., 88, 141
Tukhachevsky, Marshal, 141
Turyansky, 61
Tychyna, P., 67ff., 120, 124, 147, 181, 196
Tymchenko, E., 76
V
Vasylkiv, 61
Velychkivsky, Prof., 173
Vlyzko, 123
Volobuyiv, 84
von Schleicher, Kurt, 106
Vorony, M., 65
Vuzko, 124
Vynnychenko, V., 19, 30ff., 58, 65, 198
Vyshnya, O., 39
W
Wilson, Woodrow, Pres., 34
Y
Yagoda, 132, 141
Yalovy, 124
Yanovsky, Y., 69, 147, 196, 200
Yefremiv, S., Prof., 76, 110, 120, 198
Yegorov, Marshal, 141
Yezhov, 141f.
Yohansen, M., 69, 124
Z
Zalyochy, A., 67
Zatonsky, V., 26, 64, 122f., 143, 146
Zerov, M., 67, 124
Zhdanov, A., 119, 197
Zinovyev, 27, 141
Zoshchenko, 197
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