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.