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.