concentration and labor camps in the far north and in eastern Asia
were filled to overflowing as the Soviet authorities continued their
policy of developing their industrial centres east of the Urals. The
places in the cities and the collective farms thus emptied were, in
turn, filled by the importation of Russians and citizens of the other
Soviet republics as a means of producing not Ukrainian or Azerbaijanian
Soviet loyalty but as a means of establishing a new universal Soviet
patriotism and of separating the nationalities from their republics
which were henceforth to be mere administrative and economic
subdivisions of the Soviet state.
The object of these purges and these changes was the breaking up
of the population into individual entities who would recognize no
bonds of attachment to anything except the state. It was in a sense
the culmination of the efforts to break the sense of national or
even racial or clan unity which had been so strong in 1917, when the
Ukrainian National Republic had been established. The Communists had
broken this by playing upon class feelings; they had broken down the
class into families and now, under the relentless pressure of Yezhov,
they tried to go further and to break the families into individuals.
In line with this policy there came a complete ending to the interest
in the Ukrainians in the RSFSR and the other Soviet Republics. Skrypnyk
had done his best to educate the several million of these in Ukrainian
and at the moment of his fall the UkSSR was sending papers, books, and
theatrical companies, as well as teachers, to educate and maintain
their Ukrainian feelings as loyal members of the Soviet Union. That
was abruptly changed in 1932 and the pressure upon them to declare
themselves as simply Russians was constantly increased. It was almost
forbidden to mention the name Ukrainian in connection with the older
settlers in Kuban, along the Don, in the Green Wedge along the Amur,
etc. and it was a matter of perplexity as to what language they could
be said to speak or what dialect in connection with later studies of
the dialects of the Russian language. It was inadmissible to regard
them as speaking a peasant dialect in view of the attitude of the
authorities in recognizing some sort of Ukrainian, but it was even
worse to believe that Ukrainian could exist in those regions and so
they were simply passed over and forgotten, while the newcomers,
usually being under some kind of a ban, were simply treated as Russian
deportees.
Even this was not the whole story, for in such cities as Vinnytsya
during these same years, the population was slaughtered by the
thousands and buried secretly in carefully hidden burial places which
were then turned into parks and playgrounds to conceal the extent of
the crimes. This was repeated in many places but the situation in
Vinnytsya attracted especial attention because during the War, the
Germans found the places of burial and revealed the thousands of bodies
of the victims, many of whom had been buried alive. The extent of these
massacres was as great as was the killing of the Polish officers in
Katyn, which was likewise brought to light during the war.
By the time the census of 1939 was taken and this was the last one
published, the growth of the number of Russians and the diminution of
Ukrainians showed clearly that there was a large scale transfer of
nationality which completely reversed the figures in some sections of
Asia without regard for the natural laws of reproduction and mortality.
In this atmosphere the nature of the intellectual and literary work
in the UkSSR can well be imagined. The Ukrainian scholars were forced
to accept the full Russian theories of the Ukrainian past. This led
to a complete revaluation of all the “outstanding figures.” In 1933
the career of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was condemned on the ground that he
was a typical representative of the noble classes. By the outbreak
of World War II he became a Russian patriot for signing the Treaty
of Pereyaslav and bringing the Zaporozhian Kozaks under Muscovite
domination. It was so in every branch of historical study. In back of
the conception of the Soviet man and Soviet patriotism began to emerge
with ever greater clarity the conception of Russian patriotism, as the
doctrine of the “elder brother” who had given culture and civilization
to the other nations of the Soviet Union became clearer and clearer.
It was the same thing in language. Khvylya and his friends had been
working on a Ukrainian-Russian dictionary but this was immediately
criticized by _Pravda_ for its divisive tendencies, and the guilty
compilers were liquidated. A new edition was started in 1938 on still
a new principle. The Ukrainian and Russian words were to have the
same number of synonyms and these were to have identical value. If,
in any particular case, this did not prove to be true, it was so much
the worse for the Ukrainian. If there were more words in Ukrainian to
express various shades of one idea that there were in Russian, the
words were banned. If there were fewer, the Russian words were supplied
in order to show the influence that Russian had had upon the cultural
development of Ukrainian.
The result was the reverse of what Zatonsky had proposed. He had
suggested a mixed language with the idea that the Ukrainians would
develop by practice toward the use of standard Russian. Now the new
Commissariat of Education was introducing Russian into Ukrainian,
forbidding the use of Ukrainian syntactical constructions which had no
parallel in Russian in order to train the Ukrainians to speak Russian
by infiltrating it into their native speech. The result would have been
perhaps the same, but the important difference was that it preserved
the supremacy of the Russian language in a pure form and corrupted the
Ukrainian beyond recognition.
This procedure was too violent, even for many of the poets and writers
who were most ardent in their support of the Stalinist regime. Men
like Bazhan, who had put his pen entirely at the disposal of Moscow,
continued to use some of the forbidden words and even obtained rewards
for their obsequious phrases couched in this taboo language. It was
necessary if the whole theory of the USSR was not to fall by the
wayside and the authorities in Moscow were becoming aware of the
growing danger of Nazism.
They encouraged the writers, as Tychyna and Rylsky, to write narrative
and other poems on themes of the old hostility of the Ukrainians to
the Polish nobles and to stress the assistance which, in those ancient
days, the Ukrainians had received from the Muscovite authorities. They
fanned again the fires of the civil war when the Ukrainian Communists,
backed by their Muscovite friends and masters, were warring against the
Ukrainian National Republic and Petlyura.
In fact, during these fantastic years, Tychyna, Rylsky, Yanovsky and
similar writers, as well as Korniychuk, found it easier to maintain
their freedom by this fanning of Ukrainian chauvinism into flame than
did those authors who, following the narrow interpretation of socialist
realism, sought to trace the transformations in the contemporary life
and the growth of confidence in the Russian ideas of industrialization
and collectivization. Again and again these men were called to account
for allowing their local and national sympathies to run away with
them and to include descriptions which were perhaps nostalgic but
which could be twisted in the perverse logic of the NKVD into hidden
criticisms of the great Stalin, the leaders of the people, and the
all-wise and beneficent rule of Moscow.
By 1939, the situation in the Ukraine had changed entirely from what it
had been in 1929 when the first five year plan was getting under way.
The salient features of the Ukrainian economic life had been destroyed.
Yet Moscow was not yet satisfied.
Despite the increased taxation and the reduction in the income of the
average dweller on a collective farm, the Communist Party demanded each
year a larger part of the grain and of the cash income. The voluntary
donations for the benefit of the armed forces were increased and steps
were begun to demand taxes in kind from the returns which the peasants
received from their individual plots. Thus a peasant was required to
contribute so many eggs per year to the government, which did not
concern itself as to whether or not that peasant was raising hens. The
government demanded its share of the manure from the private cattle and
it made no difference as to whether or not the individual raised cattle.
At the same time the heads of the Communist Party sought high and wide
for misuse of state property. Again and again they discovered that on
collective farms the administration and the peasants were in agreement
that the best way to allow some improvement in the general economic
situation was to permit the peasant to cultivate and have the income
from a slightly larger plot of land. The increased productivity in this
way often more than covered the apparent use of state income from the
operations of the farm but to the leaders of the Communist Party this
was as severe an offence as was the failure to fulfil obligations, for
it dared to question the superiority of the policy of collectivization.
During 1939, the Party made strenuous efforts to stop such abuses and
they even went further in urging and commanding a reduction in the
individual allotments of land, which had been the only means of winning
even a grudging approval of the Ukrainian peasants for the idea of
collectivization.
Of course, with the outbreak of World War II there came a slight
relaxation of this pressure, for Stalin and his friends apparently
became aware that an excessive attack upon the peasantry might lead
them to make common cause with the opponents of the Soviet Union. Yet,
this relaxation of pressure was very slight during the years 1939-1941,
when the alliance of Stalin and Hitler seemed to be firm and steady and
when the Soviet Union was expanding in accordance with its own powers
and its own intrigues. In all this the Ukraine remained aloof, closely
guarded against the importation of new ideas and the population dragged
on their weary existence, scarcely daring to dream that anything could
happen to change their unhappy lot.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The First Occupation of Western Ukraine
After the expulsion of the Soviet Forces from Western Ukraine in
1920, the territory, including Eastern Galicia and Lviv, had remained
under Polish rule and had been subjected to a policy of Polonization
and colonization by a Polish population. There had been during the
period between the wars many clashes and much unpleasantness between
the two nationalities and the ill will thus generated promised
disastrous consequences for Poland in case of a new war. At the same
time the Polish domination had never threatened the fundamental forms
of Ukrainian social life, as had been the case in the UkSSR; the
Ukrainians had a certain representation in the Polish Parliament,
and they had been allowed, despite hindrances, to develop their own
economic life. With the possible exception of the one district of
Boryslav, there was very little Communism among the population, who
were well aware of the handicaps under which their brothers in the
UkSSR were living. At the same time the Nazi refusal to support the
Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine in the spring of 1939 had placed them on
their guard against the Nazis.
Thus, when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, the revolt of
the Ukrainians which many Poles expected did not take place. However,
the Polish government in the first days arrested and placed in
concentration camps many of the Ukrainian leaders but they were freed
by the rapid advance of the German forces and the Polish retreat, which
forced into Lviv and the neighborhood many thousands of refugees.
On August 23, 1939, when the Nazis and the Soviets signed a
non-aggression treaty, it was provided that if Poland were
disintegrated, Germany and the USSR would divide the territory roughly
along the line of the Narev, the Vistula, and the San. This gave to the
USSR the bulk of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian territories included
in pre-war Poland and Germany also expressed her disinterest in the
fate of Bukovyna and Bessarabia, where there was a Ukrainian population
under Rumanian rule.
The collapse of the Polish forces before the German onslaught was so
rapid that by September 17, 1939, the city of Lviv was practically in
German hands. Then the Soviets, hiding their aggressive designs under
the pretext that they were liberating their Ukrainian and Byelorussian
brothers from the rule of the Polish lords and capitalists, declared
that the Polish government had come to an end and that the Red Army was
crossing the Polish border to restore and unite the population with
the Soviet republics. At the approach of the Red Armies the Germans
withdrew, and Lviv and the old Eastern Galicia remained in Soviet hands.
The Soviet army had advanced with either anti-Polish or anti-capitalist
slogans without any opposition, but it was met with little real
enthusiasm, for the Western Ukrainians were apprehensive as to what
the future might bring. Some of the more openly anti-Communist leaders
dropped out of sight or made their way into German-occupied territory.
The bulk of the population remained passive, for they remembered
the Russian invasion of 1914 and knew what those Ukrainians who had
cooperated suffered when the Austro-Hungarian government returned the
next year, and they could not believe that this time the Soviets would
be any more fortunate.
The first days of the occupation were devoted to a conscious
Ukrainization of the territory. The bulk of the population assisted in
rounding up of the Polish police and security forces which had made
themselves objectionable during the Polish domination, and without any
hesitation unfurled the old Ukrainian blue and yellow national flag.
The co-operation of the old Ukrainian political leaders was politely
rejected but there was a large number of young, educated Ukrainians
without special political experience whose aid was welcomed.
The old newspapers ceased at once to appear, but the new occupants
started in all of the main cities new Communist newspapers as the _Free
Ukraine_ in Lviv and the _Soviet Ukraine_ in Stanyslaviv. They allowed
also a Communist Polish newspaper the _Red Flag_ and a similar paper in
Yiddish.
The old officials were at first encouraged to return to their posts,
whether they were Polish or not but in a very short time they began to
disappear and they were replaced by Ukrainian-speaking persons, some
from the neighborhood and some from eastern Ukraine. At almost the
same time, while preparations were begun for the proposed plebiscite,
the authorities quietly picked up and incarcerated most of the old
political leaders, especially those of the UNDO, the Ukrainian National
Democratic League, the representatives of those parties that had sought
a normalization of relations with the Poles.
In the same slow and unobtrusive way the Polish police of the different
cities were replaced by a “national militia.” This was composed of
armed groups of young men who more or less volunteered for the work
of maintaining order. The Ukrainian and the Jewish organizations
tried to bring these self-appointed groups under control but this
proved a difficult task for, in many cases, the new Soviet authorities
had encouraged some of the more lawless and tumultuous elements to
undertake the work so as to profit themselves by the resultant chaos
and to facilitate the calling in of their own people.
This era of anxiety on the part of the population and of extreme
moderation on the part of the occupying forces lasted for almost
a month, while preparations were being made for the election of
representatives of all organizations, factories, and groups to a
National Assembly for the consideration of reunion with the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic. Meetings were held everywhere, at which
attendance was compulsory, and everywhere there was expressed by
selected speakers the gratitude of the people for their liberation
from the Polish lords and the imperialistic capitalists. Khrushchov
and other high functionaries arrived from Kiev to conduct these
elections and to superintend the preparation of the lists of
delegates. Yet it was almost at once noted that while there were a
few well-known persons on the various lists of delegates, the vast
majority were either completely unknown or were definitely recognized
as representatives of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic or of the occupying
forces.
The election on October 22 was carried on in the regular Bolshevik
fashion with no opportunity for any choice of candidates. Over 90% of
the people were marshalled to the polls and it was made clear that they
had no choice but to approve the selected list. The response was, of
course, practically unanimous and the next step was then in order.
On October 26, the National Assembly met in Lviv. The delegates, acting
under definite orders, elected a presidium which included Stalin and
the officials of the UkSSR. The first act was to pass a resolution of
gratitude to Stalin and the Soviet leaders for their liberation of the
country. Then there were a few laudatory speeches and the resolution
was adopted to apply for membership in the USSR, to nationalize trade,
industry and the banks, to divide the land of the state, the large
landowners and the church among the landless and poor peasants, and to
send a delegation to Kiev and Moscow to ask for the incorporation.
All this was a cut and dried performance to satisfy the Communist love
of paper democracy and to justify their occupation of the country under
the guise of liberation. There was no discussion allowed and once again
the resolution was accepted unanimously.
On November 1, the selected delegation met Stalin, and the Presidium of
the USSR in Moscow formally welcomed the liberated brothers and annexed
their territory to the UkSSR. It was noteworthy that the action of
Moscow completely overshadowed any reception at Kiev but this was only
natural in view of the nature of the entire enterprise. There were none
of those demonstrations that had marked the union of the two sections
in the Ukrainian National Republic in 1919, when the vote and the union
represented the will of the people.
Once these formalities had been accomplished, the Soviets felt free to
act and, at a steadily increasing tempo, they went through in a few
months a refined version of what they had accomplished in the eastern
Ukraine in the course of twenty years. At first their actions were
moderate but with the passage of time they began to develop and to
reveal those tendencies which had marked their course in the east.
The first task was the reorganization of the country geographically.
On September 28, they had come to a new agreement with the Germans,
whereby Germany had given up her claims to Lithuania in return for
the area between the San and the Buh Rivers. So the Soviets assigned
Wilno and its territory to an independent Lithuania; they annexed the
region further south to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
and the rest to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This left
to the Germans four sections of Western Ukraine, Kholmshchyna,
Pidlyashshya, Posannya, and Lemkivshchyna, which were included in the
Polish Government General and were governed directly by the Nazis, who
allowed the appointment of a Ukrainian Central Committee to represent
the Ukrainians before the higher authorities, especially in question of
relief, etc.
The Soviet territory was divided into six districts with their centres
at Lviv, Drohobych, Stanyslaviv, Ternopil, Rivne and Lutsk. Each
of these was then divided into rayons or regions with about 25,000
population. The centres of these regions were often small towns but the
division was made quite arbitrarily and each centre was amply provided
with bureaucratic machinery.
The economic condition of the country was extremely bad and the only
saving feature was that the harvest had already been gathered, so
that there was a good chance for a large part of the agricultural
population, even of the poor, to survive during the winter. Yet the
influx of refugees fleeing before the German advance filled the cities
and the severance of connections with the west prevented the arrival of
any more manufactured goods or supplies and, of course, none came from
the east.
On the contrary, there came a new swarm of Soviet officials who were
themselves amazed at the wealth of goods in what, to the natives,
seemed impoverished markets. They brought with them liberal sums of
money to buy whatever they wished and they were the more favored
because the Soviets equated in value the Polish zloty and the Soviet
karbovanets. When we take into consideration the fact that prior to
the war a pound of meat in Poland cost four zloty and in the UkSSR
twenty-five to thirty karbovantsy, the vast purchasing power of the
Soviet officials can be seen. Then in December, to ruin the native
population, they arbitrarily stopped the zloty as legal tender, so
that the Ukrainian population lost everything, except those fortunate
persons who had succeeded in exchanging their Polish money for German
marks by clandestine trade across the border.
This swarm of officials was of various kinds. Those who were attached
to fields like military affairs, the railroads, the posts and
telegraphs, etc., i.e. those branches which were directly under the
All-Union Commissariats, made no concealment of the fact that Russian
was from now on to be the chief language. Other sections which were
under the Commissariats in Kiev first adopted Ukrainian as their
official tongue, but by the middle of 1940 they, too, had passed over
to the use of Russian, exactly as had been done in all the offices in
Kiev.
By the end of November, when the supplies in the stores were already
becoming exhausted, the actual work of nationalization commenced. The
former owners were often thrown out, if their establishments had been
of any size, and as former wealthy individuals they were refused food
tickets and other privileges on the ground that they belonged to the
non-laboring element and were enemies of the people. This meant that
they were compelled to sell upon the black market everything that
they had been able to save or which they possessed and which had not
been confiscated, and during the winter many of them, like the Polish
landowners and the police who fell into Communist hands, were deported
under atrocious and inhuman conditions to Kazakhstan and Central Asia
to disappear.
On the other hand, the Soviets introduced at once the idea of dining
halls for the workers and special stores for Communists and higher
functionaries where they could secure easily and cheaply whatever there
was to be obtained in Western Ukraine.
At the same time the nationalization of the land was commenced and this
gave a good excuse for the elimination of another class of formerly
prosperous people, whether they were Poles or Ukrainians. At first
this was carried out along the lines of the Ukrainian land code of
1922, for the authorities were eager to get crops in when spring came.
Still, during the summer of 1940 they began to urge the formation of
collective farms. The peasants in some of the more backward regions
listened to these ideas willingly, but in the better areas where
agriculture was on a far higher and more efficient plane than in large
sections of eastern Ukraine, they were very cool and meetings had to
be postponed again and again if disorders were to be averted in the
middle of the war. Still the Soviet authorities felt that they could
waste some time until a real peace was restored and their hands were
definitely free.