Ukrainian Soviet Government was definitely installed at Kharkiv as the
capital of Ukraine and for a short time went through the motions of
being an independent state. It sent its own representatives to foreign
governments, there was a Ukrainian Commissariat for Foreign Affairs,
and on paper all seemed well. At the same time, when there came too
open evidence of interference from Moscow with the sovereign Ukrainian
Soviet Republic, steps were taken to end such interference.
Yet the Communists had absolute control over the new state, not
through the Russian Soviet government but through the Communist Party,
which boasted of being an international organization and which could
discipline the various national Communist parties if they did not obey
the decrees issued by the central authority in Moscow. Any deviation
from these orders was interpreted as a counter-revolutionary act,
contrary to the wishes of the workers and peasants whose mouthpiece was
the Communist Party.
During 1921 and 1922 there came one of those periods of drought which
are not unknown in Ukraine. The grain crop was an utter failure, all
kinds of transportation had broken down as a result of the Civil Wars,
and the country was plunged into misery. It is estimated that several
million people died in Ukraine and the country was brought to the
deepest depths, far worse than during the earlier years of war. Typhus
added to the misery and carried away still more of the population.
Outside aid was sought and the American Relief Administration did
wonderful work in securing food from abroad and in distributing it to
the starving population.
The Ukrainians in their misery did their best to reject all
communization. In the Ukrainian districts there had never been the
communal ownership of land which was so typical of the Great Russians,
and the peasants fought hard and steadily to maintain possession of
their own land and that which they had secured from the landlords
during the period of the Ukrainian Republic. This naturally antagonized
the Soviets, and made them realize that they were going to have a hard
task to bring the country around to their mode of life.
They attacked the problem in two ways. On the governmental side, the
Ukrainian Soviet Republic authorized the Russian Soviet government to
represent it in foreign negotiations at a conference in Genoa. From
that time on it became customary for the Ukrainian Soviet Republic
to follow the Russian line, although for a while there was always a
Ukrainian representative in the Soviet Embassy in all those countries
where Ukraine had been formerly recognized.
Then, at the end of 1922, there was signed a declaration for the
formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This was
ratified in 1923 and came into effect in 1924. Under this new system,
the various Soviet Republics, including Ukraine, transferred all
their foreign and most of their domestic affairs to the government
of the Soviet Union, which was, as before, almost identical with the
government of the old Russian Soviet Republic. In the All Union Soviet
of Workers’ and Peasants’ Delegates, the Russian Republic had an
overwhelming majority, if there was to be any voting, and between the
control of the Communist Party by the Russians and the control of the
Soviet Union by the same people, it was abundantly evident that any
autonomy in Ukraine was a mere shadow which could be stopped at any
time.
Yet while the central authority was being extended over the country,
the Soviets gave a wide scope to cultural Ukrainization. The New
Economic Policy was very popular in the land, since it gave a certain
liberty to the individual peasants and there were many people who
believed that the worst extremes of Militant Communism were over.
There was great attention paid to the founding of the Ukrainian Academy
of Sciences and the Ukrainian Soviet government sent out the most
cordial invitations to the old leaders of the Ukrainian Republic to
return and take their places in the new order and in the rebuilding of
the country. Many accepted. Professor Hrushevsky returned from Vienna
and was made head of the Historical Section of the Academy of Sciences.
Holubovich, who had been President of the Council of Ministers of the
Ukrainian National Republic, followed and many of the other leaders
moved to Kharkiv and Kiev. The Academy of Sciences flourished and
intellectual work was liberally supported. It elected to membership the
outstanding scholars of Western Ukraine, who welcomed this opportunity
to have free and open communication with their friends and kindred
of Great Ukraine. At the same time, steps were taken to introduce
Ukrainian into all the offices of the government of the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic. A Ukrainian army was established, with the official
language Ukrainian, and while it formed part of the Red Army of the
Soviet Union, it was national enough to win much sympathy and support
from all classes of the population.
It was only the hardened and incorrigible opponents of Communism who
refused to be appeased by these actions and who persisted in refusing
to credit the new regime with good intentions. It is true that there
remained on the statute books the old Communist regulations in regard
to the Academy of Sciences but there were relatively few attempts to
enforce them, and while there was some hampering of the work of the
scholars by zealous advocates of Marxism, it hardly seemed important
for the average person. The same was true in almost all walks of life.
Ukraine began to recover from the devastations of the civil wars.
Yet during these years, Communism made very little advance among the
Ukrainian people, and by 1925 the non-Ukrainian members of the party
far outnumbered the Ukrainian, as they had from the beginning. This was
very satisfactory to all those who were eager for the well-being of
the Ukrainians, but it was not good news to the representatives of the
ruling group in the Kremlin, who were hoping for the spread of their
doctrines throughout the country. For a while there was little that
they felt able to do and even when Kaganovich appeared in Ukraine, he
had only kind words for the progress that Ukrainian culture was making
throughout the land.
The problem before the Communists was to find the most convenient and
easy way to assert the control of the Moscow standardizing policy
without arousing too much discontent among the people. The return of
agricultural prosperity under individual farming was supplying the rest
of the Soviet Union with food and at the moment the leaders were not
desirous of upsetting conditions too strongly. It was true, of course,
that Ukraine was being laid under heavier and heavier contributions
until it seemed even to some of the Communists that the entire land was
being ruined.
Then came the problem of extending Communism to the country. The First
Five Year Plan was started in 1928 and this gave a good opportunity
for changing conditions. Enormous factories and power plants were
projected for Ukraine, such as the Dnyeprostroy near the site where the
old Sich had been located. There was needed a large mass of workmen
and the government saw to it that these were recruited from the Great
Russians and from non-Ukrainian elements. The first step in the change
of character of Ukraine had been taken.
At about the same time, the first steps were taken to handle the
cultural problem which had been intensified by the success of the
preceding program of Ukrainization. Under the guise of promoting the
solidarity of the Soviet Union, it was ordered that Russian be taught
as a second language in all schools. Arrangements were made so that
possibility for personal advancement was only opened to those persons
who knew Russian. Army officers who desired a career were sent to
Russian All-Union schools, and then for the most part were assigned to
units from other Soviet Republics. Along with such tendencies, which
removed from the state organization many of the outstanding young men
even among the Communists, there came a shift of emphasis, so that
Stalin could declare that the culture of the various Soviet Republics
would be varied in language but socialist in essence. In other words,
exactly the same thoughts were to be expressed in all the various
Soviet Republics, which were to be at liberty to repeat in their native
tongue the ideas of the Kremlin and nothing else.
There was strong opposition to this stand in Ukraine and the old
and more or less disused talk of Ukrainian counter-revolution and
nationalism was again brought out of the discard. Mykola Skrypnyk, an
old Ukrainian Communist, but an ardent advocate of Ukrainian culture,
undertook to bring Communism into the Academy of Sciences. The various
Communist organizations were invited to propose candidates for its
membership, for party prominence and familiarity with the slogans and
practice of Communism were henceforth to be the determining features of
the membership, rather than eminence in any field of learning.
To counter-balance the influence of the leading scholars and writers of
the last few years, Kaganovich and Postyshev, who had been appointed
Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, began to discover
that the leaders of Ukraine were in close touch with the nationalist
and counter-revolutionary elements abroad, especially in Eastern
Galicia. It was hardly a secret, for the Soviet authorities had
encouraged such communication in the hope that discontent with Poland
would bring the Western Ukrainians to declare their desire for union
with their brothers to the east. The attempt had not been successful,
and now the Soviet authorities were ready to turn this to account.
They arrested many of the intellectual leaders, such as Yefremiv, the
Vice President of the Academy of Sciences. Claiming that they belonged
to a society for the liberation of Ukraine, they sentenced them to
long terms in prison. Soon after they involved Professor Hrushevsky,
deposed him from his place in the Academy of Sciences and deported him
to a place near Moscow, where he was deprived of all possibilities of
study. When his health was completely broken, he was allowed to go to a
resthouse in the Caucasus to die.
In 1931, the authorities discovered a new liberation centre. In
connection with this they arrested Holubovich and many political
leaders who had returned to Ukraine during the era of Ukrainization
and after the usual trial condemned them to death. In 1933 it was
discovered that more Ukrainian leaders were acting with the Ukrainian
Military Organization abroad and these too were liquidated. Even
Skrypnyk, who had been one of the most zealous partisans of Communism
in Ukraine, was brought under suspicion and committed suicide. So did
the writer Mykola Khvylovy, who was accused of counter-revolutionary
work because he desired to strengthen the cultural connections between
the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and Western Europe, something which was
regarded as opposed to the growing unification of the Soviet Union and
its increasing isolation from the rest of the world. Step by step the
independence that had characterized the Ukrainian writers, even the
Ukrainian Communists, during the twenties was taken away and those who
survived accepted the necessity of producing a culture that was purely
socialist and Kremlinesque in essence and Ukrainian only in language,
and not always that, for the new tendencies aimed to assimilate into
Ukrainian as many Russian words as possible.
The continued trials and arrests can be explained in only two ways.
Either the Ukrainian national movement had gained prodigiously during
the years of Soviet rule and had swung to itself not only the remains
of those people who had fought for the Ukrainian National Republic
but also the founders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic itself. If
so, it would have required little help from outside to have won the
independence of the country. Or the government of Stalin had decided
to eliminate as counter-revolutionary all men of any capacity for
independent thinking and the accusations against them were devoid of
factual foundation. One after another such Communists as Postyshev, who
had carried on the first trials, were themselves accused of Ukrainian
nationalism and liquidated or deported.
While this was going on in intellectual circles, Stalin announced his
plans for the socialization of agriculture. It was ordered that this be
carried through with the greatest speed and the peasants were forced
to give up their lands and to enter the newly established collective
farms, which were established throughout Ukraine as well as throughout
the entire Soviet Union. Here the government encountered and proceeded
to deal with the other aspect of Ukrainian life that had embarrassed
the Ukrainian National Government. That had attempted to satisfy the
peasant hunger for land by taking it away from the great landlords and
giving it to the peasants. It was the opposition of these Russianized
classes that had been used by the Germans in supporting the hetmanate
of Skoropadsky against the Republic, and by the Russians with Denikin,
when it came their turn.
Now by a clever extension of the use of the term “kulak,” all the
peasants who had been prospering on their own land and on that which
they had acquired, were declared enemies of the Soviet Union and were
driven into the collective farms. Armed detachments commandeered all
the grain of the individual landowners. These retaliated by killing
their cattle when they were ordered to turn them over to the collective
farms, and the situation became steadily more serious.
The result was the political famine of 1932–33. The collective farms
failed to function efficiently and to secure food for the cities, the
government confiscated all the grain in the villages and allowed the
peasants to go hungry until they were ready to work for the government
on its own terms. The area was closed to the outside world and for a
long while there were no definite reports of what was going on. Even
now many details are not known, but it seems clear that at least ten
percent of the population of Ukraine starved to death and this time
the government did not allow outside relief as it had in the famine
of 1921–22. Naturally the loss of life was greater in the purely
Ukrainian villages than it was in the cities which had been filled with
the new people brought into Ukraine for the sake of the industrial
development. As a result of this, it is certain that the proportion of
non-Ukrainians in the country has increased not only by the continued
process of immigration but also by the tremendous destruction of the
native population. The same results were achieved also by the enforced
deportation of millions more of the Ukrainians, who were sent to remote
areas of the Soviet Union where enormous numbers more perished because
of the conditions under which they were compelled to live.
While the Soviet government was thus remodelling Ukrainian life in
the country, it was exerting every effort to create a non-Ukrainian
population in the cities. The enormous coal and iron resources of the
eastern part of Ukraine were developed at a rapid rate. The Soviet
Union hired American engineers to construct the enormous power plant
of the Dnyeprostroy and they built huge factories in Kiev and Kharkiv.
As a result Ukraine rapidly became one of the foremost industrialized
areas in the Soviet Union and the only one about which any information
was allowed to pass to the outside world, for it was impossible to keep
the development in Ukraine as secret as the building of factories in
the Urals and further east in Siberia. The majority of the workmen in
these factories were brought in from other parts of the Union and the
Soviets carried out a definite policy of transportation of population
in order to crush once and for all the growth of a national or even a
local spirit in any of the subsidiary republics.
The extent of this is well shown in the writings of those Ukrainian
authors who accepted the new regime and became ardent citizens of the
Union. The poems of Tychyna, for example, a distinguished poet who
early accepted the full ideology of the Communists, boast that the
factories of Kiev are far more important than the Cathedral of St.
Sophia and all that represented the past culture. The writers sing
loudly the praise of Stalin, who with unerring judgment has pointed out
the path on which Ukraine must go in connection with the older brother,
Moscow, and all the nations of the Soviet Union.
Under such conditions support was withdrawn very ostentatiously from
all those movements which aimed to create brotherhood on the basis of
Ukrainian tradition with the population of Eastern Galicia and Western
Ukraine. Step by step the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences dropped direct
connections even with those foreign scholars whom it had elected to
membership. Later still its organization was changed, and instead
of being an institution founded by and responsible to the Ukrainian
Soviet Republic, it became merely a branch of the All-Union Academy of
Sciences and represented those activities which were carried on within
the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Most of its special and
localized activities were abolished and it became merely one part of a
great organization spreading throughout the entire country and devoted
to the study of the general interests of the whole.
All these tendencies were written into law by the All-Union
constitution of 1936, which definitely conferred upon the central
authority all possible control over the various Soviet Republics. This
marked the end of the illusory independence that had characterized
the position of Ukraine since the organization of the Soviet Union.
The power of the Kremlin was not in fact increased, but it rendered
possible the use of this power through the official agencies of the
government and not through the machinery of the Communist Party, which
was in effect a duplication of the channels of command. The change was
really one of name only, for the power of Stalin was as absolute before
as after, the same men filled the leading positions in the central
government and in the Party, and the constitution merely affirmed
publicly what every one knew privately to be true.
The following years witnessed the continued development of industry
and the renewal of attempts to bind Ukrainian manufacturing and mining
even more closely into the whole of the Soviet Union. There was a
continuation of the purges of every one who might be remotely charged
with holding a distinctively Ukrainian opinion on the ground that he
was cooperating with the Ukrainian nationalist agitation, but the
purges now came to include not only the possible suspects but almost
all of the men who had been zealous both in Ukraine and the Russian
Soviet Republic in organizing the regime. The old Bolsheviks were
nearly all liquidated and year by year fewer of the more convinced
young Communists of Ukraine found their way to the higher places in the
Soviet Union. Those positions were more and more confined to Russians
and even very few of the Ukrainians who had gone to other parts of the
country for their careers were rewarded.
At the same time, agriculture did revive as the collective farms became
a little more efficient. Yet even there a new danger developed, for the
plots of land which the individual households were allowed to cultivate
for their own use tended to increase and to be better cared for. The
peasants grasped at the slightest straw that would allow them to retain
a vestige of their old independence. The government was obliged to act
again to prevent these local family plots from taking up the best lands
of the communal farms and to limit them at most to an acre or so. There
were more decrees issued on this subject, there were more arrests and
deportations and more attempts to destroy the Ukrainian character of
the villages. The opposition could not be as strong as in the earlier
periods when the peasants were better organized but events made it
clear that the Soviet Union intended to leave no stone unturned to wipe
out the slightest survival of any of the old traditional feelings.
At the same time the rise of Nazism in Germany and the growing power
of that country created a certain alarm in Moscow. Many of Hitler’s
speeches called for the separation of Ukraine as the granary of Europe
from the Soviet Union. The Communists could not fail to know that
there were at least some of the Ukrainian nationalist leaders who were
living in Berlin and presumably receiving some support from the German
government. Yet it is noticeable that despite the many Nazi attacks
upon the Communists, relations continued at least formally between the
Nazis and the Communists through most of the thirties. It was obvious
that Germany was trying to win Western support against the Soviet Union
at the same time that the Communists were doing their best to stir
up discontent throughout the world, whether directly or through the
Communist International.
This situation increased the Soviet desire to stifle anything that
savored of Ukrainian nationalism and it added a certain reason for
the Communist desire to incorporate fully the Ukraine in the national
life of the Soviet Union. The idea of winning Ukrainian confidence
by proper treatment did not occur to the authorities, for it was
basically opposed to their fundamental belief that the Communist Party
as developed in the Soviet Union was the only legitimate spokesman for
the laboring masses of the world. It was this belief that had won them
their position in the Soviet Union and it was to that belief that they
were going to cling to the end of their stay in power.
Thus the Soviet Union pressed on its policy of remodeling Ukrainian
life to eliminate from it everything that had separated it from Great
Russia in the past. Harder and harder measures were devised, the number
of victims increased, and the new Ukrainian culture that developed
under the Soviet Union contained less and less of those elements of
freedom and democracy that had inspired Ukrainian thought during the
preceding century. The Soviets not only aimed to conquer the present
but they also attacked the past. They searched every means of changing
the attitude of the people toward their heroes of the past They strove
to emphasize every document that might reflect the revolutionary
feelings of Shevchenko and Franko, they indulged in diatribes against
Kulish and others as bourgeois, and they painted a picture of the past
which in its opposition to the definite aspirations of the Ukrainian
people came to sound very much like the decrees of the various rulers
of Russia of the past. The only difference was that they paid at least
lip service to the Ukrainian language in token of their theory that the
culture of Ukraine as of the other republics was to be socialist in
essence and only Ukrainian in language.
It is difficult to draw up a balance sheet in detail and to weigh the
gains of industrialization and the losses of the old life. It seems
certain that there was no more real happiness in Ukraine during these
years than during the long night of suppression that had preceded the
Revolution. Every step was taken to break the national spirit and to
train the new generation in an alien path. The only result was the
building up of a sullen and defiant mood which might bode ill for the
Communists, if it were properly exploited.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
_UKRAINE IN WORLD WAR II._