The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic • The New Standardization

Meanwhile changes were taking place in Moscow. Nikolai Lenin died on January 21, 1924. A bitter struggle to be his successor broke out among the leading Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union. The power finally passed into the hands of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (Djugashvili). A Georgian by birth, he was a man of indomitable will and character, hence his pseudonym of Stalin (Steel). Unlike Lenin, he had scarcely been outside of Russia and he did not have that respect for foreign cultures and leaders that had been a marked characteristic of Lenin. He had risen to power as commissar of nationalities and as secretary of the Communist party and had thus created and developed its organizational framework. His accession meant the triumph of those elements that in the full sense regarded the party and the party only as the guarantee of the stability of the regime.

In the winter of 1926 at the 15th Congress of the party, Stalin made it clear that he regarded the moment as past for the encouragement and toleration of bourgeois elements and he emphasized the fact that the Soviet Union must become internally strong and developed. In due time followed the first Five-Year Plan, which aimed at the rapid industrialization of the country.

The essence of the new plan was the solidifying of the state p89 and the standardizing of its political and cultural life on the Moscow model. The new Communist culture that had been the dream of the state's original creators was destined to be all-embracing and it was now extended to cover far larger spheres of activity than many thoroughgoing Communists in the various republics had anticipated. The institutions of the Soviet Union were all to be modeled on those of the Russian Soviet Republic and it was the distinct understanding of the Stalinists that the Great Russians were to be the elder-brothers to guide all Soviet thinking.

The early stages of this new policy were hardly noticeable. Measures were taken to provide for proper instruction in Russian in all the schools of the union. The same was true of the various military services. As the central military schools were established and developed, ambitious young men from the armies of the various republics were sent to them. When they had finished their course of studies, they were available for service anywhere in the Soviet Union. Young Ukrainians who had received a state education and distinguished themselves were liable to be assigned to Russian units or units of the Caucasian or Central Asian republics. Similarly, Russians or non-Ukrainians were assigned to staff and command posts in the Ukrainian army. This process soon introduced a considerable measure of Russification and brought the institution back to what it had been prior to the revolution.

The same thing was done in the case of such scientific and educational institutions as the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Under one pretext or another, this now became a branch of the All-Union Academy of Sciences and once that was done, there was no reason why Russian and other non-Ukrainian scholars should not be assigned to membership and to the administrative staff. The pressing demand for men in the natural sciences furnished a convenient excuse for the gradual suppression of those sections that dealt primarily with Ukrainian subjects. Thus slowly but surely Ukrainian institutions were transformed into branches of All-Union institutions and lost p90 their old contact with the native regions and populations.

During the height of the movement for Ukrainization which had served to call out the latent human resources of the Ukrainian intellectual world, the promotion of Communism had been relatively disregarded. When Kaganovich in 1928 came to Ukraine to speed up matters and put pressure upon the leaders of the party and of the republic, a series of investigations was begun to find out how far the various institutions were actively engaged in pushing Communism. The results were on the whole negative and new orders were issued.

In 1929 the Academy of Sciences was discovered to have no Communists in its membership. This was a glaring defect and under pressure from Skrypnyk, new members were elected by a "socialistic" method. Candidates were proposed by various Communist groups, societies, trades unions, and for the first time something else than scientific ability was adopted as a criterion for membership. On the whole Skrypnyk kept the situation within bounds in the beginning and the academy even with a few Communist members continued to function. It was only the first step. As increased Communization was demanded, these Communists formed a group to work against their colleagues and when the president of the academy died in 1929, a full-fledged Communist was elected to succeed him.

The final step was the purging of the old membership. Attacks were made in what is now the familiar fashion on the outstanding scholars for their ignorance of Communist truth. In 1930 Professor Hrushevsky was bitterly attacked for inculcating nationalism with his historical theories. In a short time, after a series of disorderly riots before the laboring masses of the city, he was condemned for doing harm to the proletariat by his obnoxious and un-Marxist notions. He was expelled from the academy and put under arrest in a place near Moscow where he could not read or study and where he finally became blind. Then,when he was near his end, he was allowed to go to a rest home in the Caucasus to die.1

We have spoken at some length of Hrushevsky's case because p91 he had played an important role in the history of the Ukrainian National Republic and was widely respected. His fate was shared by almost all of the men who had been persuaded in the period of Ukrainization to come home. In 1929 the Soviets discovered a secret Society for the Liberation of Ukraine and they arrested and sentenced to long prison terms the literary critic Efremiv and many others. The next year they found other traces of political opposition and of nationalism. This time it was the political men like Holubovych who were arrested and executed, imprisoned or exiled.2

It was soon the turn of the writers and artists. Those who declined to mold their thought into the accepted pattern were speedily silenced. A Ukrainian version of the Russian RAPP, whereby the artists were given specific assignments to cover the Five-Year Plan, was introduced and this provided an easy weapon for the coercion of the entire literary and artistic life of the state.

The Five-Year Plan introduced in 1929, with its emphasis on speedy industrialization, soon brought the laboring classes under the thumb of the authorities to an unprecedented degree while the outside world was regaled with stories of the triumph of Soviet construction. Furthermore these plans were so drawn as to exploit the natural resources of Ukraine and make its industry more and more dependent upon that of the Russian Soviet Republic. Certain plants for the use of the coal and iron resources were built and in most cases the half-finished materials were then transported to plants in the Russian republic for final manufacture. In this way a colonial regime was again implanted in the ostensibly independent republic. Even at this, the new factories, thanks to the laws permitting the definite assignment of labor, were filled with non-Ukrainians, and Ukrainians who heeded the government plea to go into the factories were transported away from their homes to other sectors where they could be severed from the life of the community.3

Yet the changes that were made in Ukrainian life by the p92 industrialization and program were nothing compared with the results of the collectivization of agriculture which was begun in 1929. The Great Russians had always practiced a form of communal ownership of land and the change from this to working on collective farms was relatively minor. The situation in Ukraine was very different. Here, even in the old days of serfdom, the peasant had remained attached to his hut and his own plot of ground. They were his and his alone. Now he was abruptly ordered to turn over to a newly constituted authority everything that he possessed on pain on being expelled from his home. The order aroused instant opposition. The peasants — and they were not only the rich kulaks or the medium farmers — rose in opposition. More than in any other part of the union, they killed off their cattle and horses before they would turn them over. They burned the reserves of grain which the Soviet authorities had counted upon for their export trade and for the feeding of the cities. The situation speedily became serious but Stalin, pausing only to prosecute a few local authorities for excessive zeal in collectivization, pressed on.

Sterner and sterner methods were introduced to force grain from the unwilling peasants. Then in 1931 there came another drought and poor harvest. This was the opportunity for which the Kremlin had been waiting. Collecting parties ranged the countryside and compelled the peasants to hand over the specified amounts of grain and arrested, shot or exiled them if they did not do so. The result was the artificial famine of 1931‑32, with the peasants being left at the approach of winter without food supplies and with no way of securing any, even though there was an abundance of grain in the hands of the government. The authorities refused to allow even the slightest amounts of food to be brought into the area from any source on the ground that the shortage had been caused by anti-governmental activity.4

When news of the famine began to reach the outside world, the Soviet government denied its existence and forbade the Soviet papers to publish any reports. Foreign correspondents p93 were denied permission to visit the stricken area and far too many of them, including some of the most respected names, meekly accepted the Soviet version of events. William Henry Chamberlin was almost the only man to report on the extent of the horror.

It is possible to estimate the number of deaths that occurred. It was apparently nearly 10 per cent of the rural population or in the neighborhood of five million. This figure is reached by at least two methods. Ten per cent was the approximate proportion in those villages about which detailed information was received through devious channels. If we compare the population of Ukraine according to the census of 1927 with that of 1939, which reported a net decrease of about two hundred thousand, and check against the average normal yearly increase of population, we reach the same estimate.

The world has seen some cold-blooded massacres and mass starvation before but in almost every case these have been the result of war or plague or catastrophes of nature and the governments involved have done their best to alleviate human suffering. In the case of the Ukrainian famine, the situation was different. The government deliberately profited by the shortage of crops to starve an unwanted portion of the population. This had not been its policy in 1921, just ten years before, when it was trying to cement its position. Now it was sure of itself and felt safe in resorting to any action necessary to curb a discontented population instead of meeting its demands even in part. There is no question that the Ukrainian famine was deliberately engineered to break opposition and disintegrate the population.

Starvation was supplemented by deportation in order to clear the land for the introduction of alien elements who would be more loyal to the central regime, while the Ukrainians were uprooted from their homes and scattered in heterogeneous groups throughout the country. Perhaps no act of the Soviet government has been more revealing of its essentially callous attitude toward human life than the satisfaction which it received p94 from this famine and its accompanying arrests and executions.

If we can possibly interpret the Soviet statements as even partially true, the net result of the increased pressure upon the Ukrainian people was merely to spread discontent and confirm the feeling that the future of Ukraine did not lie in affiliation with the Soviet Union. Year by year as an excuse for each new trial, each new act of oppression, there was discovered a new society, a new organization, a new tendency toward the strengthening of Ukrainian nationalisms. The official Soviet reports during the thirties, in their apprehension of the spreading of nationalism, are comparable only to the reports of Tsar Nicholas II who was in constant fear that the "nonexistent" Little Russians who were consciously yearning for a union with their Great Russian brothers and only desirous of acquiring their superior culture were still planning an insurrection and dreaming of the days when they would be free from the Muscovite yoke.

Professor Hrushevsky's teachings as to the difference in origin and development between the Ukrainians of Kiev and the Great Russians of Moscow were found everywhere and were fiercely suppressed. Every manifestation of interest in any part of Western Europe was treated as a deliberate desire to separate from the Soviet Union and a deliberate insult to the elder brothers who had brought to all the true light of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist knowledge.

A few years before the general trend in Ukrainian Soviet thought had been to emphasize the unity of the Ukrainians in the republic with those under Polish rule. Now this was reversed. Even the Academy of Sciences which had had at least tacit Communist approval in electing to membership some of the outstanding men in Western Ukraine dropped them quietly and without fanfare.5 The academy refused to correspond with the scholars in the West and its members were brought to trial on the charge of corresponding with Ukrainians abroad. It was an unanswerable accusation, for the correspondence p95 had been inspired by the governmental organs themselves during the period when the country was permitted to develop its Ukrainian consciousness.

It was the same with all subjects that had to do with the Ukrainian past or culture. After the arrest of Professor Hrushevsky the Philological-Historical center of the Academy of Sciences was wiped out in order to put an end to his teachings. The publications of the academy "for greater usefulness" were now published chiefly in Russian and then they were rarely on Ukrainian subjects, except in the field of archaeology where they could be developed on a purely materialistic basis. The plan of the academy to create a dictionary was disapproved by the civil authorities in Moscow for it demanded that emphasis should be laid on all phenomena that would tend to bring the Russian and Ukrainian languages closer together. Russian words were inserted in the dictionary at the expense of Ukrainian idioms and even then the dictionary could not escape the charge of Ukrainian nationalism and the tendency to separate the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.6

The most ardent supporters of the claims of the Ukrainian nationalists were hardly prepared to accept the evidences of the widespread success of nationalist ideas that were seriously exposed to public view by the Soviet regime. Even at the height of the Ukrainian National Republic, it is hard to find any more evidence of the desire for separation than was printed in the reports of the Soviet prosecutors of everything that the Kremlin could imagine as Ukrainian nationalism. The thought naturally comes to the mind that the efforts of the Communist regime to suppress it had fanned the movement to a greater intensity than even the struggle for independence had been able to do.

During the thirties technical changes in the administration of the laws rendered the position of the peasants on the collective farms somewhat more tolerable. The exactions which were made by the central government were standardized and were somewhat eased, so that the peasants could know what they p96 had to do. The old will to private property remained. The government was forced again and again to clamp down on the collective farms and even their Communist leadership because of the many efforts of the peasants to better their condition. Now the peasants were accused of giving too much care to the little individual plots which they were allowed to have for their own use, now they were accused of trying to add to these at the expense of the collective property, now they were attacked for stealing even a few handfuls of grain for their own use from the communal stores and were executed as dangerous conspirators. Village after village was uprooted and its inhabitants were scattered throughout the far north and Siberia and in the prison camps where they were destined to perish.7

Yet these casualties of the village population were as nothing in comparison with those of the Ukrainian Communists. After Kaganovich returned to Moscow, he was succeeded in 1933 by Postyshev as a trusted subordinate of Stalin. He called loudly upon the Ukrainian Communists to purge their ranks, recounted the discovery of the Society for the Liberation of Ukraine, then of the Ukrainian Nationalist Center, then of the Ukrainian Military Organization. His reign was one of terror as he pushed on the work of ferreting out all opposition but by 1935 he too was on the verge of arrest for nationalism and committed suicide. Skrypnyk, who had starred in the beginning of the campaign for standardization and Communization, committed suicide under suspicion of nationalism in 1933.8 George Kotsyubinsky, who had led the Red army against the Ukrainian National Republic, was executed for nationalism in 1932. Kosyor, secretary of the Communist party for many years, was liquidated. So too were Prime Minister Chubar and President Petrovsky of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Another prime minister, Lubchenko, who had boasted that he had finally liquidated nationalist sentiment, was forced to end his life. Bondarenko, a successor, also disappeared. The controlling power then passed into the hands of Khrushchov, a Russian and a member of Stalin's inner circle, who retained p97 the confidence of the Russian authorities and has been promoted to work in Moscow.

There can be but one explanation. These people who vanished, were liquidated or committed suicide were fanatical Communists but they were Ukrainians who still had some regard for the essentials of Ukrainian life and tradition. That, to the Kremlin, was an unpardonable sin like that of Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia. They had to be prepared not only to defend the doctrines of Communism but to prove that at every point where the ideas and customs of Ukraine differed from those of the Great Russians, they were nationalistic and treasonable. They had to be prepared to accept without murmur or hesitation the latest statements that were issued by the supreme authority.

Take an illustration. In 1935 Moscow issued the large Soviet Encyclopedia. In it9 Soviet scholars declared that Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had won the independence of the country from the Poles in the great revolt of 1649, was a mere servant of the Polish nobles and an enemy of the Ukrainian people. That meant that all the songs that had been handed down in the villages praising his heroism and exploits were anti-Communist and anti-Moscow, even though Khmelnytsky had later brought Ukraine under Russian influence by signing the alliance of Pereyaslav. It casts a lurid light upon Stalin's dictum that there can be but one Communist culture and that the differentiation between the peoples of the Soviet Union can only be in non-essentials. But there are no non-essentials for the totalitarian regime, however it cloaks itself in pseudo-democratic dress.

Moscow and the Ukrainian Communists had done their best at the beginning of the revolution to eliminate the wealthier classes and the bourgeoisie. They had succeeded but that was not enough. Step by step they were led unhesitatingly to attack the fundamental forms of life, the teachings of the Socialist parties, the ideas of the poets and the writers, the historians and the retellers of the ancient legends, the advocates p98 of the popular poetry, the individuals who ventured to practice even the most harmless and unpolitical customs, lest in some way they conduce to a separation from the elder brothers of Moscow, the center of Russian and of Communist culture. Imperial Russia never forgave Mazepa for his attempt to join Charles XII of Sweden and the Communists share their view. By 1939 practically every Ukrainian was regarded by Stalin as a potential Mazepa, even if he only indulged in some local quirk of custom.

It brings into high relief the whole problem of the relations between international and national Communism, between the fundamentals of Communism with its class struggle, its collectivization and its regimentation and the additional demands of Moscow that the Russian version of Communism be followed in all details. Even the wildest advocates of Russification under the tsars never contemplated such an absolute and lifeless unification. The very men who had worked fanatically against the efforts of the Ukrainian to recover their independence and free themselves from the old Russian influence in broad outlines were unable to pass the new and more strident tests and they had to choose between execution or suicide.

A mood and a temperament were developed that might prove fatal to the Soviet system if it were once aroused. Terror can succeed to a certain degree. It can silence and coerce but too much of terror will produce a revolt just as will an excess of weakness. The OGPU and the NKVD were able to prevent outbreaks. They were able to maintain the Soviet position but they were not able to win any inherent loyalty from a population that was already becoming aware that no matter what it did, it was still under suspicion. Such was the situation in 1939.

The Author's Notes:

1 Nicholas D. Czubatyj, "The Silver Jubilee of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 1918‑1943," The Ukrainian Quarterly, I, 244 ff.

"The Ukrainian Soviet literature arose, grew and developed in the throes of bitter class struggle. Its young and as yet frail forces had to blaze their path through the barriers that were raised by the Ukrainian nationalist bourgeoisie, by kulakdom and its ideologists in the domains of literary theory and literary policy, headed by the school of the 'academician' S. Yefremov. Preaching the 'united national front,' they withheld recognition from all forces which, opposing this front, sought to strengthen the proletarian dictatorship and to cement the brotherly alliance with the republics of the Soviet Union. These chauvinists further enjoyed active support of those elements which represented the nationalist deviation in the ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Not without reason did Skrypnyk (the head of the nationalist deviation in the Communist Party of the Ukraine who worked hand in hand with the imperial interventionists) even in 1929 write of the "diminished" role of literary work. His object was to make out a case for prerevolutionary Ukrainian literature (which, according to Skrypnyk and Yefremov, supposedly represented the "united front of the creative forces of our people"), as though it had been stronger, more influential and effective than the contemporary Soviet literature of the Ukraine. The reactionary roots of these arguments are quite apparent. The ideology of bourgeois nationalism reflected, after all is said and done, the aim of the Ukrainian kulak to fence off his farmyard from the proletarian revolution. It was a reflection of the hopes of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie for unhindered and "independent" exploitation of the workers and peasants of the Ukraine.

"Quite in accord with this kulak program was another slogan that was launched later by the Ukrainian nationalists (Khyylevy), that of "orientation psychology of Europe." This slogan, if carried out, would have meant the transformation of Soviet Ukraine into a colony of foreign imperialism."

I. Kulik, in Literature of the Peoples of the U. S. S. R.
VOKS Illustrated Almanac, Nos. 7‑8, Moscow, 1934, p53 f.

It is to be noted that the author of these lines was himself later liquidated on the same charges. Cf. Yury Sherekh, in The Ukrainian Quarterly, IV, 166.

p88 IX The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic II. The New Standardization

The Author's Notes:

p88 IX

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

II. The New Standardization