clear in regard to many buildings and institutions whether the bulk of
the damage and the losses were caused by Nazi or by Communist actions.
Some 3500 carloads of machinery were shipped alone from the city of
Zaporyzhzhya and most of this material was packed at night in utter
darkness with no special care as to where it was being sent.
The same situation confronted the workers, some 5,000,000 of whom were
evacuated from the Ukraine and landed in rough factories that were
hastily erected somewhere in Asia. These sometimes lacked even roofs
and means of heating when the mercury dropped to 45° below zero.
Under such conditions, if the chaos and the disorder were not to be
allowed to spread further, it was obvious that something had to be done
to improve the morale of the population. This was particularly evident
and necessary during the early months when it seemed as if the Nazis
might decide to make some concessions to the people. As a result, there
were a series of developments undertaken which superficially, at least,
offered some concessions to the spirit of the various non-Russian
nationalities.
Thus, in 1943 the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR was allowed to
celebrate its twenty fifth anniversary at Ufa in the Bashkir Autonomous
Republic and to list its institutes which were scattered throughout
Asia. Such an event rendered it possible to blame the Nazis for
the destruction of what had not been evacuated. It furnished good
propaganda for the Western powers who were already sending copious
supplies to the USSR and receiving in return from it only condemnation
and criticism.
In the same way, the various writers who had passed the approval of
the government were assigned posts as newspaper correspondents in the
Red Army where they could sing the praises of Stalin. Yet, at the same
time, they were encouraged to write articles and poems which would
reflect the hostility to the Nazis and again and again the censorship
was relaxed for men like Sosyura to write poems in praise of the
Ukraine, of its past, its present and its future.
Others like Yanovsky and Bazhan were allowed to emphasize the
separation between the traditional Ukrainian speech and the jargon
that had been put out in the various Ukrainian-Russian dictionaries
after the breaking of the Ukrainian Renaissance. They were allowed to
assemble collaborators to compile a more conservative dictionary and
to revamp the system of orthography which had been the work of such
pronounced Russian sympathizers as Khvylya during the preceding period.
Yet, these concessions were more apparent than real, for under the
wartime conditions, those Ukrainian scholars that had the apparent
confidence of the government were scattered far and wide. They were
living perforce under abnormal conditions and no efforts were made
to bring them together or to conduct a revival of the Ukrainian
work that had been so ruthlessly and needlessly shattered. It was a
wartime device adopted for a passing situation and the masters in the
Kremlin well understood that the fury of the war had done more than
they had ever dreamed possible for the disintegration of the various
Soviet Republics. Once, therefore, the evacuation had taken place,
the Soviet leaders had only to sit by and to reap the profits. There
would be plenty of time for that later and so the war years seemed an
intermission in the relentless pressure that had been exerted in the
past.
It was for the Soviet leaders a far more vital problem to recover the
masses of the people who had fled to the west or had been carried
away by the Germans and who might, even in case of a victory of the
democratic powers, reveal the full force of the Soviet pressure. That
was why they welcomed the Yalta Agreement which provided for the
compulsory return to the USSR of all refugees and deported persons
and why, once peace was restored, they showed such devilish ingenuity
in trying to recover the control of every one who could testify from
personal experience as to the nature of the Soviet rule.
It was with the greatest surprise and lack of comprehension that the
Western leaders became aware of this situation. They had listened
eagerly to the Soviet siren songs that it was only Nazi sympathizers
and criminals and traitors who did not want to return under the Soviet
rule and it required some months before supposedly serious statesmen
recovered their equilibrium sufficiently to understand the way in which
they had been duped in the middle of the war.
Yet, no sooner had Soviet rule been reestablished than the old
processes were revived with even greater energy and vigor. The last
masks of independence or of free thought in the cultural or economic
fields were torn away and the old persecution and charges were pressed
with ever increasing zeal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ukraine After World War II
At the conclusion of World War II, Stalin and the officials of the
USSR were ready for the next step. They had satisfactorily fooled
the Western powers, they had entered the UkSSR and the Byelorussian
SSR in the United Nations and they had secured from the President of
the United States and the Prime Minister of the British Commonwealth
of Nations the right to return (by force, if necessary) persons with
USSR citizenship. They had decorated the Allied leaders with medals
commemorating the Russian conquerors of the past and they were ready
to move ahead. They were sure that no one would care to ask about the
fate of the unfortunate victims of the German slave camps because every
American and Western civil or military authority of high rank had
become convinced of the humaneness of Stalin and his group.
The Ukraine had been thoroughly devastated, as we have seen. Its
factories and its fields had been laid waste. That part of its
machinery which had not been wantonly destroyed by one of the two
contesting invaders had been carted to work outside of the UkSSR. But
even so, Ukraine was not quiet.
The population, even that part which had been more favorably disposed
to the Soviets because of the persecution by the Nazis, had hoped
that with the return of peace and the Soviet victory there might be
an improvement in living conditions, an increase of consumer goods, a
relaxation of some of the austerity that had marked the years before
1941. They were almost at once to be disillusioned, for they very soon
found that out of the scanty stores of food which they had preserved
from the greedy Nazis they were supposed to make generous gifts for the
benefit of Stalin and the elder brothers, the Great Russians, the one
people that were loyal through thick and thin to the authorities of the
Soviet Union.
Yet instead of bringing in an era of peace and harmony, Stalin and
his associates, emboldened by their successes in central Europe,
immediately began a new campaign against the American “warmongers” and
“imperialists” to prepare the people for still more rigid controls. It
became clear almost at once that the return of the Soviet authorities
was to usher in not a relaxation but a tightening of the old controls.
These were bitterly resented. In Odesa and Kharkiv there were serious
disturbances and while there may be some question as to whether these
were directly inspired and organized by detachments of the U. P. A., it
seems perfectly clear that they were suppressed not only by the forces
of the MVD but by the Red Army.
On the other hand, as early as 1944 when the Nazi tide began to ebb
and the Western Sovietophile feeling was at its height, the Union
Council of Commissars in Moscow passed a resolution authorizing the
various Soviet Republics to enter into relations with foreign countries
by having their own Commissariats for Foreign Affairs and their own
national armies. Such devices completely fooled the Allied leaders.
They did not notice or want to notice that the Ukrainian Commissar
for Foreign Affairs, D. Z. Manuilsky, had long played a role as a
Russian Soviet representative in the Ukraine. Furthermore, the new
Ukrainian and Byelorussian armies did not adopt the language of the
country for which they were fighting. In theory after 1944 they were
the only Soviet troops engaged against the Germans but even Stalin
and the central authority did not pretend that there were no Great
Russians in these armies. On the contrary, they boasted of this fact,
whenever it was not necessary to hold before the world the shadow of
Ukrainian and Byelorussian independence. The ruse worked and both
Ukraine and Byelorussia were admitted to the United Nations, but
both countries have declined to enter into diplomatic relations with
any foreign country and have chosen, as was natural, to carry on all
their negotiations through Moscow. Still later, in 1951, to carry this
pretense of independence still further and deceive the Western world,
the Soviet Union conferred upon the Ukrainian Soviet Republic the right
to have its own anthem and its own national flag.
These actions were not to be interpreted as a concession from Moscow,
although they were presented in that guise. They were rather intended
to strengthen the Soviet position in international affairs and by an
appearance of generosity to facilitate the reduction of the satellite
states to the same position as that held by the Union Republics. In
this sense they were a response to the centralizing tendencies which
were now to be expressed in a still stronger form.
As soon as hostilities ended and even before the Soviets were assured
of all their hopes, they began to purge again the Ukrainian Communist
Party and within a few months some 38% of the high officials were
removed on the ground of bourgeois nationalism. All those who had
not retreated to the east or could not show that they were working
throughout the war as zealous Soviet partisans were summarily exiled
as bourgeois nationalists. In the same way, when the enforced return
of displaced persons began under the Yalta Agreement, very few were
allowed to return to their homes. The vast majority were either
executed for surrendering to the Germans or were sent to the labor
camps in the far north and east for reeducation.
The Fourth Five Year Plan which was commenced in 1946 was very
definitely devoted to the restoration of the country after the ravages
of the war and to the increase of the Soviet capacity for defense. It
was only in Ukraine and Byelorussia that the restoration had to absorb
the energies of a considerable majority of the population, for while
there were areas in the neighborhood of Leningrad and Stalingrad which
had been badly devastated, the situation in the Ukraine was far worse.
The cities and factories had been destroyed, the mines had been flooded
and the population were living as best they might among the ruins which
had been left by the two invading armies.
At the same time the work of restoration went very slowly. Less than
one third of the miners of the Donbas had returned to their posts
and the vast majority of those who were Communists received more or
less sinecures above ground. Their places were taken by forcing the
Ukrainian peasants, including a large percentage of young girls,
to work in the pits with the minimum of safeguards. Little money
was appropriated for the restoration of the damaged housing, for as
the writer Korniychuk declared in one of his works, “Ukraine was so
thankful for the success of Stalin that they did not care how they
lived, for if he had perished, life would not be worth living under any
circumstances.”
With this attitude prominently emphasized by the leading propagandists,
it is easy to see that the resources and energies of the population
were directed by force rather toward those items that would advance the
importance and the convenience of Moscow, than those that would be of
advantage to the local population.
The one exception was the necessity for rebuilding immediately and
strengthening the railroad communications between the Donbas, Moscow,
Leningrad and the Black Sea ports--in other words, the extreme eastern
part of the Ukraine which was slated for a special development with
roads and railroads linking the country up with the Russian centres
rather than with the other Ukrainian centres to the west for these were
regarded as exposed centres in case of a new outbreak of hostilities
and were to be neglected until they were masked by the extension of
Soviet power over the satellite countries.
The collectivized agriculture was in little better shape. In that part
of the Ukraine which had been under Soviet control before 1939, the
authorities revived the collective farms but they had been so badly
ruined that at first the authorities were often willing to be more
considerate of the members. Immediately after the war they allowed them
to group themselves into links or permanent sections of some eight to
ten people who would thus come to feel themselves a distinct unit in
the collective farm. It did not take long for the more rigid Communists
to decide that this sense of permanence was in a way a defiance of the
principles of collectivization, for very often members of the same
household, if it were at all numerous, would group themselves into a
link. In such cases the link became more prosperous, for it was in a
way a revival of that form of family agriculture which had long been
popular in the Ukraine before the collectivization. Furthermore, it was
soon suspected that the links varied in their delivery of supplies to
the government, sometimes in inverse proportion to their own readiness
to work. The peasants likewise as in the early days of the NEP devoted
more attention to their own private plots of land, a phenomenon that
had been noticed even before World War II.
The Soviet authorities had several answers to such developments. On the
one hand, they finally forbade the operation of the permanent links
which had developed to the point where they threatened the objective
of collectivization, the turning of the peasant farmer into a paid
proletarian worker in agriculture. On the other hand they reduced the
size again of the individual plot of land and they forced the peasants
to give up animal raising on their plots by charging them for even
the straw from the collective farms and the wild fodder that grew in
abandoned places. Then again, they levied a tax on the products of
these plots and this, plus the reduction of the allotment, rendered it
impossible for the peasant to improve his lot except through increased
work on the collective farm. In the meanwhile the steady raising of
the quota of work required for one labor day made it impossible for
the average peasant, unless he was a Stakhanovist (i.e. a person who
cooperated with the central regime and thereby received favorable
assignments) to complete one labor day within one calendar day, no
matter how long hours he worked. This had been a favorite device of
the Russian landlords as we learn from Radishchev’s _Journey from
Petersburg to Moscow_, a famous Russian radical work of the end of
the eighteenth century but a modern version of it was adapted by the
Russian Communist leaders and used effectively.
Even these measures were not the desirable solution. This was first
proposed by Khrushchov in 1947, and while it was at first looked upon
with some disfavor, it was finally deemed suitable by the slave-drivers
of the Kremlin, and Khrushchov, after a period of mild disfavor, was
promoted to the Politburo, and another Russian, Melnikov, placed in
charge of Ukraine. This was the creation of great “agro-cities” or
“agro-settlements” which would unite several collective farms in one
great centre which could be more easily controlled by the Communist
Party with a smaller number of qualified party members in charge. By
the end of 1950 the number of kolhosps (collective farms) had been
reduced from 33,653, as at the end of the war, to 14,443. The number
of households in one had grown from 163 households to 277. At the
same time the number of collective farms in which there were definite
party leaders had increased from 42% to 78%. This does not imply a
growth in Communist membership, for the number of Communist authorities
might, under the new ratio, be reduced by almost 3,000 in personnel.
This would be hardly likely but it explains at a glance the increased
control that the Communists could exert over the larger groups. It
also made it easier by destroying the separated villages to prevent as
effective help being given to the U. P. A. and the other anti-Communist
movements which lingered on, as the peasants saw that the new era was
to be not one of peace but of increased hardships. At the same time,
the peasant was made more helpless for his holdings in the neighborhood
of his home were reduced to 0.15 hectare or approximately a third of an
acre.
This area is roughly equivalent to the average American suburban lot
of 150 × 100 feet and on this the average peasant family was supposed,
no matter how many members it contained, to raise all the vegetables,
eggs and milk which the family required for the year and also any other
plant or animal requirement which was needed as a cash crop. Even this
was now burdened with taxes and the peasant was forbidden to secure
anything from the collective farm to assist in his economy, outside of
what he secured in his pay for a steadily diminishing number of labor
days and the accompanying cash and kind receipts which were apportioned
to him for his work.
Estimates based on figures from some collective farms show that the
average family receives for its year’s work, if three or four members
work, something in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds of grain,
four hundred pounds of potatoes and about one thousand karbovantsy in
money. When we remember that, as a result of the Soviet tax system,
a pair of shoes cost five hundred karbovantsy and a suit of average
quality a little more than one thousand karbovantsy, we can see how
dependent the average peasant is upon his small plot on which his
egg tax is, whether he raises eggs or not, two hundred per year. In
addition, from his cash resources he must buy the grain for his hens or
raise it on his own plot.
It is small wonder that the foreign visitor is not welcomed on these
collective farms except in a few places which are kept for show. In
all of them the Communist heads receive very satisfactory living
conditions with opportunities to purchase supplies at very moderate
prices in shops devised for Communist administrators, and it is these
administrators, and the Communists of the Motor Tractor Stations and
the MVD who receive almost the entire income that is allotted to the
collective farm.
The position of the city laborer is little better, although he receives
in connection with his plant the opportunity of securing whatever the
factory heads feel like giving him for food in the factory dining rooms.
In 1946-7, before Western Ukraine was fully Communized, there was
another drought in the black earth region and once again starvation
hung as a spectre over the entire population. Those who had the
strength and courage to get to Western Ukraine in search of food were
surprised how much food there was still to be found in those areas
where the peasants were still allowed to use their own energy, skill
and knowledge even on their own small farms which still looked like
paradise to those poor devils who had passed through the period of the
thirties.
Still later, collectivization was introduced into Western Ukraine
and the other accompaniments of the regime in the east were at once
apparent.
The Fifth Five Year Plan which was adopted in 1950 continued and
intensified the process. From the figures which has been revealed,
it is obvious that the increases which have been demanded of the
Ukraine in this period are relatively minor. There are a few large
projects planned in the eastern part of the country which can be made
immediately accessible to the Moscow Industrial area but which will
be of little value to the Ukrainian population, for even the resorts
along the coast of the Black Sea have now been definitely placed under
a Union Commissariat and are being improved to accommodate the higher
officials from the centre. The whole strength of the Soviet Union is
being exerted to build up the industrial centres in the Urals and
further to the east.
During these years there has been little progress made in many fields,
and few or none of the evacuated personnel which formerly managed the
factories have been returned. It is the same with machinery.
On the other hand, where factories have been restored, the new
directors have usually been sent down from Moscow to administer them,
and so have the responsible workmen. The deportation from the villages
still continues as the native population are removed to Siberia or
elsewhere and non-Ukrainians are sent in, in accordance with a definite
scheme for breaking up the homogeneity of the population.
Despite all this, there has scarcely passed a month in which the
central authorities in Moscow have not stressed defects in the working
of the Ukrainian branch of the party. They have found continued
failures to perform the required deliveries, a lack of ideological
work and definite wrecking and deliberate sabotage due to bourgeois
nationalist feelings on the part of the party leaders in the Ukraine.
There has been a consistent and unrelenting attack on everything
that has been done in the country, while the heads of the collective
farms and the other institutions have been attacked and changed for
nationalist deviations.
The conclusion is irresistible that it is not the intention of the
central authority in Moscow to relax its pressure until it has
annihilated the last point in the UkSSR which differs in the slightest
degree from the rules prevailing in the RSFSR and that in the meantime
it, despite its lip service to the cause of a federation, is working
for a complete standardization, not only in the field of economics but
in every other field as well.
The Ukraine is regarded as a profitable colony from which the wealth is
to be drawn in the manner of the old imperialism. It is to be absorbed
and assimilated to the last degree and, at the same time, the RSFSR and
the USSR, built around the elder brother, are working in desperation
to prepare within its own boundaries new sources of supply. Within
the last fifteen years, while the resources of the Donbas and Kryvy
Rih have increased, according to the five year plans, some 10-15%,
the actual percentage which the fundamental products of the Ukraine
bear to the total production of those same products in the USSR has
significantly dropped more than that.
Thus at one and the same time the Kremlin is planning to annihilate
all of the salient characteristics of the economy of the Ukraine and
its population, on the ground that the Ukraine is a necessary source
of raw material for the USSR and is striving to free itself of as much
dependence on that raw material as it can. This is typical of the
double-faced tactics of the leaders of the Union and it easily explains
the still smouldering discontent among the Ukrainian people.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Soviet Cultural Policy in the Ukraine After the War
The Soviet cultural treatment of the Ukrainians after World War II is
an inhumanly logical imitation of the making of the Russian Empire
during the course of centuries. As such, it is eminently sensible and
as an imitation it is unpardonably reactionary and resembles nothing so
much as the rise and flowering of Hitlerism.
There was something obscene about the Third Reich. The gatherings at
Nuremberg, the use of slogans that were progressive in the time of
Charlemagne, the sense of the unity of the Christian world, all were
prostituted to serve the cause of a narrow racism which could find no
better outlet than the extermination of the Jews and the barking at
Europe.