literature, which had been handicapped by the domination of the RAPP,
its effect on Ukrainian literature could not fail to be disastrous.
In effect, it standardized all literature on the Russian model and
it indicated that henceforth literature and literary men were to be
treated as organs of the Communist Party and of the Moscow regime. It
was the definite answer to the efforts of the Ukrainian writers of
nearly all the conflicting schools to adapt literature to their own
purposes and ideals. It took away from the writers all inspiration and
desire to use their talents for their own artistic enjoyment and it
rendered it possible for the central government to abolish that sense
of republican patriotism which had been so marked during the preceding
period in all the non-Russian republics.
In place of the ideas of the old Ukrainian life which was being brought
to an end by the compulsory collectivization and the establishment
of the collective farms, in place of the old visions of the unity of
the Ukrainian people and those ideals of a new national life that had
dominated Ukrainian literature from the time of Shevchenko, in place
of the efforts to establish in Ukrainian literature all those branches
of art and culture which were stirring in Western Europe, there was
now given to the writers, young and old, the command to celebrate and
to glorify the actual process of socialist construction in Ukraine, as
elsewhere. By 1934 Kulyk, as the organizer of the Ukrainian section,
could write of the definite end of the old bourgeois nationalist
sentiment as preached by Yefremiv and of the efforts of Khvylovy to
reorient the psychology of Ukrainian literature on that of Europe.
In his article on the modern Ukrainian literature in a volume on the
_Literature of the Peoples of the USSR_ published in 1934, he could
pass over in silence, for obvious reasons, all of the great names which
had appeared during the preceding ten years and shower his praise upon
the young proletarian writers who were willing to follow blindly and,
to the best of their ability, the new course.
There were, of course, some of the older and even of the more prominent
men who were willing to compromise with the new regime. Among them
the outstanding figures were Tychyna and Rylsky. Both of them, after
consideration and treatment by the authorities, tried to bend their
works to the new ideas but there were many who were unwilling or unable
to be untrue to their artistic faith and for them there was not even
the choice of silence or writing. They were compelled to conform or
vanish and it was not long after the organization of the All-Union
Society of Soviet Writers when this was made abundantly clear.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Debacle
The Ukrainian Communists, as Skrypnyk and Khvylovy, could not fail to
be horrified at the spreading famine which broke out in the autumn of
1932 and raged throughout the winter. Whatever they might have thought
in the beginning of the compulsory collectivization, they were aghast
at its results. They could not fail to recognize that it meant the end
of the old Ukrainian life which they had tried to remodel in accordance
with their own ideals and that it meant a widening breach with the
outside world. They could not fail to see that it meant the ending of
that world Communism in which they had tried to believe and in which
they saw the hope of humanity and justice.
They could hardly fail to recognize almost immediately how they had
played into the hands of the enemies of Ukraine by their attacks on the
older scholars, for they were now to learn that they had unwittingly
forged the tool that was to be used against them.
Postyshev arrived in Ukraine in January, 1933, to superintend and make
more rigid the rules for the collection of grain. He brought with him
his own staff, his own detachments of the NKVD, and while he nominally
had the post of second secretary, he had the instructions from Stalin
that made him the complete dictator. He soon showed what that meant.
Among his earliest acts was the removal of Chubar from his post as
head of the Soviet of People’s Commissars and he replaced him with the
more pliable P. Lyubchenko, a former Borotbist. Skrypnyk was forthwith
demoted from Commissar of Education to Chairman of the Ukrainian State
Planning Commission, a position of no special importance, once the
conduct of all Ukrainian life was to be administered in accordance
with a plan drawn up in Moscow. He was replaced by Volodymyr Zatonsky,
who had been one of the foremost advocates of russification.
The axe was used still more widely on the entire Communist Party in
Ukraine. Within ten months, Postyshev removed two hundred thirty-seven
secretaries of regional party committees, two hundred seventy-nine
heads of regional executive committees, and one hundred and fifty-eight
heads of regional control commissions. Nearly one thousand prominent
Communists were removed, not to speak of lesser members. Since there
were little more than 125,000 Communists in Ukraine, it is easy to see
that a large proportion of the Party was unceremoniously eliminated.
Elimination meant not only demotion but it was practically a death
sentence, for those expelled were charged with that most serious crime
against the state, bourgeois nationalism or sabotage, and the vast
majority were either shot or deported.
Postyshev turned his attention to the Academy of Sciences which had
already been purged of its leading members. Here he found some two
hundred and fifty more who were removed on charges of Ukrainian
chauvinism or sabotage. In their place, he introduced ordinary
Communists or Russians with more regard to their reliability and their
loyalty to Stalin than to their capability or scholarly qualifications.
Postyshev’s object was the rerussification of the country, for it
had already been commented in Moscow that there were too many of the
young Ukrainians who were securing an education only in Ukrainian
without knowing the master language of Russian. Skrypnyk had paid no
attention to these complaints, for he retorted that in Moscow the young
Russians were not learning Ukrainian and he assumed that all the Soviet
Republics had the same rights. He was soon to learn differently, for
from now on Russian was to be the official language of widest use.
In every considerable city Postyshev established Russian newspapers
which had almost completely vanished during the period of
Ukrainization. He opened Russian schools in the leading cities and he
introduced Russian into all the other schools on an equality basis
with Ukrainian. He established Russian theatres in the larger cities
and sent them Russian companies from Leningrad and Moscow to show the
greatness of Russian art, while at the same time he had Les Kurbas
arrested at the end of the year and closed the Berezil Theatre, the
leading company in Ukraine, and even abolished its name as Catherine
the Great had abolished the name of the Zaporozhian Sich one hundred
fifty years before.
The fundamental object was to re-Russianize Ukraine as rapidly as
possible. In pursuance of this idea, Zatonsky even suggested that
the students should be encouraged to talk a mixture of Russian and
Ukrainian in the hope that they could thus be more quickly induced to
accept the alien tongue. That was a rash thought, for as soon as it
was reported to Moscow, there came a strong protest from Gorky that
such a procedure could only injure the purity of the Russian language
by mixing foreign elements in it. Zatonsky hurriedly withdrew his
suggestions but it was too late and only a few years later he was to
pay the penalty for his rash proposal.
It was small wonder that Khvylovy, who knew well that he was threatened
with arrest and execution, committed suicide in despair on May 13,
1933 and he was followed on July 6, by Skrypnyk who was too familiar
with the workings of Russian Communism not to realize that he would be
steadily demoted until he could be finished off without comment as a
fallen idol.
The terror and the destruction proceeded apace and after the murder
of Kirov in Leningrad on December 21, 1934, new investigations were
ordered and it was discovered that the bulk of the Ukrainian authors
were involved in the conspiracy. In a very short time their ranks
were almost completely decimated. In the same month H. Kosynka, O.
Vlyzko, I. Krushelnytsky, K. Burevy, and D. Falkivsky were shot on
various pretenses. Nearly all the former members of the _Vaplite_, the
Neo-Classicists, the groups connected with the MARS in Kiev and the
_New Generation_, were liquidated in one way or another, either by
execution or deportation and deportation was practically the equivalent
of death, for scarcely one of the deported ever returned to the Ukraine
or made his presence or his present place of dwelling known to any of
his friends.
It would be too long to mention the list of names, but among them were
all the outstanding names of the preceding years, Kulish, Yalovy,
Yohansen, Epik, Zerov, Dray-Khmara, Kosynka, Pidmohylny, Semenko,
Vuzko, etc. These men were not only put out of the way but every
attempt was made to prove that they had never existed. Their books were
removed from the libraries and bookstores and, so far as possible, even
references to them and their work were expunged from encyclopedias and
reference books and the movement which they represented and which,
but a short time before, had been patronized by the Commissariat of
Education was rendered non-existent. Only the name of Khvylovy remained
as an example of anti-Russian work and he was presented as a pupil of
Petlyura, Hrushevsky and the Western imperialists and a believer in
bourgeois nationalism, a term which was now extended to cover anything
hostile to the general line of the Party.
Faced with the certainty of sharing the fate of their colleagues, some
of even the more prominent authors began to waver. Among this number
were Tychyna and, a little more reluctantly, Rylsky. In fact, it
required a term in prison to bring the latter to an appreciation of the
beauties of the new order. Both proved themselves valuable converts,
even if they were compelled to forget all their old mannerisms and
perfections of style and produce tasteless propaganda poetry, while the
official organs boasted of their slow but steady growth in realism.
Thus, in 1934 Kulyk could say of Tychyna, “The collection of _The Party
Leads_ represents an unquestionable achievement. Nevertheless we should
be rendering poor service to Tychyna himself if we failed to point
out the uneven tenor, and sometimes even hesitation, in the artistic
expression of themes and ideas new to him. Stronger organizational
ties with the realities, emancipation from artificial, at times purely
bookish culture, such are the conditions on which depends further
progress by Tychyna along the new road chosen by this great Ukrainian
poet.” Rylsky and Bazhan were treated in the same way, while such
writers as Panch and Holovko were told it was their task to get over
the old notion that “Mother Ukraine” had the same interest in all
her sons, whether they were working men, peasants or intellectual
nationalists. Both of them later revised their works under the kind
leadership of the Party.
The proletarian writers and those who were content to write upon the
prescribed or recommended themes were in their element. Kyrylenko and
Mykytenko wrote glowingly and woodenly about collectivization and the
elimination of the kulaks, “the dregs of society.” Korniychuk, a young
dramatist, presented in his plays all the appropriate Five Year plan
subjects and gloried in the defeat of the old in the factories and on
the collective farms. Everything in the literary field that glorified
the Communist Party and rejected those ideas which had flourished under
the preceding regime was applauded and the successful received honors
and wealth and Stalin prizes for literary achievement.
The same development or retrogression was to be noted in the more
purely scientific fields, especially where they touched studies
dealing with the Ukrainian language, history or culture. Skrypnyk
had removed some of the more distinguished members of the Academy of
Science. Postyshev purged most of their followers and then he went on
to reorganize the institution in the Communist way. The Academy was
changed into a series of separate institutes, each of which was subject
only to a carefully chosen Presidium.
Then, at the end of 1934 all of those institutes connected with the
old Historical Section and which dealt with such subjects as Ukrainian
archaeology, history, history of law, Western Ukraine, etc. were
abolished. The study of the humanities was practically ended and the
old staff was excluded. There were left only institutes of language
and material culture to care for the past and all other subjects
were handed over to the network of the VUAMLIN, the reorganized
and strengthened network of Marxo-Leninist institutes, which could
serve as a more reliable means of spreading Communist doctrine in a
pseudo-scientific form. They created a new complex of societies as the
Society of Marxist Historians, all of which had the avowed purpose of
glorifying the regime at the expense of any form of scientific truth.
In the field of studies in the Ukrainian language, under the leadership
of A. Khvylya who had already distinguished himself by his attacks on
the entire process of Ukrainization, new steps were taken to counteract
all that had been gained by any school of thought.
In the beginning Naum Kaganovich had tried to show that the scholars
of the preceding period had worked under the influence of “populist”
theories of language. He was soon forced to change this to a statement
that the work had been “bourgeois nationalist,” the favorite slogan for
anything that was not Russian. In his article, _The Language Theory of
Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalism_, he wrote: “Here under the conception
of the people emerge the kurkul circles; the bourgeois nationalists
have shaped the development of the Ukrainian language on the speech
of the kurkuls.” In another passage he declared: “By this approach to
the people the bourgeois nationalists understand the removal from the
language of everything that is connected with the October revolution,
the removal of all features which bring it closer to the language of
the Russian proletariat and the workers of the other republics of the
USSR and the implanting of everything that is outmoded, conservative
and permeated with the nationalist bourgeois spirit.”
It was easy to see at what these new “scholars” were aiming. The old
arguments as to whether the local dialects of the peasants or the newer
literary language which had been developed for over a century was the
better Ukrainian were now replaced by the definite statement that the
proper form was that which was the language of the more “advanced”
classes, i.e. the Communists and their sympathizers, who were the least
connected with any special area and were the least affected by any
considerations of locality or traditional culture or usage. Even during
Ukrainization the Communists of high rank coming from Moscow had been
officially relieved of the task of learning Ukrainian. Now this was
expanded and those who, of their own volition, learned a few words were
adjudged the best authorities on Ukrainian because of their Communist
knowledge and standing.
The new authorities set themselves the task of rooting out those
attempts which the “bourgeois nationalists” had made to bring together
the Ukrainians of the east and of the west. They declared that the
preceding group had sought to bring back capitalism and to separate
Ukrainian from the “brotherly” Russian and to remodel it on Polish
and German standards. They attacked any system of orthography and
transliteration which differed from that used in Russian and in their
attacks on Polonisms in Ukrainian they went so far as to call Polish
any Ukrainian form which differed from the Russian, even when the
Polish word in fact had the same form as the Russian and differed from
the Ukrainian.
In the small dictionaries that were printed only those words were
admitted that revealed Russian relations and the academician Krymsky
once remarked of one of these that it was merely a Russian-Russian
dictionary, so far had the process been carried.
In 1933 Khvylya published a new orthography for Ukrainian. This
repudiated the work that had been done earlier to bring together
Eastern and Western Ukrainian and sought to take as the standard those
Ukrainian dialects that had been most thoroughly russianized, although
at the same time he carefully avoided explaining the policy on which he
was working.
Thus, during these years there developed a definite policy of
disintegrating the language from within. It was based very definitely
upon the old theories of the nineteenth century, that Ukrainian was
merely a corrupt form of Russian and could not have any independent
development, but such a statement which would have satisfied Nicholas
I and Belinsky was not expressed clearly. It was enveloped in a mass
of Communist jargon which appealed to the great names of Bolshevik
ideology and covered a complete ignorance of any of the facts of
language or of popular usage.
At the same time in another field Postyshev saw the opportunity to
deliver further blows under the guise of progress and of satisfying
Ukrainian aspirations. He moved the capital of the Ukrainian Republic
back to Kiev from Kharkiv. There were good reasons for this. The Soviet
regime had been established at Kharkiv, because it was nearer to the
Russian boundary and hence could more easily receive support from
Russian military sources during the civil war. Kiev, as the centre
of traditional Ukrainian life, was more liable to sympathy with the
Ukrainian national movement, as the Russians had found on more than one
occasion. Now, with the country prostrate, it seemed advisable for the
Communists to mark their triumph and endeavor to identify themselves
with the masses by recognizing Kiev.
Yet, it brought with it another blow to Ukrainian prestige. Of all the
cities in Ukraine, Kiev was the richest in the monuments of the past.
Therefore, to mark the Communist triumph, they decided to rebuild large
portions of the city and to erect buildings that would be worthy of the
new regime. It was easy to find as the proper sites the areas where the
old Kiev had stood.
From the very first days of Bolshevism and Communism, the regime,
with its atheistic trends, had devoted itself to the robbing of the
churches. Even the ikonostasis of St. Sophia had been melted down
to recover the gold ornaments with which it had been decorated. The
museums had been largely pillaged. Some of the contents had been
removed to Moscow on various pretexts, but still more had been wantonly
destroyed.
Now work began in earnest to wreck the surviving monuments of the
past. In quick succession the Communists ruined, blew up or levelled
a large number of churches which spoke too strongly of the past
greatness of Kiev and the Ukrainians. These included the Cathedral
Church of the Golden Domed Monastery of St. Michael of the twelfth
century, with a bell-tower of the seventeenth, the Church of the
Three Saints of the twelfth century, the cloisters of the Monastery
of St. Irena of the eleventh century, the finest monuments of the
period of Mazepa at the end of the seventeenth century, including
the Cathedrals of the Theophany of the Brotherhood Monastery and the
“Great Nicholas” of the Ustyno-Mykolayiv Monastery, the work of the
architect Joseph Startsev, with a bell-tower of the late eighteenth
or the early nineteenth century, the “Little Nicholas” and the Church
of St. George of the eighteenth century, a large number of structures
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the Kievan-Mezhyhirye
Monastery of the Transfiguration, the Church of Sts. Peter and
Paul in Podil of the eighteenth century, the bell-tower of the
Kiev-Kiril-Troitsky Monastery of the eighteenth century built by the
architect Ivan Hryhorovych-Barsky, the Church of Sts. Borys and Hlib of
the eighteenth century, the Church of the Birth of Christ and the “good
Nicholas,” built by Andry Melensky at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the Church of the Tithes, the celebrated statue of Samson by
Hryhorovych-Barsky, and a long series of other monuments and buildings.
Almost all of these buildings came from those periods when the
Ukrainians were the most free from Russian influence or, as in the case
of the Mazepa baroque, had the closest contacts with the West. It was a
deliberate part of the Communist attempt to rewrite the Ukrainian past.
Of course, their excuse was that the old primarily ecclesiastical
culture stood in marked contradiction to the modern era of
industrialization and collectivization, the “glorious age of Stalin”
which called for the development of a new type of architecture. Still,
in a surprising number of cases these new buildings did not make their
appearance and the ground was left empty or covered with insignificant
structures which could better have been placed on the site of those
half-ruined shacks and hovels which were the real expressions of the
Communist paradise.
The primary object was the annihilation of the Ukrainian spirit and
represented part of the broad general movement which had been launched
for the rerussification of the country and the stopping in every way
of that spontaneous outburst of development which had been called into
being by the downfall of tsarism and the founding of the Ukrainian
National Republic. The general debacle was now complete.
Within four years, before the ending of the first Five Year Plan a
situation had been brought about which seemed to the Soviet authorities
a guarantee of their final victory over what they were pleased to call
bourgeois nationalism but which was, in reality, the logical outgrowth
of the Ukrainian aspirations throughout the centuries.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Thirties
With the completion of the compulsory collectivization, the ending of
the famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance,
the country entered a new phase. The position in which it found itself
was almost the opposite of the twenties. As, at the end of Militant
Communism, the land was ruined and exhausted, so it was again. The
number of domestic animals had dropped almost to the level of the
earlier period, agriculture had been rendered prostrate, and material
well-being had disappeared as the peasants were forced to labor on the
collective farms.
On the other hand, there was none of that excitement and desire for
work that had accompanied the introduction and development of the New
Economic Policy, when the relaxation of the restrictions and the end
of the lawlessness of Militant Communism had restored the possibility
of profit to the people and when they could hope to see the results of
their own labor.
More than that, the earlier period had been marked by the belief of
the Ukrainian Communists that they could find an independent place in
the Communist International. Then there was a conflict between those
who wished a development of Ukrainian ideals and traditions, a union
of the old and the new, and those who adopted a strictly Russian point
of view. Now there was only one dominating force--the Russian. It had
been made clear that there was to be no open antagonism. The Russian
point of view was the only one that could hope to find acceptance in
Communism, the Communist International had become a mere adjunct of
the Russian Communist Party, all Ukrainian sympathies and expressions
were banned, and the Ukrainian spirit was forced on the defensive and
compelled to fight a rearguard action for maintaining its existence.
Step by step, Stalin and the Russian Communist Party was changing
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a Russian empire with
its non-Russian dependencies and, despite the Constitution of the
Union and of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it was becoming
ever more and more clear that the latter was to be treated merely as
a geographical colony of the new Russian-dominated union, with no
attention to its wishes or its needs.