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.