marriage of Ivan III with Sophia Paleolog, a member of the Byzantine
imperial family, gave the tsar and the Muscovite Great Russians
the notion that they were the Christian people par excellence and
that Moscow was the Third Rome. Peter I secularized that religious
conception and drove Mazepa as Hetman of Ukraine, to a revolt.
Lenin, a descendant of the old aristocracy and of the Tatars, turned
Communist and dreamed of a Communist International. The defeat of
his armies before Warsaw and the failure of other plans for world
revolution turned the Communist International as a gathering of
equal Communist leaders into a Communist RSFSR supporting a group of
discredited plotters.
Skrypnyk and Khvylovy did not see this and it was their tragedy as
it was the tragedy of the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty, the Ukrainian
Communists who had sought independent membership in an ideal
organization. Stalin, by his policy in the thirties, blew away that
mirage but it required a World War for him to annihilate it.
Soon after the Germans attacked, Stalin dissolved the Comintern to
please his Western allies and to dupe them. He substituted the Slav
Congress and when he secured the assent of the Big Three to liberate
the Slavs, he highly developed this.
As the Red Army, now transformed by fiat of the Council of Commissars
of the USSR into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian armies, “liberated” one
Slav capital after another, they were followed by cultural missions
who talked to the enthusiastic multitudes on the Slav Brotherhood of
Nations in terms of 1848, Peter, the Third Rome and Stalin. Rylsky and
Tychyna, Korniychuk and Yanovsky, all the outstanding Ukrainian writers
who had yielded to the Russian cause and survived the purges, spoke.
They praised the new situation and the democratic powers admired this.
It was only a sham because soon there was established the Cominform.
Its seat was not in Moscow but its spirit was there. The object of the
Cominform was not to create a new and equal gathering of Communist
humanity, not the ostensible idea of the Comintern but it was to
inform the Communists among the Slavs and elsewhere of the approach to
Communism by the elder Communists of the world, the Muscovite Great
Russians.
In the purely cultural sphere the answer was the condemnation of
formalism, and still more of internationalism. Formalism was a
technical school of literary criticism which had contributed something
to the study of literature and culture. It was an attempt to put
technique above content, or rather to judge content by technique and
its advocates, sometimes great scholars in a narrow field, basked in
the light of the admiration of their friends, until they considered
themselves great.
Internationalism was something else. Its content had been expressed by
the Protopope Avvakum in 1666 when he announced at his trial in Moscow
that all Orthodox Christians had to come to Moscow to learn. Now it was
the same. History was to be periodicized between A. M. and P. M. (Ante
Muscoviae and Post Muscoviam, Before and After Moscow). If the before
was leading up to a Moscow discovery, it was good; if not, it was bad.
This was proclaimed by Zhdanov of the Politburo in 1946 when, under the
highest auspices, he began his attack. On September 4 of that year, at
a meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow, he lashed out at
various films which had been recently produced and at several Russian
authors, especially Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova, for not producing
a true picture of Soviet reality. Then, warming to his task, he
explicitly declared that literature had to be entirely at the service
of the Communist Party and that it was the duty of every Soviet writer
to lash and scourge the decadent bourgeois west. He berated many of
the authors for wishing to learn from the bourgeois writers at the
very moment when Soviet literature, the most revolutionary literature
in the world, was a hundred times higher and more beautiful than the
literature of the bourgeois west.
The speech of Zhdanov was the open proclamation of war against all
foreign influences in Soviet literature and it was directed against
some of the most respected figures, who were apparently silenced. Even
Tikhonov was removed from his post at the head of the Union of Soviet
Writers for not having exerted himself more strongly against these
dangerous heresies.
Yet this speech was not really the beginning, for some weeks before
the question was fully brought into the open, at a meeting of the
KP/b/U, Khrushchov, the Russian who held the post as First Secretary
of the KP/b/U, had received from the Executive Committee of the
Communist Party in Moscow full and definite instructions as to the
means to be adopted for purging Ukrainian literature and science and
for suppressing all traces of bourgeois nationalism. His remarks were
reprinted in part by _Pravda_ in Moscow, which summarized them in these
words.
“The TsK KP/b/U had not paid sufficient attention to ideological work,
does not give enough weight to the selecting and the ideological and
political education of the cadres in the fields of science, literature
and art, has not organized in the press a wide criticism of the hostile
bourgeois-nationalist ideology. As a result in some books, journals
and newspaper articles and in the lectures of some Ukrainian historians
and literary men there are ideological mistakes and perversions,
and efforts to revive the bourgeois nationalist conceptions of the
historian Hrushevsky and his ‘school.’”
The weight of the attack fell upon the Institute of Language and
Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR for two books which
it had published. One was the first volume of a _History of Ukraine_
which had appeared in 1943 and the other was _An Outline of the History
of Ukrainian Literature_ which had appeared in 1945. The authors of
both books were accused of having failed to periodicize Ukrainian
history and literature according to the Marxo-Leninist tradition
and of having followed Hrushevsky and Yefremiv in being deceived by
external political events. They were charged with remarks that could
be interpreted as maintaining an early separation of Ukrainian culture
from Russian, when it was a fact that the three brotherly nations, the
Great Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians, had had a joint culture
until the fourteenth century, after which the Great Russians became
the truest heirs and interpreters of the whole. They were charged
with idealizing the old bourgeois nationalists as V. Naumenko and O.
Levytsky, of admiring the old state of patriarchal private property and
of failing to realize the great ideological gulf between Shevchenko,
who stood in the tradition of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, etc., and
Kulish who was a liberal and not a revolutionist. They were condemned
for having a good word for such nationalist counter-revolutionists as
Vynnychenko and Oles and for calling a competent poet, I. Steshchenko,
who had been a minister under Petlyura. They forced their own
flatterer, Rylsky, to leave his post as head of the Union of Soviet
Writers of the Ukraine for not having taken a sufficiently firm stand
in condemning the mistakes of the other writers, and for a while he was
in disfavor.
The accusations penned in Moscow and printed in _Pravda_ and the
_Literaturnaya Gazeta_ were reprinted in the Ukrainian papers with even
more vulgarity and abuse. They poured out their venom at nearly all the
writers and historians who regarded the use of the Ukrainian language
as expressing the feelings and the culture of the Ukrainian people.
They condemned nationalist praise of Kotlyarevsky for introducing
national pride and feeling into his _Eneida_, the first book in the
Ukrainian vernacular published in 1798. They accused the writers and
scholars of deliberately trying to drive a wedge between the Russian
and Ukrainian people and of refusing to see, because of their bourgeois
nationalist prejudices, that the great Ukrainian writers of the
nineteenth century had always drawn their inspiration and been close
to the progressive Russian writers, as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky,
and they denied the existence of any Western European influence on
Ukrainian literature, since all the influence had come from the
Russians. They found influences of Gorky on Lesya Ukrainka and cited as
her models Russian works which appeared after her works were in print.
All this made no difference, for the Marxo-Leninists were in sole
possession of the truth and their word was law.
Stalin had declared that the new Soviet literature and culture was
to be Communist in content and national in form but it was very soon
realized that even this was to be interpreted in a special sense. Any
excessive attention paid by writers to descriptions of the Ukrainian
landscape which did not bring a glorification of the new factories was
treated as an antiquated sympathy with the old patriarchal Ukraine
and its bourgeois nationalism. Any mention of the Zaporozhian Sich
and the Kozak past, unless it was connected very definitely with the
union and longing of the Kozaks for Muscovite rule, was declared to be
treasonable and bourgeois nationalist in essence. Thus, step by step
the authorities in Moscow and their mouthpieces in Ukraine limited more
and more closely the possibility of describing or singing of any of the
characteristic features of Ukrainian life and the historic past, while
the Great Russians were given free rein to glorify the past of Russia
even under the tsars, for it was there that the seeds of the Communist
Party were planted and flourished.
This process of tracking down bourgeois nationalism perhaps reached
the limits of its absurdity in 1951 when the Soviet critics discovered
dangerous thoughts in the war poem of Volodymyr Sosyura, _Love
Ukraine_. It was a graceful, but hardly a great poem. It had been
enthusiastically received in 1944, when it appeared, and the poet was
awarded for it a Stalin Prize. The poem was published and republished
by the state publishing houses and then it was suddenly discovered that
it was untrue, bourgeois nationalist, etc. and the unfortunate author
was forced to repent of his errors. As a matter of fact, even before
this, many of the Russian translators had gone out of their way to
insert in it various passages celebrating the Volga and the Kremlin as
part of the love of Ukraine but they, too, were reprimanded for trying
to improve the work instead of condemning it for its real quality.
In every field of scholarship, literature, art, and music, the same
charges have been brought with logical consistency. Anything which
would remind the readers of the old pre-Communist life is treated as
dangerous, but none of the authors, no matter how they have falsified
history or the present, has been able to express the great achievements
of the new Soviet Ukraine and to catch its spirit and show how it can
in any degree differ from Moscow. At the first sign of any independent
judgment, the cry is raised of bourgeois nationalism and the work is
suppressed.
At the same time the Ukrainian scene is being overloaded with things
Russian. Russian theatrical companies are continually travelling
around the republic so as to show the real charity and achievements
of the elder brother and inspire a desire for imitation of its life
and thought under that all-time world genius, Joseph Stalin. Russian
musical ensembles and exhibitions of the works of Russian artists are
constantly sent to all the chief cities of the non-Russian republics,
not only to acquaint the people with Russian achievements but still
more to give them the necessary patterns by which they should plan
their lives and work.
There are constantly published masses of Ukrainian translations of
Russian works and books translated from the other languages used in the
USSR and it is almost essential for an author to allude to these and
especially to the Georgian people as the people of Stalin, if he wishes
to avoid the charge of bourgeois nationalism and the attempt to sow
hostility between the brotherly peoples.
The situation is even more severe in the field of language. Korniychuk
after World War II emphasized that Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism
was not to be sought only by a consideration of the contents of books
and paintings. It was reflected in a still more dangerous form in the
language of the books themselves. Any author who showed a predilection
for the use of the older forms of the language or sought to develop
it in any way other than the Communist Party desired was thereby
convicting himself of holding nationalistic sentiments and of being
dangerously reactionary. He thus accused of bourgeois nationalism even
those writers as Yanovsky who had been most rigorous in following the
party line in content.
The real significance of this statement of Korniychuk’s is shown by the
_Ukrainian-Russian Dictionary_ which finally appeared in 1948 under
the editorship of L. A. Bulakhovsky and M. F. Rylsky. The work was
published in Moscow, although it bore the stamp of the Institute of
Language Study of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR.
In this the authors made no concealment of their program, for they
definitely stated that their work was based upon the “spoken” Ukrainian
of the government offices (where it was the most corrupted by Russian
words), and not the older Ukrainian language as spoken before the
introduction of the Bolshevik reforms. They added, too, that they had
supplied from Russian whatever was lacking in Ukrainian, for “thanks
to the Russian language, the Ukrainian has been able to acquire the
capacity to respond to the needs of socialist construction and to
satisfy the cultural needs of the Ukrainian people.”
Stripped of its Communist jargon, this passage merely means that
the Moscow authorities have decided to carry on their policy of
russification in a new way. They have recognized the gap between the
older Ukrainian language and the hodgepodge which they have produced
and they are now insisting on using the words of the older usage in
their most narrow and restricted sense, and by refusing to recognize
any possibility of development in Ukrainian or any changes in it, they
are forcing Ukrainian to become a dead language and by an inverted
purism are planning to compel the Ukrainians to recognize that Russian
and Russian alone is in a position to grow and develop.
This is entirely in line with the new philological policy dictated
by Stalin after his repudiation of the late Prof. Marr and what was
commonly known as Marrism, a theory that Stalin had sponsored for many
years. Now he was willing to argue that Russian as the language of the
USSR was not only the Russian language as the language of the Russian
people but it was also in a new sense a zonal language, the approved
language of Socialism and Communism and, as such, it had already
absorbed all that it needed and its mission was to replace all those
languages which were spoken by people who had awakened to the truth of
the Moscow doctrines.
Thus the new theories of language study that were officially accepted
in Moscow opened new vistas for cultural oppression and perversion of
the Ukrainian masses. They were a signal for renewed efforts, not only
to control the Ukrainian cultural life in the present and the future
but their efforts were extended to the past and the scholars were set
to carry out an artificial restatement of Ukrainian history, literature
and culture from the earliest known periods.
It is small wonder then that the modern post-war Ukrainian literature
is becoming more and more a pallid and bloodless imitation of the
stereotyped patterns required for Great Russian and that even those
authors who have sold themselves to the Stalinist regime are unable to
produce anything of real value or of even mediocre excellence. They are
turning out the average propaganda material against the imperialistic
Americans on the lines ordered by the Politburo with never a thought
except the income and perquisites which they are slated to receive and
the constant terror lest at some moment by an unfortunate slip they
may be accused justly or unjustly of that terrible crime of bourgeois
nationalism and lose in an instant all that they have worked for years
to win.
The cultural pressure exerted on eastern Ukraine is spread likewise
with even more force over those portions in the West which had been
formerly under Poland or Czechoslovakia. Here, as former parts of
the old Hapsburg monarchy, the writers had had more opportunity to
absorb the current thought of the west than they had had in eastern
Ukraine. Therefore, the pressure against them has been applied even
more strongly and still more Russians have been sent to remodel the
life in Lviv than was necessary for Kiev. The process of russification
was started later but it has been pushed more energetically. The net
result is the same,--the impoverishment of Ukrainian culture as a whole
and the substitution for it of a shabby form of Russian Muscovite
Communist culture, which is to be tolerated only until there can be a
full absorption.
Yet that process has not been so easy. Hardly a week passes that some
of the higher units in the Soviet service do not discover a new nest of
Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, and most frequently among the members
and officers of the KP/b/U. It has been made evident that the Russian
Communists cannot hope to achieve their goal until they have eliminated
the entire Ukrainian population. They are trying to do it, but despite
the millions of their victims and their attempts to separate the
Ukrainian children from their parents and to rear them as slaves for
Russian factories, they have not succeeded in winning the population to
their views.
From the cultural point of view, the post-war period has been even more
depressing than were the thirties. It has been drabber, like the lives
of the people, but it has not served as yet to eliminate that spark of
hope which alone preserved the Ukrainians during the hard periods of
tsarism when they were subjects and slaves on their own territories,
which were not their own to govern or to develop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Soviet Religious Policy
In any discussion of Soviet Russian-Ukrainian relations, the religious
problem is important for it touches many issues which are but dimly
understood in the Western world. The latter has been too long content
to think of the east of Europe only in terms of power politics, the
Eastern Question, and similar problems to bother about the details of
a discussion which has been often a matter of life and death to the
people involved and which might throw a real light upon the present
situation.
One fact stands out. Rus’-Ukraine was Christianized before the division
of the Eastern and Western Churches and the full results of that
division were not made evident until the dawn of the modern era. The
dominant religious type of religion was that of the Orthodox East and
the important See was that of Kiev. Yet Kievan Christianity was never
bigoted or exclusive and even after the great Schism of 1054, the
princes of Kiev continued to intermarry equally with the noble families
of both east and west.
After the Metropolitan, under political pressure, took up his residence
in Moscow, Kiev and the Western Ukrainian lands secured a new
Metropolitan from the Patriarch of Constantinople. Moscow became the
seat of a patriarchate but it was only in 1648 that the Patriarch and
the Tsar of Moscow became willing to have any contact with the Orthodox
Christians of Kiev. Already in 1596 this attitude had culminated in the
establishment of a Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite, acknowledging
the papacy but maintaining the Eastern Orthodox forms of worship.
In 1686, while the Tsar of Russia was beginning to absorb the
Zaporozhian Kozaks, he exerted pressure upon the Patriarch of
Constantinople to abolish this new Metropolitanate of Kiev, and in
1686, by the act of Moscow but not of Constantinople, this was done.
Once Moscow secured control, it applied the Muscovite usages and as
its power grew in Ukraine, so did its pretensions. The cultural power
of Ukrainian Orthodoxy disappeared in the Russian Sea, while the
Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite became the dominating religious
power in Western Ukraine. Nothing shows more clearly the Muscovite
attitude than the fact that it gave a lower rank to the Metropolitan of
Kiev than it did to the head of the Georgian Orthodox, when they, too,
passed under Russian sovereignty.
As Rus’-Ukraine under tsarist control became only a collection of
“Little Russian” gubernias, so the Ukrainian Orthodox became a
collection of “Little Russian” dioceses, in which there was nothing
Ukrainian and so it remained until 1917, while each time that the
tsar acquired more Ukrainian lands, the same form of coercion was
applied not only to the Ukrainian Orthodox but also to the Catholics
whose Byzantine Rite under the Hapsburgs and then under Poland and
Czechoslovakia, had developed into a distinct Western Ukrainian
religion. Under the leadership of Metropolitan Andry Sheptytsky, a
giant physically and intellectually, this process went on rapidly, much
to the annoyance of the Poles in the old province of Eastern Galicia.
Finally we must note that when Western Ukraine passed under Poland in
1920, that country forced the establishment of a Polish Orthodox Church
for the several million Ukrainians and Byelorussians who were in the
revived state. The language of this was Polish and its organization was
adopted to the Polish system as it developed in the revived state.
With these preliminary notes, we can now turn to the relations between
the Ukraine and the Soviet Russians.
A. +The Orthodox+
With the Revolution of 1917 and the revival and development of the
independence movement among the Ukrainians, there arose also a demand
for the revival of an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This was
stubbornly opposed by the Provisional Government, Patriarch Tikhon and
the Russian Orthodox in Ukraine, the same forces that had haggled and
debated the development of a Ukrainian independent state throughout
the period, until the Russian Communists secured control and were able
to maintain their assumption of power.
In the first stages, while the Communists still hoped for the success
of the world revolution, they emphasized their doctrines of atheism
and they stressed the conception that “religion was the opium of the
people.” At the same time they endeavored to disintegrate the Russian
Orthodox Church from within by giving their support to the various
schemes of reform as the Living Church, etc. They also gave especial
favor to various Protestant bodies, as the Baptists, who sought to
introduce their ideas, often with marked success.
It was a crucial period for eastern Europe, for the Western nations
and America which had been victorious in World War I were not inclined
to cement their victory. No matter what they thought of the Communist
regime, Great Britain and the United States were still convinced that
the victory of a democratic Russia was a certainty and they refused
to take any steps to help the non-Russian peoples who were being
over-whelmed by the Soviets, lest it prejudice their future relations
with Russia. France, obsessed with the fear of Germany, was seeking
to restore a greater Poland which would absorb as much as possible of
Ukraine. The memory of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk blinded everybody to
events as they were taking place.
It was no less critical for the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Allies
sympathized with his position but the successful revolt of Mustapha
Kemal against the Treaty of Sèvres produced a situation where the
Western powers had to fight or surrender. They wished to do neither and
with a certain Bolshevik sympathy for Turkey, the Patriarch was obliged
to be cautious, until his hands were in a way freed by the settlement
of Lausanne.