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.”