Ukraine under the Soviets
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Title: Ukraine under the Soviets

Author: Clarence Augustus Manning

Release date: September 15, 2026 [eBook #79579]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Bookman Associates, 1953

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79579

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UKRAINE UNDER THE SOVIETS ***

Ukraine Under the Soviets

CLARENCE A. MANNING

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages

Columbia University

Ukraine Under the Soviets

BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES

New York

Copyright, 1953, by Clarence A. Manning

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PRINTED BY RECORD PRESS, N. Y. C.

Foreword

It was not many months after the downfall of the tsarist regime in Russia in 1917 that that great empire began to disintegrate. The subject peoples began to demand their own states and showed themselves willing to fight for them. The significance of this was lost upon most of the leaders of the Western democratic powers and they tried to explain it as some new device of the German General Staff, instead of recognizing it as a part of a democratic procedure.

Three and a half years of war had then passed and the attention of the democracies was focussed on the Western Front. They were aware of the contribution in manpower the Russian Empire had made to the common cause and they looked forward with apprehension to the campaign of 1918 without the aid of the imperial Russian army. They had greeted the disappearance of the tsars in a bloodless revolution as a sign of the triumph of democracy and they were ill prepared to face the strange events that followed the fall of the Romanovs.

They could not believe that the government of Lenin and the Communists who seized control of the city of Petrograd late in 1917 could long endure. Its methods they could not understand and they sought to interpret them in terms with which they were familiar. They did not try to fathom the reasons why, within a few months, the Russian Empire fell apart and they sought instinctively to bring it once more together.

They watched without understanding the downfall of the Ukrainian National Republic, the rise of Soviet rule in Ukraine and elsewhere, the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the events of the next years. The rise of Nazism seemed to them the all-important menace and the opening of World War II convinced them of this even more strongly. The sudden understanding between the Soviets and the Nazis and then the equally sudden attack of the Germans upon the USSR still did not clear up the situation. The West aided the Soviets and, despite one difficulty after another, they willingly conceded the Soviet demands as a contribution to a common victory and sought in the United Nations a common meeting place for all anti-Fascist states. With some misgivings they admitted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as independent states to the United Nations.

In the meanwhile, as Soviet armies pushed westward into the heart of central Europe, they spread out what has since been termed the iron curtain to mask from the eyes of the world the nature of their government. Step by step, information from the Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, from Rumania and Bulgaria has grown increasingly difficult to secure. When China and North Korea passed within the same veil, the world began to awake.

The scanty reports from Ukraine today receive more attention than did the neglected information of thirty-five years ago. Yet that is still not enough.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Russian Communists have used the Ukrainian land and the Ukrainian population as the laboratory for their future conquests. It is there, among the Ukrainian people, that Lenin and his associates worked out their program of disintegration, infiltration, conquest, exploitation and russification that they have employed so successfully since the end of World War II. It has cost the Ukrainians dearly to serve as this laboratory. By the millions they have perished of starvation, execution, and deportation, and the other peoples of central and eastern Europe are meeting the same fate.

The object of this work is to study that process, insofar as it can be known. Other books have told the story of the Ukrainian struggle for independence, the efforts of the Ukrainian people to set up their own free and independent state. That story is not retold here, for this book is concerned with the reverse of the picture—the efforts of the Ukrainian people to protect themselves, their mode of life and their culture, against the extension of the Soviet Russian influences, against that system which, starting from a declared policy of internationalism, has turned into a rigid, Russian imperialistic policy which weighs heavily upon every form and department of life.

It is not only a study of the past. What happened in Kiev and Kharkiv is happening to-day in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Bucharest and Sofia, in Ulan Bator, Peking and Pyongyang. It is the story of a process and it is from that point of view that we must view the developments in Ukraine and the methods of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Once that is grasped, much that is obscure in the history of the last years will become clear and we can see the process in its development and in its completed form. We will know what to expect and what methods can best be devised to check this creeping paralysis of civilization and bring back to mankind its hope for a civilized future.

Acknowledgments

This volume is primarily based upon a series of detailed studies of Ukraine under the Soviets, which were prepared by a group of Ukrainian DP professors in Europe. They were selected by the Shevchenko Scientific Society and supported during their work by the Ukrainian National Association, which has provided the means for publication. They were:

Dm. Sv.—The Partisan Struggle in Ukraine

Ivan Koval—The Ukrainian Communists

Ivan Koval—The Russian Communists in Ukraine

Kost Pankivsky—Western Ukraine under Bolshevik Rule, 1939-1941

...—The Ukrainian Lands under Bolshevism up to World War II

Ol. Yurchenko—The State Legal System

Mykola Vasiliyiv—The Soviet Economic System

...—The Agricultural Exploitation of Ukraine

V. Marchenko—Social and Economic Conditions

K. Kononenko—The Agricultural Economy

...—Changes of Population in Ukraine

Y. Sherekh—Principles and Steps of the Soviet Linguistic Policy

M. Hlobenko—Ukrainian Literature

Ol. Ohloblyn—The Humanities under the Soviets

M. Mishchenko—Ukrainian Medicine

Ev. Olensky—Ukrainian Music

N. Makhiv—The Natural Sciences in Ukraine

Iv. M.—Ukrainian Religious Life

Contents

PAGE

FOREWORD

5

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

9

CHAPTER

I.

The Background of the Communist Triumph

15

II.

The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic

25

III.

The Period of Militant Communism

35

IV.

The New Economic Policy

45

V.

Ukrainization

57

VI.

The Literary Renaissance

65

VII.

The Scholarly Revival

73

VIII.

Mykola Khvylovy

79

IX.

The Five Year Plan

85

X.

The Famine

93

XI.

The Famine, The Soviets and The World

103

XII.

The Early Trials

109

XIII.

The Turning of the Cultural Tide

115

XIV.

The Debacle

121

XV.

The Thirties

131

XVI.

Ukraine in the Late Thirties

141

XVII.

The First Occupation of Western Ukraine

149

XVIII.

The Western Ukrainian Reaction

159

XIX.

The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania

165

XX.

The German Attack on the Soviets

167

XXI.

The Return of the Communists

175

XXII.

Soviet Ukraine During World War II

181

XXIII.

Ukraine After World War II

185

XXIV.

The Soviet Cultural Policy in Ukraine After the War

195

XXV.

The Soviet Religious Policy

205

CONCLUSION

215

INDEX

221

Ukraine Under the Soviets

CHAPTER ONE

The Background of the Communist Triumph

No idea could be more erroneous than that the triumph of Communism in Ukraine and the destruction of the Ukrainian National Republic, which had declared its independence on January 22, 1918, was the choice of the Ukrainian people themselves. It did not suit their desires or their interests, and the methods which Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin adopted to master Ukraine were essentially the same as those by which the iron curtain has been pushed steadily to the west. Ukraine was the testing ground for the development of the Communist methods of conquest, just as it has been the testing ground for all the Communist methods of control of their helpless satellites.

From the moment when he arrived in Petrograd in April, 1917, Lenin commenced a policy of disintegration. The collapse of tsarist Russia had destroyed all of the organized forces of law and order throughout the empire, and it was no easy task to restore these in an area where there had not been allowed for centuries a popular government resting upon the will of the people and staffed by experienced democratic administrators. Under such conditions, Lenin’s propaganda of self-determination for all the peoples of the empire fell upon ready ears, as did his efforts to promote class conflict on every hand. At the same time his promises to the Great Russians constantly called, under one guise or another, for the restoration of Russian unity even while his talk of internationalism and the Communist International seemed to imply a world Communist regime in which all peoples would be equal. It was this policy of lying and deceiving until the moment for successful armed intervention came that gave him the dominating position.

He enjoyed an immense advantage in the fact that the civil war between the Whites and the Reds was largely fought on Ukrainian territory and thus compelled the young Ukrainian government to fight upon two fronts throughout the entire period, while for some time the new republic was forced also to oppose the Poles in the west. Lying as Ukraine did on the shore of the Black Sea, the armed forces of General Denikin, who was heading the effort to create an anti-Communist monolithic Russian government, could only reach Moscow by crossing Ukrainian territory. It was only across Ukrainian territory that the supplies sent to him by the Western nations after the ending of World War I could be delivered and it was his policy to allow no manifestation of Ukrainianism in any form, for he intended to continue that denial of Ukrainian existence that had characterized the old tsarist regime.

His efforts in this direction were aided by the unfortunate failure of the Western democratic powers which had triumphed in the war to understand either the nature of Bolshevism or the desires of the various national movements. At the same time his success was rendered impossible by the refusal of the West to back him in his efforts to restore all or most of the social and political order which had vanished with the abdication of the Tsar.

Thus with the White Russians and the Ukrainians locked in a desperate struggle, the way was open for Lenin to move with relative freedom on his path of disintegration and of conquest. He did not fail to take advantage of every opportunity, and the advances and retreats during the period from 1917 to 1920 and even later were but a preliminary for the later tactics of Communism.

On the other hand it cannot be denied that there existed in Ukraine certain factors which also worked to his advantage. The political and social system prevailing up to 1917 had not given any training in self-government to the Ukrainian people and in the midst of war and revolution they had to start on the most elementary tasks of popular education, while at the same time they corrected fundamental abuses in the economic situation and created and administered a government. Let us, therefore, look briefly at the outstanding elements of the situation as they were at the beginning of the revolution.

From the time of the organization and Christianization of the Kievan state at the end of the tenth century to the eighteenth century, Ukraine, whether independent, or subject to Poland-Lithuania, or to the Russian Tsars, had remained as a political unit, even though divided. However, in 1775 Catherine II destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich, the centre of the Ukrainian Kozaks, and in 1783 she abolished all Ukrainian political institutions and privileges. From that time the area was divided into gubernias as the rest of the Russian Empire and the full Russian methods of administration were introduced.

From that moment, too, the Russian government spared no efforts to destroy every vestige of Ukrainian national and cultural consciousness. The Ukrainian language was treated as a peasant dialect of Russian; the name Ukraine was forbidden and even the substitute Little Russia was treated as a generic term for the area north of the Black Sea, but it did not figure on the political map of the Russian Empire as a distinct entity. The Ukrainian revival in the nineteenth century beginning with the publication of Kotlyarevsky’s parody of the Aeneid in 1798 was confined to the cultural sphere and could offer little or nothing in the way of administrative experience to the Ukrainian people. Those Ukrainians who entered the Russian service were usually sent to distant areas, while the administrative personnel in Ukraine was chiefly Russian in origin and feeling.

The great estates were largely owned by Russians or by Poles and even many Ukrainian landowners who had succeeded in retaining their holdings were so thoroughly Russianized that they felt little sense of kinship with the peasants on their estates. Ukrainian life was lived chiefly in the villages. The Ukrainian language was not taught in the schools or used in the courts, for all education and administration were in the Russian language. Still the peasants continued their own manner of living with their own traditions and their own tastes and desires.

The cities of Kiev, Kharkiv and Odesa had a large Russian population. The administrative, commercial and financial institutions were largely in Russian hands and the directors and leaders of these, whatever their political disagreements, were united in opposing the efforts of the Ukrainians to secure even that minimum of rights that they were guaranteed by Russian imperial law. The Russian element in Ukraine, radical or conservative, acted as a unit during the fateful years 1917-1920. On the other hand, the miners and workers in the Donets basin and Kryvy Rih, the centre of the Ukrainian coal and iron industry, were in very large part likewise Russian and the ideology of St. Petersburg, especially in its radical aspects, was dominant throughout this part of the Ukrainian territory. Many of the most bitter opponents of Ukrainian rights were, in fact, Russian radical miners and workers from this area.

The Jewish population of Ukraine, a large minority, was little interested in the Ukrainian problem. Insofar as they were not actively sharing in the movement for special Jewish institutions, the majority, with certain conspicuous exceptions, were strong supporters of Russian unity, either conservative or radical or, like Leon Trotsky, they were at the service of any government which was opposed to the Ukrainian demands.

Thus in 1917 the strength of the Ukrainian movement was to be found in the villages. Here Ukrainian life was lived, Ukrainian thoughts and ambitions were sponsored and it was here that the vision of an old and a future independent Ukraine found its chief support. Even so, that population was itself divided, not according to the class principle but on an ideological pattern which included members of all classes and walks of life.

When the revolution broke out in 1917 or, to be more precise, when the tsarist regime collapsed, there were four main divisions in Ukrainian society and they were made clear within a very few months.

The first of these were the nationalists and the advocates of the restoration of order in the country. At the very beginning of the century Mykola Mikhnovsky had issued a call for an independent state and for a while he had exerted a strong influence upon such future Ukrainian leaders as Symon Petlyura, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Volodymyr Chekhovsky, but his ideas of placing national liberation in the forefront seemed too extreme for his adherents and by 1917 many of these had in a sense fallen away from his advanced position.

On the other hand, two and a half years of war had shown to many of the Ukrainian officers and men in the Russian army the need of a disciplined force to uphold the national cause. Some of the Ukrainian regiments had early joined the forces of the Revolution, had adopted the Ukrainian flag and introduced Ukrainian as the language of command. Now at the Military Congresses which were held in Kiev in 1917, they took a strong stand in their demands that the Ukrainian National Rada adopt a firm policy toward St. Petersburg and the Provisional Government and they were willing to go much further than the Rada in the setting up of independent governmental machinery.

Opposed to this group were the great mass of the peasants. They were little aware of the involved task of governing or even maintaining order. It would be hardly fair to say that they were anarchistic in temperament. They had rather maintained almost unconsciously their Ukrainian character. Few of them had been further from their villages than the nearest administrative centre and they could not see the necessity of substituting another regime on a broad scale for the fallen tsarist system. For decades they had attributed all their hardships and difficulties to the tsar, the bureaucrats and the police, and with all three vanished, they had no desire to replace them. It seemed to them that the land was intended by God for their use, and once the landlords were dispossessed, they were ready to forget the past and live in peace and quiet with their neighbors. Two and a half years of war had taught them the folly of organized destruction and they willingly accepted the position that a new world had come into being in which there was no need for complicated forms of government, for the collection of taxes and the enforced maintenance of order. They believed that the Revolution had almost automatically given them all that they desired—the right to use their own language, to have that language placed on a par with Russian and the right to secure their own land and to live peacefully upon it.

Between these two groups stood the bulk of the Ukrainian intellectuals grouped in the Social Revolutionist and Social Democratic Parties, each of which was modelled on its Russian equivalent. Yet we must not delude ourselves into thinking that these were political parties in any sense known to the Western world and America, where there has been a long record of political activity. They were before the Revolution rather conspiratorial and debating groups, busied with theorizing about all manner of political questions and (except where they had an opportunity to take part in the work of the zemstvos) without practical experience. A few of their members had served in the First Duma in 1906 but this had been dissolved within a couple of months by Tsar Nicholas II and each succeeding duma had become less representative. Thus the number of those intellectuals who had had practical political experience even in the conduct of elections was very small, while the debaters, students, theoreticians, etc. in these parties cared more for the proper solution of ideas than for their application to practical life.

Neither of these groups existed as distinct Ukrainian parties. They tended largely to follow the leadership of the similar Russian groups; they had learned to employ the same methods, listened to the same leaders, and their demands as Ukrainians were loosely connected with their social and political theories. They were conscious, but only potentially active, nationalists and at the moment when it was necessary to make rapid decisions, they hesitated and splintered on the importance which they assigned to national and to economic and social measures.

The Social Revolutionists, largely intellectuals from the villages, were at first the more important. They were populists and non-Marxian socialists who voiced the desires of the peasants for the ownership of their land. They called for the confiscation of the large estates, for they did not believe that any one should have larger holdings than he and his family could work. Since the land in Ukraine was held individually and the village community was only a figment of Russian law, they differed sharply from the Russian Social Revolutionists who stressed the existence of the community with an emphasis on the almost annual redistribution of land. Finally, they set themselves up as a Ukrainian party but still grouped around the journal Narodnya Volya (The People’s Will), the traditional name for a Social Revolutionist paper.

By the autumn of 1917 this party had definitely split. The left, which stressed the economic and social aspects of the party, established another journal Borotba (The Struggle). This was soon followed by a formal schism and the creation of a new Social Revolutionist Party (Borotbisty) with the name taken from their paper. It was only natural that the relations between this group and the Bolshevik Great Russians tended to become closer as radical ideas gained strength in the country.

The numerically smaller Social Democratic Party was purely Marxian and it spoke primarily for the Ukrainian factory workers. Like the Russian Party, it was divided between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, with the latter drifting steadily toward the Social Revolutionists and even some of the bourgeois groups. On the other hand, the efforts of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks to establish their own party met with continual opposition. The Marxian theories of the withering away of the state had long been used by Lenin and some of the German Social Democratic leaders as weapons against the Poles in both the Russian Empire and Germany, and the same ban was now applied to the Ukrainian Bolsheviks. If they wished approval by the central authorities, they were told to become merely a Ukrainian section of the Russian Party. If they persevered in their efforts, they were read out of the party which in Ukraine was dominated by the Russian factory workers and the Russian miners from the Donets basin and Kryvy Rih.

The position of the Ukrainian Social Democrats and especially the Bolsheviks was thus much more difficult than that of the less organized and more spontaneous Social Revolutionists. Strict party discipline hampered them at every turn and ardent Ukrainians as Mykola Skrypnyk, a personal and trusted friend of the Russian Bolshevik leaders, refused to make any schism in the party, even though he and his Ukrainian friends quite regularly appealed for recognition as a separate party, especially after the Bolsheviks recognized the existence of an independent Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

He, as an old Bolshevik, however, refused to cooperate with those Ukrainian Bolsheviks who dared to risk a fight with the central committee in Moscow and who finally tried to set up a Ukrainian Communist Party.

The greatest weakness of both of these intellectual groups was their lack of appreciation of the importance of foreign policies. It was with great hesitation that their representatives in the Central Rada in the summer of 1917 approached the Russian Provisional Government to include a Ukrainian representative in all Russian diplomatic missions. They had had few or no representatives in the pre-revolutionary Russian diplomatic service; relatively few of them had been abroad, even to Western Ukraine under the Austro-Hungarian Empire; they had no distinguished Ukrainian emigrants abroad who could speak to the world with the great authority of Ignace Jan Paderewski, Thomas G. Masaryk or Michael I. Pupin and during the crucial early months they largely neglected any consideration of foreign policy.

They wasted precious time in futile negotiations with the Russian Provisional Government over questions of federalism and they turned rather slowly toward the idea of independence. At each move of the more nationally conscious toward this goal, a certain portion of the more leftist members drew away toward the appropriate Russian camp in the name of internationalism and thus became the unconscious tools by which both the Provisional Government and later the Bolsheviks hoped to retain their control of the wealth of Ukraine.

It was this vagueness on the part of many of the intellectuals which kept them from being true intermediaries between the nationalist and military groups and the great mass of the peasants. It weakened the energy and zeal of some of the Ukrainian regiments which had declared for the Ukrainian cause immediately after the outbreak of the revolution and facilitated the development of pacifist opinion in the rank and file. So when, at the end of 1917, actual fighting started between the Russian Communists and the Ukrainian Central Rada, the armed forces of the new state were not as well prepared as they had been some months previously, and it was necessary to start again under almost new and more unfavorable conditions.

The pressure of events and the necessity for defense against the Red and the White invaders brought together the more consciously nationalist elements, first to declare the independence of Ukraine and then to organize, but the economic and social divergences were never solved. The dissolution of the Central Rada by the Germans and their support of a conservative government only embittered the political feuds and encouraged the rise of peasant leaders who were content to operate in their own areas and switched sides as questions of the moment moved them. All this weakened the sounder forces of the state and created the bewildering succession of such forms of government as the Rada, the Hetmanate of Skoropadsky and the Directory under Petlyura and gave the struggle at times a bizarre appearance as the different forces raised by the different political groups now combined against one or other of the invaders, only to separate when the other became the more pressing danger.

Under such conditions the central authority was finally over-whelmed and those people who were most strongly committed to a free and independent Ukrainian state withdrew from the country. The Soviet regime was able to take control. This did not, however, end the difficulties for there soon came a revelation that all was not yet well and harmonized. The peasants continued to be restless. The guerilla leaders did not at once cease their activity. Above all, the country was ruined but the relations between the Russians and the Ukrainians were not yet solved.

CHAPTER TWO

The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic

As the power of the Provisional Government in Petrograd declined and more and more responsibility was assumed by the Central Rada in Kiev, relations between Petrograd and Kiev grew rapidly worse and the conception of Ukrainian independence gained strength in all circles, except among the Russian population of Ukraine. The seizure of power in Petrograd by Lenin could not fail to hasten the progress of separation.

During the summer and autumn of 1917 Lenin had advocated the widest application of the principle of self-determination and encouraged the non-Russian peoples to demand separation from the Provisional Government. He and his friends had hardly come into power, when he showed at once the cynicism and hypocrisy of his entire policy. The Central Rada in Kiev and the vast majority of the soviets in Ukraine repudiated the demand for the confiscation of all property, the expropriation of the land and the turning over of the control of all industry to the workers, although in the Third Universal it did provide for “state control over production in the interests of Ukraine and Russia” and declared that all land not worked directly by the owners was to become the property of the workers. For all intents and purposes, the Third Universal which was issued on November 20, 1917, did its best to separate Ukrainian affairs from Bolshevik control without as yet resorting to a declaration of formal independence.

This produced a very unsatisfactory situation, for the Bolsheviks attacked the efforts of the Secretary of the Rada for Military Affairs to effect an understanding with the old Russian Army Headquarters at Mohylev and with the other national groups which were rapidly making common cause with the Central Rada in their opposition to the extreme measures of the Petrograd Soviet. The Council of Commissars in Petrograd claimed to speak for the whole of the former Russia in its efforts to make peace with the Germans. When the Rada denied this and approached the other non-Russian peoples, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd formally accused the Rada of withdrawing Ukrainian troops from the front, of disarming Bolshevik units in Ukraine and of allowing the Don Cossack forces to retire to their homeland across Ukrainian territory. On December 17, it hypocritically recognized the right of Ukraine to independence but threatened war on the Rada if it did not meet the conditions of the Council of People’s Commissars.

At the same time the Bolsheviks in the Kiev Soviet arranged an All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in the hope of putting pressure on the Rada. The attempt missed fire for the Congress proved to be under the influence of the anti-Bolshevik parties and adopted resolutions declaring that the Ukrainians had not thrown off the power of the Tsar to accept the domination of the Commissars. The Bolshevik spokesman Zatonsky was unable to make himself heard above the opposition and only 80 members supported the Soviet demands.

As a result of this failure Vasili Shakhray and Zatonsky left Kiev for Kharkiv where they joined a Congress of Soviets largely from the Donets basin and Kryvy Rih. There, on December 20, they established a new Ukrainian Rada under Russian Communist control and set up a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. They were joined by a group of Ukrainian Bolsheviks including Neronovych and George Kotsyubynsky, the son of the well-known Ukrainian author who had been a friend of Gorky.

The so-called Ukrainian army loyal to this new regime was composed almost exclusively of Russian troops and was under the open command of a Russian officer, Michael A. Muravyev. This force occupied Kiev on February 7, 1918 and held the city for about three weeks. Its actions showed clearly the nature of the government. Under the pretext of liberating the Ukrainians from the control of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and the Rada, it abolished all Ukrainian newspapers and its disorderly elements not only executed members of the Ukrainian and Russian bourgeoisie but also Ukrainian Communists and radicals who used the Ukrainian language in their hearing.

In the meantime the Bolsheviks had opened negotiations with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk where Trotsky claimed to speak for the entire former Russian Empire. To circumvent this, the Rada formally declared the full independence of Ukraine and sent delegates to the peace conference. As a balance to this, Trotsky introduced into the conference the representatives of this new Ukrainian Soviet Republic who claimed to be the spokesmen for the Ukrainian peasants and proletariat. Their arguments did not convince the Germans and Austrians, who saw greater possibilities of profit by recognizing the Ukrainian National Republic, so as to secure without fighting a large part of the Ukrainian grain supplies. The Ukrainian National Republic signed this agreement with misgivings, for, in fact, it threw the Rada into the power of the Germans and ended all chance of assistance from the Allied democratic powers which had previously regarded Lenin as the tool of the German General Staff. Now, with the conclusion of this peace, they extended their ill-will to the Ukrainian Central Rada.

The immediate result was German assistance to the Rada and the Soviet forces were quickly forced out of Ukraine and back into Great Russian territory. The leaders of the Ukrainian Soviet government were members of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and could not raise the question as to whether or not their new state was actually independent, and whether it could be, if it did not have its own Communist Party associated on a par with the Russian Party in the Communist International.

This brief Communist interlude in Ukraine should have been most instructive to both the Allied powers and the Germans, but neither drew the true lessons from it. The Allies, who were still opposed to the principles of Bolshevism and were annoyed by the speeches of Zinovyev and Chicherin, became more friendly disposed to the Russian Whites and gave up their efforts to win through invoking the democratic principles of self-determination the support of any of the non-Russian peoples. The Germans, on the other hand, after aiding the Rada to return, dispersed it on the ground that it was too radical, but when a more conservative regime was set up under Hetman Skoropadsky, they did not give this honest support. They sought only for Ukrainian supplies and by their actions they weakened the power of the Hetman and strengthened discontent against his regime without allowing him to do anything that would weaken the power of the Communists.

The situation became almost ridiculously complicated. Germany, anxious to secure troops for the Western Front, was, by the spring of 1918, at peace with both the Commissars of Moscow and the government of Ukraine. It was therefore opposed to both the White Russians and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Even the Czechoslovaks on their way to Vladivostok, thanks to the negotiations between President Masaryk and Muravyev, were on friendly terms with the Ukrainian Communists and had difficulties with the Ukrainian government and the Germans. As soon as they crossed into the Russian Soviet Republic, they had difficulties with the Russian Communists and the Germans and found their support among a part of the White Russians. It was the same situation as in the far north where the Germans backed the White Finnish forces under Mannerheim against the red Finns who were the favored party of their friend and associate, Moscow. Yet all the time there was no Ukrainian Communist Party, for the Ukrainian Communists owed their prime allegiance to the Russian Communist Party which was, in theory at least, on the opposite side in the general disturbed situation.

To the Communists, as Skrypnyk, Shakhray and George Pyatakov who had played an important role in the Communist occupation of Kiev, this seemed a serious gap and at a meeting in Tahanrih in April they triumphed over the Communists from Katerynoslav who had insisted upon remaining merely a part of the Russian Communist Party. Their victory was of short duration, for when there came an organization meeting in Moscow on July 5, the Russian authorities definitely made it clear that they would not tolerate the existence of a Ukrainian Communist Party. Bela Kun warned that in the international civil war that was to be begun, great efforts were to be made not to allow it to assume anything of a national character, but to keep it restricted and fought on class lines. They were also informed that they could in this new struggle have no relations with Mensheviks or any Ukrainian Social Revolutionists or Social Democrats. A few months later Stalin was elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian party as a symbol of the dependence in which the party was to be kept.

The first people to appreciate fully the dilemma in which the Ukrainian Communists found themselves were the Ukrainian Communist leaders who had established, with Russian help, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. They were quickly taught that as long as the control of their Party was not in their own hands, they were completely helpless and at the mercy of the Russians.

Shakhray, who had endeavored to argue at Kiev in December, 1917 that the Ukrainian Communists were to be counted as Ukrainians, very soon in Russia became so disgusted that he resigned from the Russian Communist Party and retired to Saratov to establish a Ukrainian Communist Party of Bolsheviks. He criticized the extreme policy of centralization carried on by the Russian Communists.

Along with S. Mazlakh, he published a book entitled The Wave—What is being done in Ukraine and with Ukraine. This book, which was often quoted later by Skrypnyk and his associates, was the theoretical basis for Ukrainian Communism. Shakhray tried to foster discontent against the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky by stressing his relations with both the German forces in Ukraine and the White Russian refugees who had taken shelter in that country. He declared that Ukrainian independence could only be consistently won by the Ukrainian Communists, for they, as the Ukrainian proletariat, were the only people who could advocate and carry through a real revolution in view of the treachery of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, he attributed the Communist failure in Ukraine to the fact that the Party was entirely under Russian control and looked at the cause of the Communists through the eyes of the Russian colonists in Ukraine who were, in accordance with the Russian imperialistic tradition, working not for Ukraine but for Moscow.

He soon left Saratov for Kuban and here he was captured and killed by the Denikin forces. Mazlakh, who had remained a member of the Russian Communist Party, was later shot by them for nationalism. The third Commissar for War, Neronovych, became disillusioned and on the entrance of German troops into Ukraine he gave up politics but he fell into the hands of the Ukrainian National Army and was shot. Thus, the first attempts of the Russian Communist Party to seize Ukraine and expel the Ukrainian National government ended disastrously and relatively few of the early leaders survived. Most of them paid the penalty for their actions to one of the contending forces, with the Bolsheviks executing then or later the larger number.

During the summer of 1918 while Hetman Skoropadsky remained in power, the chief work which the Communists could hope to do in Ukraine was through their mission in Kiev under the leadership of D. Z. Manuilsky. This was ostensibly engaged in negotiations for a definite peace treaty between the Ukrainian National Republic and the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. In reality, Manuilsky was almost openly intriguing with the tacit consent of the Germans who had no desire to see their own position in Moscow jeopardized, as their armies were being driven back on the Western Front. Manuilsky was also able to notice the constant splitting of the leftist Ukrainian parties, which, in their hostility to the policies of the Hetman, tended to move nearer to the Communist position.

The disintegration in both the Social Revolutionist and the Social Democrat ranks became steadily more marked during the summer of 1918. When the German armies collapsed and the Hetman could no longer retain his post, a Directory of five men, including Petlyura and Vynnychenko, set themselves up at the news of the abdication of the German Emperor and they soon recovered Kiev. At the same time the left wing of the Social Revolutionists (Borotbisty) refused to recognize the new Directory and drifted rapidly toward the Bolshevik position.

The Kremlin, sensing the great change in the Ukrainian situation, at once refurbished the idea of a Ukrainian Soviet Republic. Its real head was now Christian Rakovsky, a Rumanian with Bulgarian citizenship who had never been in Ukraine, but its nominal leaders were Pyatakov and George Kotsyubynsky. These moved from Kursk along the railroad lines into Ukraine at the end of December but Chicherin, in his telegrams to the Directory, categorically denied that the Russians were supporting this movement in any way. He laid all the responsibility upon the Ukrainian Communists. The ruse did not work and finally on January 16, 1919, the Directory, in which Vynnychenko’s star was sinking, declared war.

This was opposed by the left wing of the Social Democrats who were very influential in the Directory. On January 10-12, the two wings definitely parted and the left adopted the name of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Independent) and insisted upon the establishment of a non-Communist Soviet Republic. The right wing, in view of the weakness of the Ukrainian proletariat, advocated instead a Congress of Workers which would include both peasants and the city proletariat. When war actually started, the left wing split again between those who were willing to stand for an independent Ukraine and those who refused to act against Russia under any circumstances. The latter took the name of USDRP (Independent Lefts).

It was not long before the Borotbisty and the USDRP (Independent Lefts) began negotiations for merging. Both were convinced of the superiority of the Soviet form of democratic government and both were convinced that any Communist government would inevitably recognize the essential rights of the Ukrainian people. In this respect they were far more naive than were the leaders of the first Ukrainian Communist regime who had already become completely disillusioned at the contrast between the theories and the practice of Lenin and his associates. They refused to cooperate with Petlyura and the Directory and, in effect, they withdrew from its support a considerable section of the Ukrainian intellectuals at a crucial moment.

On the other hand, with their own armies they fought against the White Russians of Denikin, because they saw in these merely an attempt to restore the old order. Yet they declined to be included in the organized army of the Directory and by their independent actions they made more difficult the burden of the army commanders. They encouraged the formation in the country of independent military bands which added to the growing chaos. To emphasize their position they again changed their name to the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) and constantly sought to ingratiate themselves with the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Communist Party which had again succeeded in reoccupying Kiev and in forcing the Directory to flee.

On the other hand, the USDRP (Independents), almost as true admirers of the Soviet system but far more critical of the Russian influence, did merge their forces for the fighting against Denikin with the forces of the Directory. In the summer of 1919, this group, under the influence of the Khmelevtsevs of Kobilyaky in Poltavshchyna, commenced again to review their position. After the death of their leaders in a crossing of the Dnieper and after the defeat of Denikin, they decided to adopt the appellation of Communists and to rename themselves the Ukrainian Communist Party without any additional description title. Thus, they took the name of Ukapisty and as such they dragged on an independent existence for some years, confidently expecting that they would ultimately receive national and international recognition from the Comintern, the Communist International.

This endless splitting and regrouping of the various parties proved a headache to the Directory which was trying to organize the country for defense against both of the Russian invaders. The individual armed forces, acting independently, aided in wrecking the economy and this inspired peasant leaders of various kinds to seek the control of their own native regions. Some of these men proved themselves able, if short-sighted, leaders. Some, as Nestor Makhno, were unadulterated anarchists who saw no need of any central regime. Others were mere adventurers thrown into prominence by the course of events and willing to shift their principles for the sake of a momentary personal advantage. Others were patriots with no broader vision than their home districts.

As a result, throughout 1919 there were some 328 revolts against the extending power of the Russian Communist forces which were fanning out over Ukraine, slaughtering and robbing as they went but still unable to secure a definite control of the villages.

As opposed to this welter of conflicting ideals, the policy of the Russian dominated Ukrainian branch of the Russian Communist Party was simplicity and clarity itself. This supported the paper independence of the Ukrainian Soviet regime and openly avowed its intention of subjugating the country and of exploiting it for the benefit of Moscow. Their purposes were even openly avowed at the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies on March 22, 1919, when Shlikhter, a Ukrainian German and one of the commissars appointed by Moscow to collect grain, declared: “You all remember how Ukraine began to become Soviet; with every day of the advance of the Red Army, we and you felt more easy; the rich grain-producing Ukraine is ours. We have four central military divisions collecting and on them we rest all our hopes. We have a mass of workmen sent in (from Moscow to Ukraine), who know how to search all the Ukrainian villages. We always remember that the eyes of the proletariat of Russia are turned toward Ukraine.”

These remarks represented the cynical attitude of Lenin and the Communists. They ignored the statements as to a Ukrainian Soviet Republic that were being made by Lenin and others to woo the various leftist Ukrainian parties. They were safe speeches made to reassure the Great Russians that the Bolsheviks still had a monolithic outlook, even though they were prepared to go to almost any lengths to create a paper regime which would insure and facilitate the plundering of the rich grain-producing Ukraine. They told, more or less, the truth, that was not recognized by the more idealistic theoreticians, that the Ukrainian Communists were, in fact, the dupes and victims of the Moscow regime which cared nothing for the Ukrainian people, or even the Ukrainian proletariat.

By the end of 1919 the Ukrainian Soviet regime was so satisfied with the success of its raiding and collecting parties that it felt able to proclaim an amnesty and to disarm the population completely. To accomplish the latter purpose, new Russian forces were sent into the country, the villages were thoroughly searched and disarmed. The peasants were tiring of the apparently endless exactions of the independent commanders and they turned against many of the patriotic partisan bands and declined to give them further support. This broke the movement and even the alliance of Petlyura with the Poles and the short occupation of Kiev by the combined armies in the spring of 1920 did not suffice to restore the old enthusiasm for the hard-pressed Directory.

By the end of 1920, when the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet delegations met the Poles in Riga in October, 1920, the fighting was nearly over. The Poles signed a treaty of peace without consulting their Ukrainian allies of the Ukrainian National Republic. There was nothing for the forces of the Directory to do but to retire abroad and continue their unsuccessful efforts to secure Western assistance. This was not forthcoming. The French were interested in aggrandizing Poland as a bulwark against Germany; the other allies were openly supporting Denikin through a misinterpreted friendship with the Russian people and there did not seem to be left even a spark of the principles enunicated but a short time before in Wilson’s attitude toward self-determination and the rights of people to govern themselves. The struggle was ended and the Ukrainians were left at the mercy of their Russian overlords, now back in a new guise.

CHAPTER THREE

The Period of Militant Communism

Any interpretation of the so-called period of Militant Communism which extended from the Soviet seizure of power to the spring of 1921 must rest upon the individual estimation of the sincerity and idealism of Lenin and his associates. If we assume that they had a real belief in the principles of Marxism as it developed into Communism, the period must seem one of disillusionment on the world, national and regional scale. If, on the other hand, the stress is to be laid upon their seizure and maintenance of power, the period becomes a further step in the total disintegration of society in the former Russian Empire and in the destruction of all those institutions and conceptions handed down from the past or developed by the democratic Ukrainian National Republic.

On the world scale it became almost immediately obvious that the world revolution as projected and preached by Lenin and Trotsky in 1918 was not going to occur in the immediate future. The failure of the Communists to secure control of Germany and the defeat of Bela Kun in Hungary reduced the Communist International from an association of revolutionary representatives of Communist nations and governments to a gathering of exiled and embittered conspirators totally dependent upon the will of the Russian Communists in the Kremlin. This, even had Lenin been sincere, would have inevitably inspired him with the idea of collecting the territory of the Russian Empire for his own advantage.

In the first heat of enthusiasm the Petrograd Soviet had confiscated all property, nationalized land and industry and embarked on a series of far-reaching changes. They thought of the land question in terms of the use of land by the village community and of industry and factories by the workers and they did their best to inflame the workers and peasants against the great landlords and the factory owners and administrators. In this they succeeded admirably and the already low standard of living in the Russian Empire began to drop lower and lower.

Under such conditions it became more and more necessary for the Soviet leaders in Moscow to make renewed efforts to master Ukraine and to inject some apparent vitality into their puppet, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. In this they were finally successful, but even though the Communists came back into Ukraine, they did not venture to destroy the fiction of Ukrainian independence, although they had no intention of allowing it to develop.

From the moment of its formation and adoption of a Communist Constitution on March 14, 1919, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic declared itself an independent and sovereign state. It was recognized with all due pomp and formality by Lenin, who again stressed it in his Letters to the Workmen and Peasants of Ukraine in his efforts to strengthen the opposition to Denikin. The Ukrainian Soviet Government was represented at the Conference in Riga that ended the Soviet-Polish War in the fall of 1920. The travesty was continued when, in December of the same year, Lenin concluded with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic a formal treaty of alliance in which Ukraine, for purposes of defense, graciously handed over to Moscow the commissariats of war, navy, foreign trade, railroads, finances, labor, posts and telegraphs and the Supreme Council of National Economy. It still retained the right to have its own diplomatic representatives in Poland, Germany and Austria, countries which had recognized the Ukrainian National Republic, and there were still preserved Ukrainian military schools to train officers for the Ukrainian army in both Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and Kiev.

Still all this was merely a sham arrangement, for the bulk of the forces that fought against the Ukrainian National Republic were Russian and they operated with no regard for the feelings even of the Ukrainian Communists. They moved at will over Ukrainian territory, collected supplies at will and shipped them to Russia and they behaved in every way as if they were in their own territory.

The key to this enigma is to be found in the fact that the Ukrainian Communist Party was not regarded as an independent Communist Party with a seat in the Comintern, but was merely a branch of the Russian Communist Party. Its officers were therefore appointed at will and changed at the pleasure of the Russian Party. Its discipline and actions were controlled by Moscow and any independent Ukrainian development could be countermanded by a mere word from the centre. By this extremely simple device Lenin could maintain his hold over the Ukrainian Communists, even in the unlikely case that the Comintern was revitalized by the Communist seizure of power in another of the large states.

The policy did not fail to arouse criticism, even during the wars, by some of the Ukrainian members of the Party. In 1920, a “fraction of the federalists” was formed under Yu. Lapchynsky with the aid of S. Kirychenko, P. Slynko and E. Kasyanenko. It was naturally dissolved as soon as its importance was recognized, and its leaders were expelled from the Party. They accordingly joined the Ukapisty and only returned when that voluntarily liquidated itself some years later.

There were thus at the moment of the ending of the Civil Wars three Communist Parties in Ukraine, the official KP/b/U, the branch of the Russian Party, the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) and the Ukapisty, i.e. the Ukrainian Communist Party.

The Borotbisty were the first to go. They had been formed out of the Left Social Revolutionists and were less sure of their Marxian knowledge but they contained many of the leftist Ukrainian intellectuals who valued the development of Ukrainian culture. The group had been praised by Lenin for its great part in the defeat of Denikin. In the spring of 1920, the proposal was made that they fully join the Ukrainian Branch of the Russian Communist Party. Shumsky and Blakytny led the affirmative. The spokesmen for the opposition were Poloz and Panas Lyubchenko, who was later to be the head of the UkSSR and to commit suicide in 1937. The affirmative triumphed, and the Borotbisty were dissolved as a separate group. They were given the nominal right of choosing two members for the Executive Committee of the KP/b/U but this was, of course, an empty phrase, since that Executive Committee was itself but an agent and tool of the Executive Committee in Moscow.

The Ukapisty offered a more serious threat, for they were trained in Marxian dialectics and they knew the weak points in the program of the Moscow centre. They accepted the Marxian analysis of capitalist society and the Leninist theory of imperialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet regime. As regards the question of nationality, they shared the Marxist-Leninist conception but in contrast to the Russian Communist Party they adapted this to suit a non-ruling and enslaved nation. The Ukapisty theoretically based the difference between its attitude and that of the Russian Communist Party on the fact that the latter represented the proletariat of a dominant nation, while they stood for the proletariat of an enslaved nation. Thus the one considered the question of nationality as a question of tactics connected with the spreading of the proletarian revolution; for the other it was a question of program connected with the liberation of the people and itself not only from capitalistic but also from national enslavement. They condemned the Russian Bolshevik practices in Ukraine and, in contrast to the Bolshevik idea of spreading the revolution by armed force (an idea which collapsed with the defeat of the Red Army at Warsaw in 1920 and which was then condemned by Lenin himself), they believed in the “internal forces”, i.e. that the revolution would only be organic and lasting if it was carried out by the internal forces of each nation and not if it was introduced by bayonets from abroad. They stood therefore for an independent Ukrainian Soviet state, with its own red army, its own independent economy, and its entrance into the Comintern on an equal footing with all other Communist parties.

The Ukapisty were allowed to exist until 1925 and it was not until the Comintern was willing to declare that it was Muscovite to the core and that all foreign Communist parties were of right subordinate, that the Ukapist appeal for inclusion was definitely rejected and that the group was offered the choice of suppression or of self-liquidation. They accordingly accepted the voluntary decision and signed thus their own death warrants as had the Borotbisty by their early submission.

All three parties had the same general attitude toward all non-Communists and bourgeois groups. They were in general agreement that these had to be destroyed and driven from political and social importance. Thus, all adopted a hostile attitude toward the nationalists who had supported Petlyura and the Ukrainian National Republic. They attacked the remains of the Social Revolutionists, the Social Democrats, and all the non-Marxian or Marxian groups that did not accept a strict Communism. They dissolved the organizations and seized their property, while they imprisoned many of the older leaders and tried to humiliate them in the eyes of the Ukrainian public.

Thus in 1921, they staged in Kharkiv a public trial of the members of the Executive Committee of the Social Revolutionists. The list included V. Holubovych, the Prime Minister at the time of Brest-Litovsk, N. Petrenko, P. Hubenko (Ostap Vyshnya), Lyzanivsky and many others. They were charged with hostility to the “government of workers and peasants” but apparently the regime was not too sure of its ground and merely sentenced them to relatively short terms in prison.

It was not only the politicians who suffered, for the new regime attacked every institution which it did not control. In 1920 it abolished all Ukrainian professional organizations and trades unions, including such as the Poltava Society of Workers in Cooperatives and similar groups in Kiev, Kharkiv, and other cities. Then, by arrests of the leaders of the cooperative societies, it forced new elections and put into power only those persons who had the direct approval of the Russian Bolsheviks.

It was next the turn of the purely cultural organizations. All the societies of the Prosvita (Enlightenment) which operated a chain of reading rooms, schools, libraries, theatres, etc. were disbanded on the ground that they were connected with the Rada of the old Ukrainian National Republic. The regime arrested and shot as chauvinist counter-revolutionists many of the active workers. Those who were spared at the moment were treated as members of the proscribed classes and were punished by the exclusion of their children from schools, the denial of food cards, etc., all the traditional devices to eliminate the counter-revolutionary and suspected classes.

At the same time the government confiscated all the funds of educational institutions and the private organizations which had, during the Ukrainian National Republic and earlier, been interested in educational and scientific work. It closed the Ukrainian scientific societies in Kharkiv and Kiev and it put an end to all of the pre-Soviet journals, newspapers, and magazines. The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences which had been planned during the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky but had not commenced its work, was treated somewhat more leniently and it was allowed to open largely to support the pretext that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was an independent state, although it was made clear that Communist influence would be exerted on its statutes and organization.

Such a period of intellectual disintegration could not fail to leave its mark on all aspects of Ukrainian culture and art. The older writers who had achieved some prominence before 1914 either retired again into the emigration or they became silent. The younger generation, which was just rising into prominence, was either driven into temporary seclusion or, for the most part, swept into the surging current of events. They felt the leftward urge of many of the intellectuals and tried in one way or another to catch the spirit of the times in their works.

Yet it must be realized that, as in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, there still did not exist a predominant party line in the field of literature and the arts. Writers, painters and dramatists of widely differing tendencies accepted the revolution and loudly protested that they and they alone were the true mouthpieces of the times and greedily sought for support from the commissars.

They were the more fortunate in this because the bulk of the leaders, like Rakovsky, had little appreciation of Ukrainian life. Few of them understood the language and they preferred to work through the Russians in the cities and the Donets basin. They were, however, still unable to deal advantageously with the villages where the Ukrainian population was chiefly congregated and they allowed the former Borotbisty to secure key positions in the People’s Commissariat for Education. Thus it came about that the one commissariat which could exert the most direct influence on the cultural life of the country was the one in which the Ukrainian influence was strongest.

The time was not propitious for the publication of works of large size and of high artistic value. The years 1919, 1920 and 1921 were years of turmoil when nothing seemed to be real and permanent except death and violence of every kind. The mere struggle for existence was so intense that it absorbed the energy of almost the entire population and the economic decay spread like a creeping paralysis over the land. To the destruction of the civil wars and of the fighting with Denikin were now added the ravages of the Communist detachments, which swarmed over the country seeking for food to take to the north to save the Russians.

In the early months it would be hardly fair to talk of a Communist system of government, for while the theorists were debating as to how they should build socialism and Communism, armed Communist bands organized under the Red Army or under the Cheka (the Extraordinary Committee for Suppression of the Counter-Revolution) indulged in mass terror, murder and robbery.

The measures adopted in Petrograd and Moscow for the distribution of the land were ill adapted for the Ukrainian situation. It was only natural that these were applied with a certain amount of peasant approval at the expense of the larger Russian and Polish landlords, many of whom had cooperated with the Germans. This was the more natural because in pre-war days the bulk of the grain that had been exported from Ukraine had come from these estates and, as everywhere in peasant Europe, the confiscation and division of the land among the peasants reduced the amount of food stuffs available for the urban population.

The natural result was the growing depopulation of the cities. Peasants who had gone into industry now flowed back to their native villages and demanded their share of the land in the hope that they might be able to raise food for themselves and their families. This increased the already overcrowded rural population and intensified the bitterness that was felt among all classes.

The hatred thus aroused was increased by the formation of committees of poor and landless peasants to take over the estates. Yet in Ukraine there was an important sector of the population who had been the owners and proprietors of from two to nearly one hundred acres of land. In some districts these included nearly a quarter of the peasant families and in an attempt to propitiate them the Soviets were frequently inclined to favor them and allow them to retain their holdings instead of dividing them among the more idle and shiftless of the population.

Yet this did not serve to maintain agricultural production, for the crying demand of Moscow was for food. The Communists had abolished all markets and taxes but they substituted for them a rule that the peasants were to turn over their entire crop to the government and should retain for themselves only 31 pounds of grain per month for each member of the family. This naturally dissatisfied the peasants who had been won to the support of the new regime by the promises of the government that they could secure for their own use the land of the state and of the landlords. Each year, as the Soviets tried to enforce the collection, they planted less and less acreage and resorted to more skilful methods of hiding what they did produce in the hope that they might somehow exchange it for those manufactured products of which they were in urgent need.

To counterbalance this, the Russian detachments made more and more extensive raids and they were not satisfied to take merely the legal surplus. They seized everything in the way of food and supplies on which they could lay their hands and, in case of opposition, they ruthlessly shot the peasants without any trial or investigation as counter-revolutionists. In a sense they succeeded in their mission, for the food collectors in 1920 secured in Ukraine 2,560,000 tons of grain or about 75% of the total amount that they secured in the whole of the former Russian Empire.

This led to new clashes and with the suppression of the larger armed partisan bands, there grew up a new feeling of ugliness that boded ill for the security of the whole regime. The success of the Communists in the industrial centres was thus balanced by their failure to win over any substantial part of the rural population.

In the cities the new regime met with problems of another kind. The workers in the great coal and iron industry where Communism was strongest had at a very early date expelled the managers and foremen and had taken over themselves the operation of the plants, many of which had been ruined in the civil war. Now they found that they were not able to restore production. Industry practically came to a halt and by the end of 1921 there was only one blast furnace operating in Ukraine. The production of pig-iron dropped to 11,300 tons, or barely 3% of the pre-war production. The railroads suffered the same fate. There was no way of repairing them and without a trained administrative staff, they almost stopped functioning. This, in turn, increased unemployment and a lack of food in the cities and once more the city dwellers began to stream out into the country districts.

As a final blow there came in 1920 one of those periods of drought which have recurred sporadically in Ukraine throughout the centuries. In view of the general decay in transportation and the ravages of the war, this became serious and the situation grew even worse when the same phenomenon was repeated in 1921. Between the drought and the raiding detachments, the peasants had no reserves of grain and a famine broke out which cost the lives of several million Ukrainians.

This famine was very definitely the result of Communist mismanagement, plus the drought, but the Soviet regime was unable to take any effective counter-measures. When its extent was realized, the regime allowed through the League of Nations the organization of the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover. This collected and sent to the stricken areas large quantities of grain but it carried on its work with such impartiality that it ignored for humanitarian motives the discontent of the peasants and its operations enabled the Soviet regime to master a storm which would otherwise have endangered its very existence. It is interesting in this connection that the Soviet regime only with the greatest reluctance allowed relief work to be carried on in the Ukraine, where the famine conditions were the worst. Their only interest was in the Volga area inhabited by Great Russians and they tried to use the assumed independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic as an excuse for refusing to allow help to be extended.

Thus by the spring of 1922 the policy of Militant Communism had broken down at every point. The system had shown its political, economic and cultural bankruptcy and its sole success had been among certain groups of idealists abroad who were infatuated with the resolution with which the Soviets had broken with the old order. Yet this was a poor foundation and it was obvious that something drastic had to be done, if the Soviet system was to be saved.

CHAPTER FOUR

The New Economic Policy

With the cities prostrate, the land untilled and the people starving, not only in the Ukraine but elsewhere on Soviet-controlled territory, Lenin suddenly changed his policies and introduced various measures which rapidly relieved some of the most glaring defects of the Soviet system. The general term for the new arrangement is the New Economic Policy which more or less remained in force until 1929.

The basis of these measures was a change in the method of collecting taxes and income. Whereas, during the period of Militant Communism, the peasants had been compelled in theory to hand over their entire production to the state with the exception of what they were allowed to retain for their own personal use, they were now assigned a fixed amount which they were to contribute, and the balance they could retain or even sell in the local markets. The decree providing for this was signed March 21, 1921. This gave the peasants a new inspiration to work, for they could begin to make plans rationally and intelligently and could hope to receive some reward for their diligence and industry. This measure was supplemented by others which made it appear that the Bolshevik regime was in some degree returning to the philosophy or the practices of capitalism.

That was undoubtedly the impression that Lenin wanted to convey abroad. There had been signs that some of the European countries were willing to renew commercial relations with the Soviets, and the introduction of the New Economic Policy strengthened these desires. People began to speculate glibly and naively that the practical realities of existence had forced Lenin to admit much that he had previously denied and they predicted that in the coming years the form of Soviet life would steadily approach that in the Western world.

The same reaction was to be seen at home. Many of the more sincere and convinced Communists greatly disliked the concessions to the old order that were made at this time. It seemed to them that their revered master was turning his back upon his old position and they scoffed at the new Nepmen, who were growing wealthy under the new regime.

Lenin was not to be shaken in his policy. His motives in these concessions to capitalism are well expressed in the remarks in the History of the All-Union Communist Party. “Militant Communism had tried to take the fortress by frontal assault. It advanced too far and risked being cut off from its base. Lenin made the proposition to retire a few steps, to retreat for a while further to the rear, so as to pass from an assault to a siege, and then, after gaining strength, to return to the assault.”

The later sequence of events showed the correctness of this explanation. The New Economic Policy in Lenin’s mind was a temporary move which was made in the hope that the economic life of the country would revive. He made no lasting concessions and a careful reading of all the measures shows that they were not motivated by the sense of failure that was ascribed to them by the capitalistic world. Lenin did not put the measures in any form that would definitely bind himself or his successors. They did not provide any guarantees of their permanence, nor did they state any principle that was in contradiction with the basic philosophy of Communism. They were, obviously, a mere tactical manoeuvre in the difficult situation in which the Soviets found themselves.

The basic decree was signed in Moscow and was, of course, only applicable to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. It could not therefore be valid without further action in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic which was, by hypothesis, a completely independent and sovereign state. Yet so closely knit together was the fate of the Ukrainian Communist Party with that of Russia that it was not necessary for the Ukrainian Soviet regime to issue immediately any new decree on the subject. It was automatically assumed that it was equally binding in Ukraine and without any further ado, the Ukrainian peasants were given the right of selling any surplus products exactly as if there had been no independent Ukrainian Soviet government.

The legal aspects of this decree did not interest the bulk of the Ukrainian peasants. They saw only the relief which it afforded them and the opportunities that it gave. They immediately took advantage of it, and its first effects were to be seen in a surprisingly short time. Of course, there could be no improvement in the national well-being until the harvest and the harvest of 1921 was again reduced by drought, so that with the best of intentions, it was not until 1922 that conditions began to improve.

A new Russian land code was finally adopted on March 3, 1921, and it was, of course, the model to be observed in the Ukraine. Yet this did not suppress the discontent of the Ukrainian peasants.

In an effort to suppress this smouldering discontent, D. Manuilsky, who was then the Commissar for Agriculture of the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee (the revolutionary centre and the provisional government of the country), summoned to Kharkiv a gathering of agronomists from all parts of Ukraine in the First All-Ukrainian Agronomical Congress. He found the more than one thousand present practically united in their assertions that the agricultural laws as developed by the Bolsheviks were inapplicable to the Ukraine. They had been drawn up and approved on March 6, 1919 and they were entirely based on the spirit of the Russian land commune which provided usually for a redistribution of the land every three years, with the supplemental provision that the redistribution should take into account the number of persons in each family. This was all very good when it agreed, as it did in Russia, with the general spirit of the people who were vitally interested in the commune as such. Conditions were different in Ukraine and the purely artificial Land Society was developed. Of course, all the peasants had to become members but the land was divided by households rather than on an individual basis. Furthermore, it was provided in the Ukrainian Code that “The right to land handed over for labor use is without term and can be taken away only in accordance with the provisions of the law.” This insured the individual household in possession of its own piece of land and made it possible for the more industrious to undertake the improvement of the soil.

By the time that the final form of the Labor Code was established on November 22, 1922, it had become almost essentially different from the Russian Code, although it paid a lip service to the principle of nationalization through the actions of the Land Societies. A further sign of submission was the establishment of maximums on landholding. No household in the densely settled areas could have more than fourteen hectares or, in the less thickly populated areas, forty-eight hectares. The Land Society had the right to decide on the form of exploitation of the land to be carried out but if a family disagreed with the form established, it was entitled to demand the same amount of land but not necessarily the same land that it had contributed. Furthermore, outside of the requirement that all members of household were compelled to labor personally on the land, the provisions dealing with hired labor and the renting of land were left purposely vague or were omitted for further study.

The new code, which was more liberal than that in Russia, was devised in the interests of the landless peasants and also the poor and middle peasants, and definitely ratified the seizure of the estates of the large landowners. Sixty-eight per cent of the landless peasants received small tracts of land and fifty-two percent of those with holdings from two to four hectares were settled under more favorable conditions, or received additional land. On the other hand, 27.2% of those with more than sixteen hectares, the normal holding, and 56.8% of those with more than twenty-five hectares, saw their additional land removed and handed over to their less fortunate neighbors. In a sense this might seem to have been a solution of the crying need of the peasants for land but it brought with it some unexpected results.

The civil war had completely destroyed any free capital, and without capital the peasants could not buy the tools, the fertilizers, etc., which they needed to prosper. This made little difference in the very beginning, for at the moment the primary need was for food and the peasants were compelled to live upon what they could raise. It was not long before the returning prosperity commenced new differentiations in the villages. The poorer peasants began to take advantage of the provisions that they could lease their newly acquired land, and while the Russian law provided that a lease could run for only three years, the Ninth All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets soon lengthened this term to 13 years and liberalized the laws for hired labor.

The result was that by 1926, the poor peasants had leased 1,181,000 hectares and 53.9% of the peasants who had at least ten hectares rented additional land.

In a word, under the New Economic Policy conditions began, in fact, to return to what had been the situation prior to the revolution, with the exception that the great land owners had disappeared, but as they had been largely Russian or Polish, their departure only increased the Ukrainian influence in the villages and made them more homogeneous than they had been before.

The Commissariat of Agriculture endeavored during these years of reconstruction to maintain as independent a position as possible. It established its own independent services, its own research stations which were concerned with Ukrainian agricultural problems, its own breeding stations and its own bureaus for study and development of the various branches of agriculture, and it did its best to separate these from the similar services directed by Moscow and not concerned with the particular problems of Ukraine.

The peasants responded to this with their own efforts. In 1922, with the famine still raging, they secured permission from Moscow to establish the so-called Selo-Pomich (or Village Aid) to provide credit for the peasants. This finally persuaded the Cheka to hand over part of the golden objects which they had stolen from the churches, and it used the capital thus secured to buy seed corn in America. It then loaned this to the peasants and when the harvest came, the loan was repaid in kind and more credit was then extended.

The peasants also revived and breathed new life into the cooperatives which had been broken up during the period of Militant Communism. In 1923 they established another cooperative organization, the Selo-Tekhnyka (Village Machines) which purchased more expensive agricultural machinery and rented it out to the peasants for the appropriate agricultural work. These points became the centre of mechanization and were in effect the first tractor stations. In 1924 they established the First Agricultural Bank, a sort of private institution which at one time had more loans outstanding than had the Ukrainian State Bank which was, of course, closely supervised by Moscow.

All these efforts met with marked success and agriculture speedily began to revive. The peasants became more prosperous and their holdings of livestock rapidly increased, although they did not reach the pre-war level. This, in its turn, created a new demand for manufactured products and restored the factories to operation, and with them the conditions in the cities began to improve.

Similar concessions were made to industry, but with one important difference. The larger and more important industrial plants were not turned back to their former owners who were, as before, allowed no voice or influence in their direction. They were taken from the workers who had seized and abused them during the period of Militant Communism and placed under the supervision of government trusts. These were either regional in character or confined to a single branch of industry. In either case, they were under the control of a more or less trusted group of men among whom Communists were in the leading positions, but while they received certain credits from the state, they were more or less autonomous and they were allowed to go through regular commercial transactions and encouraged to show profits in their annual reports. There was thus again a source of encouragement both for the directors and the workers, and slowly but surely the level of industry began to rise.

The smaller plants were very often leased to individuals who were allowed to employ hired labor and the hope was given to these that their taxes would be at such a level that they, too, could show profits. The very small shops and plants were in some cases taken back by their former owners when they had survived and any provisions about the use of hired labor were tacitly forgotten in the first flush of the New Economic Policy.

All of these measures were interpreted by the great mass of the Ukrainian people as a recognition of the validity of human experience. There were, of course, keen realists who gave full credence to the declarations of Lenin that the Soviets had never wavered in their objections and were using these concessions only as a means of reviving the life of the country and strengthening their own position. At first this did not seem to be true and it was only as conditions really settled down and a semblance of prosperity returned that it became possible to note the steadily increasing pressure which the government exerted.

In the same way the currency reforms were not without their own influence. In 1923 the government introduced a new currency, the chervonets, which was ostensibly based on a gold standard, to take the place of the old depreciated paper. Nevertheless, the latter was allowed to circulate in the rural districts with the result that its value continued to fall and it became more and more difficult for the peasants to satisfy their needs for manufactured goods which were priced in the new currency. This produced the so-called “scissors,” for with the restoration of industry, the value of manufactures continued to rise, while the prices of agricultural products continually fell.

The political system was still not clear. The new regulations were introduced in the Council of Commissars in Moscow and it was emphatically stated that they were for the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, but Ukraine and also the other Soviet Republics put into practice the same resolutions, often without any decree by the ostensibly independent government.

The key to this enigma lay in the nature of Communist discipline. In theory and on paper the Soviet regime was thoroughly democratic in the broad sense of the word. There was an elaborate scheme of elections to the village and the higher Soviets, and even though this was weighted very heavily to provide increased representation for the city proletariat where the Communists felt themselves strongest, it was always possible to defend the system.

Yet this does not tell the full story, for though non-party men were elected to the lower and local Soviets, the number of Communists increased steadily in the higher. These Communists were themselves classified as members of the Ukrainian branch of the Russian Communist Party and they were bound by party discipline to obey all the instructions given by the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party.

There was thus, in reality, two governments in both Ukraine and the Russian Republic. There was first the republic government theoretically responsible to the people and thus transmitting the wishes of the people upward, even though the highest republic authorities were the direct appointees of Moscow. There was likewise the domination, more or less veiled, of the Communist Party, a government which only transmitted instructions from the top down. In the early days, and indeed for a considerable period, it is often difficult to determine whether certain measures came into effect because they had been approved by the Council of Commissars in Moscow or because they had the backing of the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party which was a monolithic organization, responsible only to its chiefs. It was in a sense a theoretical question for, by the period of the New Economic Policy, the Council of Commissars, the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the control of the Communist International rested in the hands of the same men who functioned in three different capacities but still formed a well-knit body. Even though the legal relations between Ukraine and Russia rested on the vague treaties and agreements made during the period of Militant Communism and the civil wars, the Ukrainian Soviet government could be practically overruled at any moment and on any point on which it disagreed with the wishes of Moscow.

Since all non-Communist organizations had been dissolved, the only possible opposition could come from the Ukapisty, the Ukrainian Communist Party. This was composed of a small number of brilliant men, confirmed Communists, who insisted upon preserving the independence of the Ukrainian Communist regime in the hope that sooner or later they would be admitted to the Communist International as an independent national Communist Party. They therefore willingly accepted the doctrines of the International, which was little more than the third facet of the ruling block. By 1925 the situation had so far developed that their aspirations for this were definitely checked and even this theoretical opposition was eliminated by compelling the Ukapisty to enter into the Ukrainian Section of the Russian Communist Party, or else.

This situation makes clear the relations that existed between Ukraine and Russia during the early years of the New Economic Policy. As agriculture and industry revived in Ukraine, it was suggested that the Ukrainian government send aid to its Communist brothers. That suggestion was a command, and just as the Muscovite bands under Militant Communism scoured Ukraine for food, so under the New Economic Policy, the so-called Ukrainian government began to drain off the wealth of the country for the charitable purpose of helping its Russian brothers.

The vagueness and the ambiguity of this system was partially cleared up by the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The treaty establishing this was signed on December 30, 1922, just as Lenin was becoming paralyzed and unable to function efficiently. It bound together the various Soviet Republics, while at the same time it paid lip service to the right of any of these Republics to secede. Of course, this was from the beginning an empty phrase, for the only people who had the power to declare the secession was the Council of Soviets of the Federal Republic and they were Communists assigned to their posts by Moscow and bound to obey the orders of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party. In addition to this, a surprising number of the ruling group of the Russian Soviet Republic now took over the corresponding posts in the Union and thus added still a fourth facet to their varied activity.

The Constitution, which was formally adopted at a Union Congress of Soviets on July 6, 1923, went still further in providing for the government of the Union. The Commissariats were divided into three classes: Union, Joint and Republic. Thus, those of Foreign Affairs, Armed Forces, Foreign Trade, Communications, Water Transport, Posts and Telegraphs, Heavy Industry, Light Industry, Supply and Timber had full control over the corresponding sections in the federal republics. Those of Internal Trade, Labor, Finance and Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection were nominally joint commissariats but, in case of a dispute between the Union and the Republic commissariats, the rights of the former were supreme. The remaining commissariats, Interior, Justice, Education, Health, Agriculture, and Social Welfare were still left under the Executive Committee of the Republic Supreme Soviet. It was thus very evident that, except in a few fields, the powers of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to decide its own destiny were practically non-existent.

It goes quite without saying that it was these local commissariats which attracted the Communists of Ukrainian origin, whether or not they belonged to the Ukapisty or had joined the Ukrainian Section of the Russian Communist Party as former members of the Borotbisty. This was a very important development in the next decade in Ukrainian history and it was due to the relative freedom of the Commissariat of Education that the Ukrainian cultural renaissance took the form which it did.

At the same time, despite all the verbiage and the apparent exceptions, it was abundantly clear from the very beginning that the economic system of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was to be bound hand and foot to the Moscow regime and that its financial and industrial potentialities would be treated as Moscow wished.

It was relatively simple to deal with industry. The development of the coal and iron resources of Ukraine were simply transferred to Moscow control and it was practically impossible for the Ukrainians to express any opinion as to the form which that development would take. The Russian directors of the trusts could make such contracts as they desired and carry them out without regard to the wishes of the local population or the workmen.

Agriculture was a little more difficult. The decree of 1921, which had started the New Economic Policy, provided for the payment of a specific amount of tax in kind and left to the peasant the rest of his crop. In an endeavor to get this grain into Russia, the government offered to buy it but it did not have the funds or the inclination to pay for it at the market price. The financial reforms connected with the introduction of the chervonets could, to a certain degree, make it expedient for the peasant to sell to the government for cash, and as time went on the peasant gained the power of selling his crop for cash but the Moscow control of transportation and the prohibition of large scale trading left him helpless and he saw himself forced to dispose of it locally or to the government. Then the government made a fixed price which was far below that of the free market, and was often scarcely a third of the amount that the peasant could have secured. This sale of large quantities of agricultural products at a fixed price gradually became the rule and was one of the signs that the period of toleration for private income was coming to an end.

In 1925, the government began to clamp down on the small traders, the Nepmen, who had profited by the opportunities which they had had. Again it had a large choice of measures. Thus, depending on the situation, it could invoke laws against the hiring of labor; it could order the state agencies to refuse to buy from or sell to an obnoxious individual and thus isolate him; it could suspend his ration cards and perquisites, take away his right of voting and thus make him a pariah in the community; it could levy prohibitive taxes which would put him out of business and confiscate his property; or it could find some violation of some other law or regulation and imprison or exile him.

The degree of pressure which was put upon the peasants and the workers varied from year to year. Each year Ukraine was compelled to export more to Russia without regard to the needs of the local population. Thus, the amount of grain rose from 1,050,000 tons in 1924-5 to 3,165,000 tons in 1926-7, when there was a bumper crop, but in 1927-8, when the harvest partially failed and there were signs of need in the country, the amount collected and exported rose to 4,353,000 tons. At the same time, the continually increasing demands aroused again a spirit of opposition and of indifference among the peasantry and a resentment against the growing exactions of the Soviet regime in Moscow.

Still these were years of relative peace. With the introduction of the New Economic Policy, the government became more tolerant of differences of opinion and the OGPU (the Organization of the State Political Administration, the new name for the old Cheka) was relatively inactive. There were few political arrests, imprisonments, executions and deportations and the bulk of the population began to breathe more easily. There were men, however, who saw the straws in the wind. For example in 1924, Mikhnovsky, who had been one of the early Ukrainian nationalists, committed suicide and so did Syrotenko, a prominent Social Revolutionist, but these were in a way exceptional cases.

It is far more likely that this lull was part of the Moscow policy of preparing to eliminate in one swoop all persons who might prove to be dangerous, but it was also affected by the confusion and the intrigues that were going on in Moscow. With the death of Lenin, there was no clear successor to his post and prestige. There were many claimants, notably Stalin and Trotsky. When Lenin died, the power passed into the hands of a small group of leaders with Stalin, the Secretary of the Communist Party, and Trotsky as Commissar for War as the main contenders for the supreme power. The struggle between these two men lasted for several years, with the star of Stalin rising over that of Trotsky who favored a far more rigorous policy toward both the Nepmen and traders in the cities and the kulaks or kurkuls (the richer peasants) who had profited materially by the opportunities for private trade and production. It was not until that conflict was over that any one dared to risk the internal upheaval that might come with a change from the avowed outlines of the New Economic Policy and a reintroduction of more rigorous socialist or communist practice.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ukrainization

The period of the New Economic Policy was likewise the time when the movement for the Ukrainization of the state reached its highest point. This was a complicated political, cultural and scholarly movement which aimed to develop the Ukrainian self-consciousness in every possible way and to establish the proper role of the Ukrainian language and culture in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It took many and diverse forms, and while it developed into a definite opposition to Russian influence and Russian methods, it was not primarily so much an anti-Communist as an extra-Communist movement, even though most of its outstanding leaders were tried and tested members of the party.

The basis for the entire movement is to be found in the slight attraction that Communism as a doctrine possessed for the Ukrainian people. As late as 1927 there were only 122,928 Ukrainian Communists, that is, about thirty-nine for each ten thousand of the Ukrainian population. The bulk of the Communists in Ukraine were Russian and the vast majority of these belonged to the urban proletariat or to the workers in the Donets Basin and Kryvy Rih.

The general period of disintegration during the civil war and the period of Militant Communism had greatly strengthened the power and self-confidence of the peasants and had weakened the power of the city workmen. This showed Lenin and the dominant group that some method had to be found to win at least the passive support of the countryside if new troubles were to be averted.

The Bolsheviks were well aware of the tenacity with which the Ukrainian peasants, whether they were literate or illiterate, clung to their native language. Lenin had used this characteristic with skill and success in encouraging the Ukrainian opposition to the Russian Provisional Government. The proper recognition of the language had been one of the most insistent demands put forward by all groups which had later come together in the Ukrainian National Republic. The failure of the Bolsheviks in their early occupation of Ukraine to recognize the Ukrainian language had been one of the surest means of arousing opposition to their course and this time with their power established, the Bolsheviks decided to change their policy. As early as December 6, 1919, the Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party had declared: “In carrying out absolutely the principle of the self-determination of peoples, the Central Committee considers it necessary to repeat again that the Russian Communist Party maintains the recognition of the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.” It encouraged the Russians in Ukraine to learn Ukrainian and to aid in developing this as a weapon for the Communist education of the laboring masses.

Yet all was mere verbiage and even Vynnychenko who, at this moment, was sympathetic to the Bolsheviks in his “Letter to the Ukrainian Workmen and Peasants,” published in Forward (Lviv, 30.10. 2-3, II, 1920), lamented the fact that, despite this, the Ukrainian language did not receive its just due and that many Russian Communists were inclined to look upon even Ukrainian Communists as potential counter-revolutionists.

On the other hand, there was one group of Communists who were sincerely devoted to this goal. They were the former Borotbisty and the Ukapisty who had stressed the need for Ukrainian Communism and who had never lost an opportunity, while stressing their Communist feelings, to express the hope that the Ukrainian Communists might some time be formed into a special party and be duly admitted to the Communist International on a par with all the other Communist parties of the world. They took advantage of the situation offered by the formation of the Union of Soviet Republics and eagerly sought posts in the Commissariat of Education, which was one of the independent republic commissariats. This gave them a very good opportunity to work for the development of Ukrainian and Ukrainian culture in a field where there could be little expressed opposition.

On the other hand, every step for the fostering of Ukrainian or its development was met by the Russian Communists, and especially by those in Ukraine, with the greatest hostility. This went so far that Dmytro Lebid, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the KP/b/U, declared that there was a conflict of two languages and cultures in Ukraine and that it was not the duty of the Communist Party to interfere in this but to allow the dominant culture to win. In this he was actuated as a Russianized Ukrainian by his hostility to his native language and culture but he failed to win support, for it was very obvious that his policy of favoring Russian was only deepening the gulf between the Party and the Ukrainian peasants, the thing that the Moscow authorities were endeavoring at the time to bridge.

On August 1, 1923, the Communist Party passed a new decree which said: “The government of the workers and peasants regards it as necessary in the immediate future to concentrate its power on the spreading of a knowledge of the Ukrainian language. The former equality existing hitherto between the two most widely used languages in Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian, is insufficient. Life, as experience has shown, causes the actual superiority of Russian. To remove this inequality, the government of the workmen and peasants will introduce a series of practical means which, respecting the equality of the languages of all nationalities on Ukrainian territory, must assure to the Ukrainian language that place which corresponds to the number and economic importance of the Ukrainian people in the territory of the UkSSR.”

It further provided that Russian officials in Ukraine should learn Ukrainian within a definite period. All this sounded well on paper but the date by which Russian officials had either to learn Ukrainian or be recalled was constantly postponed further into the future, and the highest men who came for but short periods and who represented Moscow in the Ukrainian capital stubbornly refused to make any effort to obey these decrees.

On the other hand, every declaration to this effect was eagerly snapped up by the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty in the Commissariat for Education. In a short time they worked so effectively that nearly all the books published in Ukraine and about 85% of the newspapers were put out in Ukrainian. The circulation of these Ukrainian publications in the villages increased rapidly and aided in producing a sense of relief among the peasants and a tolerance of the situation which was in sharp contrast to the prevailing mood of a few years before.

A network of Ukrainian schools was set up throughout the country with instruction in the native language and the number of students grew rapidly from among the peasant classes. It had been centuries since the Ukrainian language had reached such a state of popularity. The theatres produced plays in Ukrainian as the chief part of their repertory. The cities assumed a markedly Ukrainian appearance and the leaders could look with satisfaction on their results.

The one difficulty was the low level of the instruction in many places but this was equally characteristic of the Russian terrain. The revolution and the Bolshevik laws had abolished the old Russian system of education and had eliminated from the schools the bulk of the older intelligentsia and their children who, on one excuse or another, were excluded from all opportunities for study. The old disciplines were abolished and the Soviet school entered upon a chaotic period. Nevertheless, the changes which the former Borotbist Hrynko introduced, including the establishment of seven year schools which gave the students the right to enter upon a three year course in various technical schools, served to increase rapidly the number of young and partly trained Ukrainians who were available for posts in the government service and who thereby freed the organization from its dependence upon Russian-trained people.

In 1925, he was succeeded in the post of Commissar by O. Shumsky, likewise a Borotbist, who had held the post of Ukrainian Minister in Warsaw. He had come back in 1923 to become the Director of Agitation and Propaganda for the Central Committee of the KP/b/U. An ardent believer in the Ukrainian cause, he opposed very strenuously all the Russifying influences in the Party and insisted, as a matter of principle, that only Ukrainian Communists should be promoted to prominent posts in the Ukrainian Communist organizations. He even went so far as to insist, when Kaganovich was sent from Moscow as Secretary of the Ukrainian section of the party, that he be removed and replaced by Chubar, an old Bolshevik, and he recommended that Hrynko should be made the head of the state.

Kaganovich, who had been rather on the side of Shumsky in many of his enterprises, now turned against him on the ground that he was breaking Communist discipline and, in a short time, Shumsky was removed and transferred to Moscow, where he received a post as head of the trade unions. From there he was moved to Leningrad to become head of a school of economics, but by this time his star was setting. Shumsky, on more charges, was sent to a concentration camp near the Finnish border. According to the story, he was assured that he had a chance to escape. He tried it and was shot. His leading assistants, Maksymovych, Vasylkiv and Turyansky, were branded as Shumkyists and punished accordingly.

His successor, M. Skrypnyk, took up his work as Commissar of Education under even better auspices. Unlike his predecessors, who had entered the Communist Party from the ranks of the Borotbisty or the Ukapisty and who thereby risked the charge of being Ukrainian nationalists and having bourgeois-nationalist sympathies, Skrypnyk had been an old member of the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolsheviks). He had been a personal friend of Lenin long before the Revolution. He had been arrested several times by the tsarist government, had taken an active part in the October Revolution of 1917 and was a disciplined member of the party. He was thus above reproach so far as his party standing was concerned.

From the time of the foundation of the Ukrainian National Republic, Skrypnyk had been one of the outstanding Ukrainians in the Communist Party. From the beginning he had taken the definite stand that the Communist organization in Ukraine should be thoroughly Ukrainian, independent of the Russian Communist Party and with a seat in the Comintern. He believed that Ukraine should naturally have a Soviet government and be an independent state with all the rights and perquisites of the RSFSR and he regarded the war between the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and the Ukrainian National Republic as a civil war in which the Soviet Russians naturally came to the aid of the Soviet Ukrainians. At the same time he believed equally strongly that this assistance should be that of a brother-nation and should have no elements of a foreign occupation.

He was a disciplined Communist and he always acted in accordance with the strictest Communist tradition. He never joined any faction or questioned the vote of his superiors but he remained firm in his convictions, and while he was always in the minority and was willing to yield superficially, he always seized the next opportunity to advance substantially the same points but in a somewhat different form. He was on friendly terms with Stalin and he came to his post after a definite interview with Stalin and with instructions that put him in a position second only to Kaganovich.

The appointment of Skrypnyk with his Communist record showed very well that in 1927 the VKP (the All-Union Communist Party) was still playing with the idea of making the Communist International a real gathering of supposed equals, united under the leadership of a central body in Moscow. It was a tacit recognition of the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a political entity, but it was equally the recognition of a Marxian Socialist culture which might lead to some of the later developments of Stalinism. The appointment insured Stalin of the aid of the true Ukrainian Communists in the coming battle between him and the left deviationists.

Once in his own mind Skrypnyk had answered the problem, he did not waver. He accepted the Marxian doctrine that by the development of an urban proletariat he could develop the Ukrainians to the point where they would be justified in demanding an entrance into the Comintern as an independent nation. He interpreted the cases of Czechoslovakia and Latvia as exactly that, since the proletariats of Prague and Brno, as well as Riga, had forced national independence and he set himself to do the same in Kiev and Kharkiv.

Without wavering in his devotion to the principles of Communism, he attacked the problem in the broadest possible way. He stimulated derussification by supporting the Ukrainian press, theatre and schools. Under his influence and work, the cities, including Kharkiv, where Ukrainian influence had been relatively weak, came to be predominantly Ukrainian and in smaller places it became very rare to hear Russian spoken. The State Printing House and the smaller cooperative publishing houses produced almost nothing that was not in Ukrainian and during the few years that he remained in control, there were more Ukrainian books published than in the preceding century and a half.

Skrypnyk was still not satisfied. He extended his activity and patronage of things Ukrainian to all those areas in the RSFSR where Ukrainians were living in compact settlements. He provided Ukrainian papers, books and theatres for those who were living in Kurshchyna, Voronizhshchyna, along the Volga, Kuban, Western Siberia and Kazakhstan and the Far East. He sent educated men and women to establish schools and other cultural institutions and, for the first time in history, efforts were made to establish a real community of interests among all the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union.

More than that, he held out a friendly hand to Western Ukraine, which was under Polish rule. Although by this time the entire control of foreign affairs was concentrated in Moscow, Skrypnyk was allowed to arrange for a Ukrainian consul in Lviv and Yur. Lapchynsky, a former Ukapist, was appointed to the post. The consul’s duty was to win support for the Communists in Eastern Galicia and, in pursuance of this purpose, Skrypnyk, too, paid a visit to Lviv. He had a certain success in his work and a few Western Ukrainians, as S. Rudnytsky, who came from Prague to become the head of the Ukrainian Institute of Geography and Cartography in Kharkiv, and the mathematician Chaykivsky, entered the UkSSR. They formed a special club in Kharkiv and had their own literary organization “Western Ukraine.” Skrypnyk even worked out a plan to recruit 8,000 teachers in Western Ukraine to undertake Ukrainian work in the Donbas where the Russian influence was strongest.

At the same time Skrypnyk was a determined Communist and he lost no opportunity for advancing the doctrines of the movement, even at the risk of doing violence to those Ukrainian ideals in which he believed. Thus, in 1928, he demanded a reformation of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences which had been working feverishly in the same cause of Ukrainization but which, from his point of view, was insufficiently Marxist and Communist. In 1929 he won his point and the Academy was forced to elect to membership seven Communists who were chosen for their knowledge of the subject and not for their scientific ability. One of the seven was Skrypnyk himself, and among the others were O. Shlikhter and Zatonsky, the veteran from the earlier Ukrainian Communist movement. He soon promoted Shlikhter to a prominent position and refused to confirm the election of the non-Communist scholar, Krymsky, to the post of secretary. At the same time he forced the election of several Western Ukrainian members, so that for a few years the Academy did become a real centre to represent all Ukrainian scholarship.

Thus, in this complex process Skrypnyk played at times a curious and often contradictory role. He was at once the head of the Ukrainian movement and of the Communist movement in the country and he never realized or noticed the contradictory character of his actions, like Tito in the early years of his dealing with Moscow. Still, during his term of office the Ukrainian movement reached its height and seemed to be flourishing.

CHAPTER SIX

The Literary Renaissance

At the beginning of the Ukrainian struggle for independence, the time was ripe for a new period in the literature. There were still living some of the old masters of the nineteenth century as Ivan Levytsky-Nechuy, who died shortly after the establishment of the Ukrainian National Republic. Lesya Ukrainka and Kotsyubynsky, the two foremost of the writers of the next generation, had died in 1913 and Oles, the representative of the generation of 1905, was in retirement.

This cleared the way for a younger group, as Tychyna and Rylsky, who were already testing their abilities when the First World War broke out.

The outbreak of the struggle in 1917 called back into life such publications as the Literary-Historical Journal which had been suppressed in 1914 by the imperial Russian government. It attracted to its pages the leading men of the older generation who were largely populist in their political views and in it appeared the writings of such men as Prof. M. Hrushevsky, Vynnychenko, Samiylenko, Oles, Vorony, G. Chuprynka and L. Starytska-Chernyakivska. The list of contributors includes most of the people who had already established their reputation and the journal had a short but distinguished career.

When the Ukrainian National Republic finally was overthrown and the Soviet regime established, many of these older writers disappeared from Ukraine. Oles retired to Prague, and Vynnychenko and many others made their way to Western Europe. Even those who remained in Ukraine found themselves out of sympathy with the new government and relapsed into silence, but even this did not save them for many were arrested and executed at various times.

It was only natural that the period of the civil war was not conducive to the production of artistic literature. For those who were willing to cooperate, there were many posts open in the government, but the pressure of public affairs distracted them and left them little time for belles-lettres. For others who had less taste for political and public life, the obvious course was to retire to the villages and there meditate and work in silence with scanty hope for the immediate publishing of their works. This was the course largely pursued by Tychyna and Rylsky and their friends, together with many of the Symbolists.

However, during 1917 and 1918 new almanacs and journals put in an appearance and these could hardly fail to express the political struggles, for some of them, as Mystetstvo (Art), were definitely leftist in character and others were the product of various groups and schools of writers.

With the final establishment of Soviet power, the literature lost most of the freedom which it had acquired in the years of struggle. The Communists lost no time in suppressing all the old publications and in establishing their own. These were more or less strictly censored, and it was impossible from the beginning to publish any work which might awaken the suspicions of the new regime.

At the same time in Ukraine, as in the RSFSR, the Communist attitude toward literature was not clearly defined. The new authorities spread over the country a whole chain of Proletkult (Proletarian Art) centres with the idea of a speedy development of a new proletarian art. Yet the experiment was not too successful and, as an outcome of the similar developments in Petrograd and Moscow, these were soon suppressed but not until they had created a taste for writing in many of the younger and often uneducated generation, who were attracted by the slogans and the hopes inspired by the Communists.

This marked a definite break with the past and it was sufficient to eliminate from their commanding positions most of the older men. However, there was no official attitude adopted toward literature, no definite command to write in accordance with a definite style, provided that the authors stayed away from subjects that seemed to be openly anti-Communist.

The authors who were closest to the new regime were those that had approached Communism through the Left Social Revolutionists (the Borotbisty) and who considered themselves a “proletarian” group in the new terminology. Many of the earlier members of this group, as the impressionistic poet Vasyl Chumak and the prose impressionist Andry Zalyochy and also Hnat Mykhaylychenko, were killed during the civil wars or in various uprisings. In a sense they were fortunate and so was the outstanding novelist, Vasyl Blakytny, who died in 1925. Blakytny’s death was widely lamented as the death of a distinguished author of revolutionary romanticism, but it was only a few years later when he, like the other Borotbisty, was accused of “unreliability,” his works were officially banned and the plaque which marked the house where he died was removed.

Artistically, the Symbolists, as Tychyna, were technically the most advanced on the literary side. They were consciously trying to adapt the Western, and especially the French, conceptions of Symbolism to Ukrainian and without going into the decadent features of French Symbolism, they sought to acclimate in Ukrainian many of the devices and the metres that had been worked out in the West.

Close to them was the group of the Neo-Classicists headed by Mykola Zerov. The members of this group, too, endeavored to produce high art with as few political overtones as possible. The group, which also included the poet Maksym Rylsky, sought to draw their inspiration from the classical world and they stressed the ancient connections between the Black Sea and the classical world of the Mediterranean.

Both the Symbolists and the Neo-Classicists were in their hearts more or less hostile to the revolution, in so far as it was a destroyer of cultural values but they were anything but reactionaries or anti-Communists in the ordinary sense of the word. They were rather far removed from the developments of the present, interested in literature and literary criticism and standing for the preservation of cultural values.

In view of the relations between the Communists in Ukraine and those in the RSFSR, it was only natural that all of the literary debates that went on in Moscow should find an echo in Ukraine. This was the period when Bukharin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky were debating very seriously the relations between the Communists, the proletarian writers and the so-called “fellow-travellers” who sympathized more or less sincerely with the revolution but who had not taken the full step and become members of the Communist Party. It was in this latter group that the greater Russian writers of the day were to be found and many of them had already achieved fame before the revolution. In 1925 they succeeded in obtaining what seemed to be a certain recognition by the party and it was on the basis of these decisions and this standard that both the Symbolists and the Neo-Classicists continued to be able to publish.

At the same time Ukrainian literature could not be considered as a mere reflection of any of these groups. There was still too much consciousness of Ukrainian independence to make the more able authors merely blind imitators of a foreign literature. Besides, the contacts which still existed with Western Ukraine under Polish rule brought it about that even the Eastern Ukrainians were influenced both by the Polish and Austrian developments and writers as Stefanyk were read almost as much in Kiev and Kharkiv as they were in Lviv and Stanislaviv.

The taking over by the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty of the Commissariat for Education could not fail to have a definite effect upon the leftist writers who dreamed of establishing not only a proletarian literature but also a Ukrainian proletarian literature, and with this purpose in mind there developed at the capital of Kharkiv and also in Kiev and elsewhere a new series of literary schools and movements, each of which based itself upon its own interpretation of the revolution. They started in general from two contradictory positions, depending on whether they stressed the revolutionary ardor of the peasants or that of the proletariat and this was roughly parallel to the division between the peasant and the factory writers in the RSFSR.

Thus the organization, the Plough, as its name implies, was the organ of that group which emphasized the role of the peasants and their connection with the proletariat. They admitted to membership every one who wished to write, provided he belonged to the “laboring element.” Naturally, with such a slogan, much of their work was not of a high order but the leaders considered their work as educational and they did not object when the more competent and trained writers dropped away or joined other organizations.

Opposed to them was the Hart (the Tempering of Steel) which existed from 1923 to 1925. This based itself far more solidly on the proletarian writers of the cities. It stressed urban and factory life and saw the triumph of Communism transforming the peasantry into a type far more like that of the city proletariat than that of the old, independent farmer. Yet this group, too, was very soon torn by questions over the relations between the Russian and Ukrainian Communists and it split up after the publication of its first almanac.

The sharpest defender of a definite Ukrainian line in the Hart was Mykola Khvylovy and he very soon split away from the more moderates and those seeking a closer alliance with the Russians. He formed the group Urbino in 1925 and out of this grew the Vaplite, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, which became the rallying ground for all of the more consciously alert members of the leftist and Communist groups. It was with the Vaplite that there were associated most of these men, as Arkady Lyubchenko, Yury Yanovsky, Petro Panch, the dramatist Mykola Kulish, the theatrical producer Les Kurbas and such poets as Tychyna, Mykhaylo (Mike) Yohansen and Mykola Bazhan. This was the outstanding literary development of the period of Ukrainization and under the leadership of Khvylovy, they took a definite political stand on all the questions of the day.

There were similar groups in Kiev. Thus there was formed the Aspis (Association of Proletarian Writers) in 1923 and from this, in its turn, was developed the Lanka or Link in 1924-6 and later the MARS (the Workshop of the Revolutionary Word), 1926-8 with such members as Evhen Pluzhnyk, Dmytro Falkivsky and T. Osmachka. They sought to keep themselves somewhat free from excessive flattery of the government and in general shared the general attitude of the Vaplite in Kharkiv.

Another movement which had appeared just before the revolution was Futurism which, in the person of its leader, Mykhaylo Semenko, denied totally the artistic value of all preceding literary schools. The revolution gave this, too, the possibility of boasting that by its denial of the past it was the true mouthpiece for revolutionary art, even though its successes were relatively slight and many of its productions were almost unintelligible to the general public. The Futurists, too, engaged in the usual process of splitting and recombining during the height of this period, when the authors were still relatively free to express their own thoughts.

Beyond these again was the great mass of the proletarian authors. These were men, usually of less artistic ability, who listened eagerly to the general slogans put out by the Communists in Moscow and Kharkiv. They followed blindly the established formulas for the production of Communist literature. They had, in fact, the general attitude of the Russian On-Guardists and they were more renowned for their reliability and skill in following the general line of the Party than they were for their literary originality or their moral and artistic integrity. They were in general the literary hacks of the day, often with slight preliminary education, and proletarian in more senses than one.

Thus during the period of Ukrainization, the literature moved along two distinct planes. Leaving aside those authors who endeavored to work in an anti-political world, there were those who blindly followed the political line and those men who ventured to think for themselves but along the lines of Communist thought. These latter were the logical outcome of the ideas of the Borotbisty and the Ukapisty and the proclamation of the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At times they could even be critical of the actual developments of the day but in their hearts they accepted the general articles of belief and sought to give them a fuller significance. The way was open to make them a loyal opposition to the regime and for several years they seemed to be attaining the position which they desired.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Scholarly Revival

The third great field of development was in the realm of study and research, especially in such fields as concerned Ukraine, its history and culture. This was connected especially with the foundation and development of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and its subordinate institutions.

Ukrainian studies had developed during the nineteenth century and from the very beginning they had played a great part in the arousing of the national consciousness. While the scholars under the tsars were not allowed to touch the fundamental problems in the relation of Moscow and Ukraine and their results, of necessity, were compelled to stress the official line of the tsarist government as to the desire of the Ukrainian people to lose their identity in the Russian Empire, still studies in folklore and in folk-songs could not fail to bring home the great differences in the mentality and aspirations of the two peoples. Ethnography could not fail to show that the customs and the manners, the architecture and the decorations differed in Ukraine from the Great Russian territory and the scholars, if they were sincere and careful, could not fail to notice it and to publicize it.

As soon as the Ukrainian National Republic was set up, the situation changed, for now there was a Ukrainian regime which was not afraid to speak out. There began, despite the hardships and the destruction of the civil war, a new flood of publications in all these fields. By 1918, under the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky, plans were made for the establishment of an Academy of Sciences, its statutes were drawn up, and a few members selected as a nucleus.

The changing fortunes of the war compelled the postponement of its realization but the work was not really lost. Soon after the definite formation of the Ukrainian Soviet government, the work was resumed, with those men who had survived leading in the work.

Despite some slight interference of the Soviet authorities, who demanded that history should be treated along the lines of Marxo-Leninism, the Academy succeeded in remaining almost completely autonomous. The period of the New Economic Policy, which seemed to restore the financial position of the country and the more peaceful life, provided a fairly favorable atmosphere. As a result the Academy flourished and in 1924, it was even able to invite Prof. Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, the recognized dean of Ukrainian historical studies, to return to Ukraine and take a position in the Academy.

Hrushevsky accepted the invitation and on his return to Kiev, he renewed the work of the old Ukrainian Scientific Society which had been united with the Academy. As head of the Historical Section, he fostered the creation of a large number of commissions in various branches of study and from 1924 to 1930 he edited a journal Ukraine which speedily became the outstanding journal in the field of historical and cultural studies. There was no period of Ukrainian history, no section of Ukrainian archaeology, art, and ethnography which was not assigned to some commission or group in the Academy.

At the same time the Academy was put in charge of most of the libraries, collections and resources of the older universities on Ukrainian territory. This had its good and its bad sides. It materially increased the resources of the Academy and the material at its disposal. On the bad side, it rendered more difficult the position of the younger scholars who were seeking to start upon a career.

The various Soviet Commissars of Education had made these changes with the idea of securing large numbers of half-trained men and women who would occupy positions in the new state and take the place of the old bureaucrats. They therefore turned the universities into technical schools of a rather inferior character, unlike the situation in Russia, where despite all the changes there was still preserved the fiction of university teaching and research. It was made clear that the teachers were not supposed to busy themselves with more advanced subjects for these were now the province of the Academy. Still there was a steady stream of young people into its influence and for several years it could well be said that there had never been a time when Ukrainian scholarship was so free and untrammeled.

The Academy in Kiev was, of course, the highest organ of scientific studies but it was not isolated, for some of the academicians, like Dmytro Bahaly, set up in Kharkiv a Chair of Scientific Research like an institute and Slabchenko did the same in Odesa. The example of these were followed in smaller cities and similar research centres were opened in Poltava, Chernihiv, Nizhin, Dnipropetrovsk, Kamyanets Podilsky, Vinnytsya, Zhytomir, Mykolayiv and Luhansk.

In the early years there was a constant effort to establish closer relations with the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the other scholarly institutions in Western Ukraine, and for some years there was an active interchange of views between the scholars of the two sections. Several outstanding Western Ukrainians were elected to membership in the Kiev Academy and the scholars went back and forth across the boundary with considerable freedom and cooperated in the development of Ukrainian studies.

In the field of history and of economics, it was necessary for the scholars to pay some slight attention to the Marxo-Leninist ideas. They could not too openly contradict them but it was usually possible, by the addition of a few official quotations, to speak quite plainly with regard for scientific truth and accuracy.

Even these restrictions were far laxer when it came to studies of language and material culture. The All-Ukrainian Archaeological Society and the Society for the Preservation of the Antiquities of Ukraine sent out expeditions to all parts of the country.

The studies for the enrichment of the language developed two opposing tendencies. There was one group, including Evhen Tymchenko and Olena Kurylo, which championed a puristic development. They rested their studies on the older forms and the peasant dialects and sought to remove from the language features which they felt had been erroneously added by the literary men and the colloquialisms of the day. The opposing school, including Ol. Synyavsky and many of the younger men, took the opposite attitude and welcomed the innovations which had been introduced into literature, especially from Western Europe. The discussions revealed the wealth and the variety of the literary resources of Ukrainian and, on the whole, broadened the appreciation of its independent character, even though in their use of terminology many of their words failed to come into common usage owing to the position of scientific Russian.

At the same time the scholars endeavored to coordinate the orthography of the language in the east and in the west, for previously there had been considerable variation in the Galician and Russian Ukrainian. Thus the eastern, following the Russian tradition, did not separate g and h and there were other differences, especially in the transliteration of European names into the Cyrillic.

To carry this work through there was held in 1927 a special conference in Kharkiv. Scholars were invited from all parts of the Ukrainian world, and after lengthy discussions there was worked out a standard system which represented the general consensus of scholarly opinion and opened a new period in the writing of the language.

At the same time there were published over thirty technical dictionaries and a group of academicians including A. Krymsky, V. Hantsov, K. Holoskevych, M. Hrinchenko and S. Yefremiv, began work on a great Ukrainian dictionary, six volumes of which, from A to P, were published. This was intended to be a general dictionary of the language and to represent all regions where Ukrainian was used, without stressing either archaism or reformation.

The development during these years was not only in the humanities but it extended to all fields of science, especially those that had to do with the study of the Ukrainian resources and agriculture. Young geologists, biologists, etc. found convenient opportunities for the use of their talents, and their studies revealed new and often unsuspected potentialities in the country.

All this work, which was under the Commissariat of Education, was treated kindly by the former Borotbisty and Ukapisty who were in control of the Commissariat. At times they grumbled that more was not being done in the field and under the principles of Marxo-Leninism, but they did not use their power to suppress or hinder the work. In a sense they looked at it with a certain lack of comprehension and criticism. It is not too much to say that this intellectual and scholarly activity proceeded outside the range of Communist interests and was allowed far more free scope than was possible in the case of the writers or the administration.

The only answer which the more rigid Communists found was the establishment of a large chain of Marxo-Leninist Institutes which were ostensibly devoted to the study of the philosophy of Communism and to the working out of Communist sciences on the same pattern as those in Moscow. These reflected the actual state of Communist thinking and were really schools for propaganda and not for scientific study in any sense of the word. They were liberally supported and they were frequently able to secure their pick of the more talented and ambitious scholars who were willing to rise through the established channels of Communism, rather than by the more exacting service of true knowledge.

It was not until 1927 that Skrypnyk, with all of his Ukrainian patriotism, hearkened to the Communist protests that there were no Communists in the Academy of Sciences and he insisted that a certain number of prominent Communists should be admitted. It was, of course, done but not without grumbling, for the members of the Academy had been very careful as to the type of man whom they elected and as to his scholarly abilities and reputation. They felt, deservedly, that the addition of these new members would lower the standards of the Academy but there was no way out.

This was to be the signal for the ending of the old system of relatively free thought. It was the first step in the approaching changes that were to wreak havoc on every form of Ukrainian life and bring to an untimely end the rapidly developing Ukrainian Renaissance.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mykola Khvylovy

Shumsky and Skrypnyk, as Commissars for Education, defended the position of the Ukrainian language in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and among the Ukrainians in the entire USSR. They worked to break down the anti-Ukrainian attitude that had existed from the beginning in the Communist Party of Ukraine, but as men holding public office and busied with the political and administrative problems that were thus raised, they did not go further. The additional step to point out the road for this newly conscious Ukrainian Communism was taken by Mykola Khvylovy.

Khvylovy, who was born in 1891, was already well known as a Communist writer. A fearless author of strong convictions, he had worked his way early in the Civil War to the position of the Communists and had served as a commissar in the Ukrainian Communist Army. He was now one of the recognized Communist writers and moving spirit of the leading literary group, the Vaplite (the All-Ukrainian Academy of Proletarian Literature), the members of which were devoted to him.

Khvylovy was an ardent admirer of Trotsky and when the break came between Trotsky and Stalin, he took the side of the former and held, with him, that the cause of counter-revolution had triumphed and that the rise of a Soviet bureaucracy was merely a return to the old unhappy state. Khvylovy had become a Communist solely because of his belief that it was only through Communism and Communist teachings that humanity could achieve its goal of liberation and self-development and he was impatient with anything that seemed to contradict this theory.

He was at the same time an ardent Ukrainian. He could not bear to see the subordinate position which Ukraine and the Ukrainian Communist Party held in the USSR and he resented the already obvious attempts to present Moscow as the supreme representative of Communism and of a general Communist culture.

In 1925, he began to publish a weekly pamphlet as a supplement to the central newspaper Visti under the title Culture and Life. In this he advocated the development of an independent Ukrainian Communist culture which would be distinct from that of Moscow. His first articles, which were purely literary in character, started a lively controversy in the press and in public meetings. It was difficult to attack him, for he based his arguments entirely upon the official statements of the Communist Party and he revealed the inconsistency which existed in these official statements. The entire Ukrainian section of the KP/b/U was aroused and so was the whole of Ukrainian society. Here was a popular writer who dared, in the name of Ukrainian Communism, to take the statements of the Communist Party (KP/b/U) seriously and to draw the logical conclusions from them. These articles he then republished in book form, Quo Vadis (1925), Thoughts against the Current (1926) and The Sociological Equivalent (1927).

Khvylovy’s original arguments had urged the necessity for the new Communist Ukrainian literature to assimilate and build itself upon the great European cultural and literary tradition as exemplified in its greatest and noblest writers and thinkers and not to confine itself to being, as it had been too often in the past, a mere appanage and colony of Russia. He deplored the already evident tendency of Ukrainian Communist literature to base itself on the pronunciamentos of Moscow without testing and analyzing them and this led him to proclaim as his slogan “Away from Moscow.”

“The ideas of the proletariat we all know without the guidance of Moscow. Only the young Ukrainian nation, the Ukrainian proletariat and its Communist intelligentsia are the true bearers of the great revolutionary socialist ideas and they must not orient themselves on the centre of All-Union Philistinism, on the Moscow sirens. They need to orient themselves on themselves and Europe, but not on the Europe of Spengler, which is declining and which we all hate, but on the Europe of the great civilization, the Europe of Goethe, Darwin, Byron, Newton, Marx, etc. That is the Europe that the first legions of the Asiatic Renaissance cannot dispense with.”

In another article he wrote, “Russia is an independent country. Independent. We too are independent. Insofar as our literature has its own path of development, we must ask ourselves the question as to which of the world literatures it is to follow. It is not the Russian in any case. This is positive without any reservations. Ukrainian poetry must flee from Russian literature as rapidly as it can. The reason is that Russian literature has dominated us for centuries as the master of the situation and has trained our psychology to slavish imitation. To base our young art upon it means the halting of our development.

“The time has come to put an end to all Little Russianism, to Ukrainophilism and to Prosvitaism (an allusion to the net of elementary Ukrainian educational institutions existing before the Communist Revolution), and also to ragtag Moscophilism.”

The ideas which Khvylovy expressed about literature had a far wider significance, for they could be applied to every aspect of Ukrainian life and activity. As the discussion shifted to the broader questions that were involved, Stalin, who was engrossed in the struggle with Trotsky, interfered personally. He wrote in April, 1926, as general secretary of the VKP/b [the All Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)] to the KP/b/U: “If the Western European proletariat look with longing on the banner which waves in Moscow, the Ukrainian Communist Khvylovy has nothing else to say in favor of Moscow but to urge the Ukrainian workers to flee from Moscow. What is to be said about the other Ukrainian intellectuals of the non-Communist camp, if the Communists begin to speak and not only speak but write in our Soviet press in the words of Khvylovy?”

This was the signal for a new series of attacks on Khvylovy by the complacent russifiers in the Communist Party of Ukraine. All the members of the Executive Committee except Shumsky joined in the attack and so did their satellites, but Khvylovy stood his ground and reiterated more strongly his demands for an independent Ukrainian cultural development and repeated Trotsky’s attacks on Moscow as the centre of the new Philistinism which had devoured the revolution.

By the end of the year, Khvylovy and the Vaplite found it necessary to prepare a formal letter of apology and self-accusation for publication. However humble and self-accusing he was in this letter, he was thoroughly insincere, for he had no intention of changing his course and in a few weeks he resumed his hammering at the forces and advocates of Moscow. He merely sought to gain time to let his words sink in more deeply into the consciousness of the Ukrainian people. His opponents recognized this and throughout 1926 and 1927, they ceaselessly attacked him. In fact, at the end of 1927, at the Tenth Congress of the KP/b/, Kaganovich declared that Khvylovy was an “echo of the bourgeois and kurkuls who base their hopes for the restoration of a bourgeois government in Ukraine on the forces of an armed foreign imperialism.”

Khvylovy’s article on Ukraine or Little Russia was refused publication by the Visti on the orders of the party authorities and renewed efforts were made to silence him. This it was impossible to do decisively until the final expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist Party, for the leading representatives of Moscow could not be sure until that time that many of the expressions used by the daring writer would not be incorporated into the principles of the party itself, even though Trotsky had never been known for any pro-Ukrainianism.

To make his cause more vocal, Khvylovy began to express his basic ideas not only in his publicistic articles but in his artistic stories and novels which were very popular among all classes of literate Ukrainians. The climax came with his Woodsnipes, the first part of which appeared in 1928.

This was strictly a propaganda novel written with all of Khvylovy’s artistic skill. In this he depicts types of his Ukrainian opponents, the Russian Bolshevists, the typical careerists, and the character of Aglaya, the new Ukrainian type who speaks in the words and with the views of the author. She denounces the gloomy devils in the Moscow chauvinists who were bent upon the enslavement of Ukraine in the name of the International. “It is the same Russian intelligent-internationalist, who willingly talks about the self-determination of nations ... only not of those which are in the Soviet Union. Here it sees only followers of Petlyura and does not notice its own interference. It here thinks that Ukrainian culture exists ... as an Austrian intrigue. He points out to Europe the achievements of the Russian genius and leads out into the arena the other peoples of the Union, as the Russian tsarism maintained its own zoo for the people it had conquered. In a word, he is an internationalist who, behind his cosmopolitanism, preserves his own zoological nationalism.”

The second part of the novel was completed and Khvylovy went abroad. As a result of the storm that this novel aroused, the journal of the Vaplite was suppressed. The moment was apparently chosen in the hope that Khvylovy would maintain his position and be forced into emigration, from which his influence in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic would be lessened, if not destroyed. Instead, Khvylovy promised to have the manuscript of the second part destroyed and returned to Ukraine.

“By destroying the Woodsnipes and thus buying the right to return home ... and to continue the struggle in more limited forms,” wrote Yur. D., in the introduction to the Salzburg edition of the book,—“Khvylovy assured the possibility of the appearance of a numbers of plays by Kulish, of the pieces of the Berezil, his own compilation of the Literary Fair, the Ukrainian films of Dovzhenko, the Ukrainization of the higher schools,—in a word he postponed for five years the assassination of the great cultural renaissance.”

The other members of the Vaplite joined in their own way with Khvylovy in painting the contrasts between the high ideals set forth in the decrees of the Communist party and the sordid reality of the Bolshevik bureaucracy in the Ukraine, who were making no attempt to turn the visions of the party principles into the life of the people. All of the writers were attacked as Khvylovy and sooner or later silenced, even though for some time they worked with him in publishing the Literary Fair, a medley of works of all kinds with pungent introductions and comments.

This tendency became so marked that in 1927, Andry Khvylya, one of the most faithful supporters of the official line of the Party declared of the story of Valeriyan Pidmohylny, the Third Revolution, “It makes it seem as if Makhno was at the head of the revolutionary movement, that the villagers were with him, as their earth bore them, and that the Bolsheviks were running after Makhno and collecting cream, ... that the Communist Party were a group of plotters, who had no connection with the masses but through espionage were profiting by the great deeds of other people.”

Khvylovy found another Communist ally in the person of Volobuyiv. He was a young Ukrainian economist who utilized the materials on the Ukraine prepared by Prof. V. Dobrohayev and published in the central organ of the KP/b/U, the Bolshevik of Ukraine, a series of articles which showed the extent of the exploitation of Ukraine by Moscow. He proved clearly that Moscow was carrying out a colonial policy in respect to Ukraine, instead of treating it as an equal republic. This was a sensational revelation for the twenties. Later the works of both Volobuyiv and Khvylovy were condemned by Moscow as anti-Communist and Volobuyiv, shortly after 1933, was exiled to a Siberian prison.

The growing pressure upon Ukraine, the forced collectivization which was beginning and the beginning of the great famine of 1932-3, completed the disillusionment of Khvylovy, who up to this time had maintained a stubborn faith in the principles of Communism and its aspirations for a better future for the common man. His later works made it clear that he had lost all hope that the revolution would accomplish anything except a continuation of the streams of blood that were beginning again to flow throughout Ukraine. Yet there was nothing for him to do but to continue his work.

CHAPTER NINE

The Five Year Plan

Lenin and the Communists had never made any concealment of the fact that the New Economic Policy was only a passing concession to put an end to the stagnation and demoralization which had resulted from the civil war and the period of Militant Communism. It was not the adoption of a definite plan for the future nor was it a sign of a growing rapprochement with capitalism or a gesture toward the rest of the world, as the partisans of the Soviets abroad tried to make it appear.

With each step of the recovery of the economy of Ukraine and of the Soviet Union as a whole, unobtrusive steps were taken to remove the various concessions which had been made. Year by year, from about 1925, new regulations were introduced by the Commissariat of Finance, one of the All-Union Commissariats which had the definite object of suppressing not only the concessions but of tightening up the restrictions on individual life and preparing the way for socialism and communism. By one device or another, the Nepmen were broken. Now the government forbade the state trusts to sell to them as individual traders either raw materials or finished or semi-finished products. Agreements which had been freely made by the government were either suddenly cancelled or were perverted. Obviously false charges were brought against the various individuals and they were fined exorbitantly or they were arrested and deported. By the fall of 1927 the sector of private trade had been almost completely liquidated and the way was open for the central government to do what it would with the situation.

With the Nepmen disposed of, the way was open for a similar attack upon the wealthier classes of the peasants and those who had profited by the operation of the Ukrainian land code which, as we have seen, was less rigid than were the similar arrangements in the RSFSR, where the land society was organized far more on the lines of a collective than it was in Ukraine. It was always possible to apply individually any of the laws against the leasing of land or the employment of hired help, for in both cases the provisions had been left vague and indefinite, so that the authorities could act whenever they so desired. As a matter of fact, as one of the first measures the administration of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic reduced the period on which a lease could be made from thirteen to six years and thus it was easily possible to upset many of the calculations that had been made by the richer and more progressive landowners.

At the same time the closing of the official markets rendered it possible for the government to force the peasants to dispose of their grain at the officially pegged prices which in the grain-growing districts were considerably lower than they were in the less fertile areas of the north. If this did not produce the desired results, it was equally possible to demand the grain tax in kind and to compel the peasants to turn over, free of charge and under the guise of payments, additional supplies. All these measures, which were introduced in many cases personally and not by districts, caused the peasants to feel themselves becoming steadily more impoverished and less able to resist the demands of the government.

On the other hand, the All-Union Commissariats which took precedence over those in the individual Soviet republics and which were, in reality, staffed only by Russian Communists, effectively broke the power of the localities or of the republics to have any special voice in the management of their own affairs. This was, in its turn, skilfully explained by stressing the superior requirements of the Union which, on any closer analysis, turned out to be the interests of the Russian area. Thus, at the XVth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), a Russian who was at the time the chief of the Ukrainian State Planning Commission remarked in an unambiguous manner: “It seems to me that we must assign perfectly clear tasks, to emphasize that the national republics are to fulfill certain functions in the economic system of our Union, and that on the basis of the fulfillment of a certain mission, which is to be a part of the joint mission—the industrialization of our Union—is to be founded the growth of the economy of the national republics.”

In the next few years the sense of these remarks was to become perfectly clear, although it was apparently not noticed even by the more ardent Ukrainian Communists. It was to the effect that the economy of the national republics was to be fitted into the general picture of the Union and that the planning committees were to coordinate their work in such a way that there would be little or no place left for the initiative of the authorities of any republic. This did not require any action by any of the various republican governments, for step by step the central regime in Moscow gradually made more and more of the local Commissariats mere operating agencies under the control of All-Union Commissariats as these were increased in number and in scope by the vote of the Presidium of the Union or by the decisions of the All-Union Communist Party.

In this connection the final liquidation of the Ukapisty as a group in 1925 was significant. They had definitely cherished the hope that sooner or later they would be able to win recognition as a special Ukrainian Communist Party with their own seat in the Communist International. That was now becoming merely a subsidiary organ of the Russian Communist Party and there was no longer any reason for maintaining the fiction of an independent existence. The foreign Communist Parties had definitely sunk to being poor relations of the Russian Party or the All-Union Party. Their representatives were exiles from their native lands under Russian protection and under those conditions they speedily ceased to have any voice in the work of the Comintern, which existed only as a Russian propaganda organ abroad. It was therefore unrealistic for the Ukrainian Communists to build any real hopes on the Comintern or on the building of a separate Ukrainian Communism and the abolition of the Ukapisty was but a formal recognition of this fact.

Yet this obvious truth apparently was overlooked by Skrypnyk and, to a lesser extent, even by Khvylovy, who was absorbed in his everwidening discussion of the cultural significance of Ukrainian Communism and the role and mission of the Ukrainian Communists. While these were talking and arguing about certain ideas, the central authorities in Moscow were cleverly laying plans for removing from the field of practical politics and administration the very basis of local government for which they were fighting.

In the same way, reform of the administrative divisions was under way with the concealed purpose of changing the boundaries of the local sub-divisions, so that they would have a purely economic basis. This was done by the elimination of the central areas, the gubernias and the okrugs and the introduction of a two-step system of administration, the kray or oblast and the rayon or region, which was designed on a purely economic purpose and was admirably adapted for the elimination of local and even republic feeling.

By these and other administrative measures the essential features of the New Economic Policy were eliminated but they were done so gradually and locally that a large part of the population only realized the situation when the process was too far advanced to be affected by any scattered protests.

At the end of 1927 Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and this ended the long feud between him and Stalin for the control of the Party. Trotsky had quite consistently fought the New Economic Policy as a needless concession to capitalism and within a few months of his rival’s defeat, Stalin reversed his policy and openly adopted a more rigid system of controls similar to those which he had attacked Trotsky for urging.

As a matter of fact the pretext for a distinction between the Soviet government and the Communist Party was wearing thin. It was a needless piece of propaganda, once the regime felt itself sufficiently strong. There was no longer the need of maintaining non-party men in places of apparent authority and with his practical sense, Stalin speedily allowed the system to lapse into the limbo of obscurity and made the Communist Party openly what it was, the dictatorial party dominated directly from Moscow.

Once this was decided, the way was open for the establishment of the First Five Year Plan which was frankly drawn up so entirely in the central offices that the local Commissariats of the different republics ceased to have their former significance in the state and became, for the most part, mere subsidiaries to be watched and checked at every turn or at every manifestation of a tendency toward independence.

There was no longer any talk of the independence of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic with its powers to maintain diplomatic representatives abroad or with the pretense that it was handling its own affairs under the guidance of the All-Union Communist Party. The role of the Russian element in the state kept on increasing and once more it was possible to revive the old arguments as to the need for definite russification.

It was relatively a simple matter for the government to administer industry as it wished. It had retained control throughout the period of the New Economic Policy of the leading factories and industrial enterprises and the workers had been deprived of any of the rights which they might have imagined themselves possessed when they took over the plants. They were by now completely dependent for their conditions of work and for their employment on the whims of the plant managers who were themselves directly under the central authorities in Moscow. The government built new plants where and as it wished and was not bound to consult any one as to its purposes and measures.

The peasants were less tractable, for especially in Ukraine they still felt themselves the masters of their own fate. The new philosophy looked upon them, too, as the servants of the state and determined to collectivize them in one way or another and to force them into collective farms, whether they wished it or not.

In this process the first step was to break the peasant power of resistance and the regime saw clearly that this was based upon the financial power of the richer and the middle peasants. Whereas Lenin and the earlier Soviet regime in Ukraine had grouped together the middle and the poor peasants and had supported them against the richer peasants and the large landowners, the policy was now changed and the middle and the richer peasants were grouped together and opposed to the poor peasants. This multiplied enormously the hostile and unsympathetic elements of the population but by holding out tempting offers to the poor peasants, the Communists succeeded in fanning anew the flames of class hatred in the villages and in producing the desired effects.

Along with the adoption of the Five Year Plan, the All-Union Congress called for the strengthening of attempts at collectivization. As a result, the amount of grain demanded and the amount of taxes were rapidly raised with the avowed purpose of ruining the kulaks and kurkuls, as they were called in Ukraine. Increased pressure was put upon all classes of the rural population to join collective farms and in some districts this was so effective that almost seventy per cent of the land was turned over for organization on a “voluntary” basis.

As a further step in the same direction there began in 1928 and also in 1929 a furious attack on the richer and middle peasants and a growing insistence on the need of “dekurkulizing” the villages. This meant nothing more or less than the elimination from the countryside of all those people who had prospered under the New Economic Policy. The property of the richer and more prosperous peasants was completely confiscated and they with their families were deprived of all their rights, often including the house where they had lived or the shacks into which they could crawl for shelter. With superb inhumanity the Bolsheviks would drive formerly wealthy peasants and their families from their homes in the middle of winter and leave them without food or clothing and would threaten any of their relatives or friends who dared to give them any relief.

In the first stages of the process, cases were known where some of these richer people were moved out of the Ukraine with their goods and cattle, but as the Communists settled down to their work, they simply seized everything for their own use and that of the collective farms and contented themselves with shooting or deporting their enemies, often to the far north for work in the forests or to northeastern Siberia for work in the mines and in the more remote parts of the wilderness.[1]

[1] A graphic account of this dekurkulization was given in a DP camp by Sh., a former peasant of the district of Kharkiv:

“On May 22, 1929, all my property, tools, cattle, building and clothing were confiscated. I and my family (my wife, six small children and my mother), were left without means of livelihood; we stayed with people like old folks, ate what we were given, although people were forbidden to give to us. On November 27, in spite of the fact that there was snow on the ground and 15 degrees of frost, I and my entire family, without clothes and half-naked, were put out of the house. Until February, 1930 I lived in another house which was half fallen down. On February 28, I, my wife and six children (my mother had disappeared; I do not know where) were arrested and with other dekurkulized persons were sent to the railroad station. There we were packed into freight cars as sardines in a barrel and travelled for 11 days, without knowing our destination. We were fed once every two days. Many perished from cold and exhaustion. We finally reached the station of Makarikha near Kotlas, district of Archangel, and in 40 degrees of frost, we were detrained in the woods in the snow.

“Then all those able to work were driven to forest operations 300 kilometers from Kotlas. They drove us half shod in the intense cold. They fed us on the way 300 grams of bread, 5 grams of barley and 3 grams of salt per person a day. Many died on the way. Many, unable to walk further, were shot on the spot. There we cut wood and they treated us very badly. The norms of work were abnormally high. We lived in huts which were holes we dug ourselves. Of the many thousands of people who came there more than half died of exhaustion, hunger and cold.

“Of the members of the families of kurkuls who remained at the station of Makarikha, more than half froze. Among these were my sons Ivan and Fedir; a third son Hryhory died of exhaustion. Later all the children up to 14, including three of mine, were returned to Ukraine but I have no further news of them. They probably perished. In 1932, first my wife and then I escaped by hiding in cars loaded with wood. I found work in the Don Basin. In 1937 my wife was arrested suddenly and shot in the prison of Artemivsk in the Don Basin. I escaped because I was living under an assumed name. Now I am a DP and living in Germany in an IRO camp.”

They followed this up at the end of 1929 by providing for the compulsory collectivization of all the land. Private holding of land was abolished and so was private use. The peasants were forced into collective farms to which they had to contribute all of their livestock, agricultural implements and tools. Then they were left nothing that they could call their own except a small garden plot that was assigned to each family for the purpose of raising those types of vegetables that it was not profitable to raise in large quantities, because the collective farms were occupied with those types of agriculture that were selected for them by the central authorities in Moscow.

The immediate result differed in different places. In Great Russian territory, where the principle of the community ownership of land had definitely taken root, the peasants complied without too much hesitation. In Ukraine and Kuban, where the older style of Ukrainian agriculture had been long in vogue, the peasants became sulky. They killed off large numbers of their cattle and livestock of various kinds. The government, seeing this tremendous loss, then tried to eliminate from the collectives and liquidate in one way or another all of those who had been guilty of disobedience to the order requiring the peasants to contribute all their wealth.

There developed almost a civil war in some sections of the country as discontent rose and the peasants were prepared to die rather than to yield. Nevertheless, this time the government was not prepared to concede anything, as it had in 1921, and despite remarks by Stalin that in some details the Communists had become dizzy from success, the regime held its course and even continued to apply the screws more tightly. The result was the famine of 1932 and 1933.

CHAPTER TEN

The Famine

In 1921, the great famine which had swept over Ukraine had been the result of a failure of the crops, a prolonged drought and the excesses of Militant Communism which had demoralized the country. The Soviets, more or less unwillingly, allowed the despatch of foreign assistance and this saved the lives of millions. There was to be no interference in the punishment of the obstinate peasants this time.

In the fall of 1929, just as compulsory collectivization was being introduced, the government in Moscow made an important change in the agricultural set-up, for it transferred the Commissariat of Agriculture to the central group by establishing an All-Union Commissariat which was to be in control of all agriculture in the Soviet Union. This meant that in Ukraine all of the work which had been previously done by the local authorities was now transferred to Moscow. The republic commissariats ceased to have the power to pursue individual plans for improving the conditions of the soil, for varying the crops as their own advisers decided or as the population felt it necessary. Everything was to be done from the centre and the Ukrainian Soviet Government was compelled to hand over all of its research stations and other institutions to Muscovite control. This put a stop to the intensive development of Ukrainian agriculture which had been fostered by the Ukrainian land code and introduced the new system in which the peasants were in the same position as the workers in the factories.

At the same time the central regime ceased to make public the actual figures of production on the ground that they might betray to outside nations important facts as to the Soviet development. From this time on estimates and achievements were given only in terms of percentages in reference to a prior date. Still the already published data were so scanty and incomplete that it became increasingly more and more difficult to secure an actual picture of the progress in the Union as a whole and still more so in any of the separate Soviet Republics, for the central regime rarely broke down what little information it gave out among its constituent parts.

It was not long before another change was made in the methods of collecting the products from the collective farms. Under the new system, the farms did not contribute according to their crop but according to the amount of land which they proposed to sow. This amount was due to the government, even in those cases where there was a complete failure of the harvest not under the control of the workers. In other words, if a crop failed because of bad weather conditions, the peasants were compelled to hand over just as much produce as if they had had a bumper crop.

It can be easily seen that such a measure was merely another device for weakening the economic position of the village and the independence of the collective farm. At the same time the establishment of official tractor stations in place of the old locally controlled centres which sent crews and machines into the countryside gave the government another weapon for the exertion of pressure upon the peasants and even the Communists who were in charge of the farms and these crews likewise were paid not on the basis of their work but of the theoretical area which was to be sown. Later this was again changed to the total area of the farm whether it was suitable for any special kind of agriculture or not.

These measures only increased the discontent among the peasants who once again began to limit their work to the minimum necessary to maintain themselves on a steadily dropping scale of living. To counter-balance this the Council of Commissars in Moscow passed a decree in February, 1930 allowing the local authorities who were, of course, handpicked by Moscow to resort to extreme measures against the kurkuls, to confiscate their property and then to dispose of them by sending them and their families to concentration camps, to special settlements in the far north or eastern Asia or merely by expelling them from their home district. These measures were so vigorously applied that it has been estimated that by the end of 1932, some 2,400,000 persons had been removed from Ukraine to parts unknown. These were naturally the more prosperous, the more progressive and energetic persons who had profited by the New Economic Policy and had accumulated some capital.

The forcing of the peasants into the collective farms and the prohibition of almost all possibilities for the securing of raw materials had a further effect. Under the older system, the Ukrainian peasants had time, during the winter especially, to work at home and to supply themselves most of their need for manufactured articles. They were able to work in leather and in cloth and wood. This was now rendered impossible, for the individual plots were too small to furnish the necessary raw materials and the peasants were forced, if they would satisfy their most immediate needs, to rely upon the goods turned out by the state factories. These goods were always inferior in quality and short in quantity, for the whole point of the Five Year Plan was to develop heavy industry as rapidly as possible and the government took no interest in seeing that the villages were supplied with consumers’ goods. It concentrated its attention on those branches which could be of use in military preparations. Even when petitions were made by the Soviets in Odesa and Kharkiv for permission to establish textile factories, they were peremptorily told that the plan provided for the establishment of such plants only in selected parts of the RSFSR. Thus to the local shortage was added the costs of distant transportation, which made the price prohibitive even for the goods that were received.

In 1931 almost the entire grain reserves were removed from Ukraine and the peasants had nothing to carry over, and when in 1932 there came a drought in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, the peasants had no supplies.

This did not bother the authorities. During 1931 and 1932 they collected from the peasants all that they could. The next step was to tighten the laws.

On August 6, 1932 the TsK VKP/b and the Soviet of Commissars issued a decree for the “protection of socialist property.” Under this law the stealing of a single ear of grain from a kolhosp granary could be punished by confinement for ten years in a concentration camp. It was so interpreted that if a peasant picked up a single stalk from the field after the harvest, he was liable for the same punishment. In other words, the peasant could only secure his grain legally from and through the administration of the kolhosp.

With this law on the books, the Ukrainian collective farms could be punished either for failing to protect “socialist property” or they could be attacked for failing to present to the government crops and grain in an amount equal to that foreseen by the plan. This was the easier because there were few of the kolhosps that had been able to sow the area required of them. Lack of intelligent and competent leadership on the farms and the exigencies of the weather made it almost inevitable that there would be deficiencies, especially since the schedules were made up in Moscow and took no account of the local conditions.

As the grain deliveries lagged, the demands increased and on January 24, 1933, the Central Committee of the VKP/b issued a new resolution that “it was regarded as proved that the party organization of Ukraine had not carried out the tasks assigned to it in organizing grain deliveries and executing the grain plan.”

To remedy this, the central authorities ordered the formation of political detachments in the machine tractor stations, “the chief basic tasks of which were the insuring of the unconditional and immediate execution by the kolhosps and their members of all their obligations to the state and especially the decisive struggle with the stealing of kolhosp property, the struggle with the manifestations of sabotage of the income of the party and the government in the sharing of the grain supplies and the meat products of the kolhosps.”

The leaders of these detachments were given the obligation “to secure the constant lawful and accurate fulfilment of the laws of the Soviet government by administrative and criminal measures against the organizers of the stealing of Soviet property and the sabotage of the income of the party and the government in the branch of village agriculture.”

The machine tractor stations were staffed by men largely alien to the Ukrainian countryside. The more fanatical Communists were placed in these political detachments and were, in effect, told to supplement or replace the local administration in the exercise of pressure and terror upon both the heads and the members of the kolhosps. To aid them in their work Moscow sent to Ukraine a Russian Pavel Postyshev as a special plenipotentiary of the Central Committee with 7,000 party workers from the Russian Republic.

The work of these special “commissions” and “brigades” was marked by the utmost severity. They entered the villages, and made the most thorough searches of the houses and barns of every peasant. They dug up the earth, broke into the walls of buildings and the stoves in which the peasants tried to hide their last handfuls of food. They even in places took specimens of the fecal matter from the toilets in the effort to learn in that way by analysis whether the peasants had stolen government property and were eating grain. Wherever they found any, the peasants were severely punished, while the detachments carried off not only grain but everything edible.

The same reports came from every corner of Ukraine. “They requisitioned everything that could be eaten” was the report from the village of Zorich in the district of Poltava. In one village in the district of Odesa, “they collected all the grain, potatoes, beets to the last kilogram” and in other places they even took half-baked loaves of bread from the stove. In at least one of these commissions, Molotov, then head of the Council of Ministers, took a personal part.

The natural result was a famine of unprecedented severity. The villages had been hungry in the autumn. After these searches commenced, they literally starved. An Englishman, M. Magridge, wrote in the Fortnightly Review for May, 1933: “During a recent visit to Ukraine, I have seen a little of the war which the Soviet government is carrying on against the peasants. The fields were waste as in a real war and the poverty had spread still further. On one side there were millions of peasants with bodies swollen from hunger; on the other side, soldiers, members of the GPU, carrying out the orders of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They hurled themselves on the region like a pack of locusts and seized everything edible. They shot and hung thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they made of the richest country in the world a melancholy wilderness.”

Reports from all sections of Ukraine have listed with depressing regularity the articles of food that were eaten. They included grass, weeds, bark, dead animals, field mice, dogs, cats. Finally, cannibalism broke out and in many places sausages were found that were made of human flesh, either of people who had died or who were killed for food. The extent of this last is shown when in 1936, among the prisoners of Solovki, there were three hundred twenty-five persons guilty of cannibalism, seventy-five men and two hundred and fifty women.

An observer in the spring of 1933 gives this picture of a Ukrainian village: “In the centre of the village, beside the ruins of the church which had been blown up was the bazaar. All the people in it had swollen faces, they were not talkative, but were silent and speechless. Their movements were unsteady, for their legs and arms were swollen. They sold or bought cornstalks, pounded corncobs, a black powder made of Russian thistle, roots, and the lower parts of water plants. This assortment of village wares was a diet which did not save the people from death by starvation but merely by increasing their sufferings, postponed it a little.”

The agronome A. S. who in March and April, 1933, was in the villages of Izbinske and Starytsya, Vovchansky region, Kharkiv district, wrote: “The people daily died in dozens. The corpses lay in the houses for several days for there was no one to bury them. Pits were dug in the cemeteries with great difficulty, large enough to hold several persons. The corpses were piled on carts like wood and carried to the pits and thrown in like logs without any of the customary or religious rites. They fell as they would, head down, or on their side or standing—a terrible sight. The gravedigger of to-day might be a corpse to-morrow.”

The bodies of the dead lay in all the villages, along the roads and in the fields. Special brigades were formed in the villages to bury the dead but they were too weak to collect all the corpses and these were devoured by those dogs which had escaped being eaten and had gone savage. The roads were deserted for it was dangerous for one or two people to walk together because of the danger of attack by robbers who sought to rob them or to kill them for cannibalistic purposes.

Under such conditions many of the people closed up their huts tightly, lighted their stoves and inhaled the fumes to commit suicide.

In the spring, when those who had survived broke from the fields the unripe ears of grain, they were seized by the government agencies on the charge of stealing socialist and government property, while the “light cavalry,” the armed Comsomols and the members of the Communist Party, shot these “barbers,” as they were called in the press contemptuously, like hares.

Thousands tried to secure work in the state agricultural enterprises (the radhosps). The agronome B. B. wrote: “In going around the experimental station in Poltavshchyna, I saw under a haystack a number of people. To my questions, the manager of the station, a Russian in origin, told me that they were peasants of the neighborhood who had come in large numbers to the radhosp, hoping to find work and thus have the money to buy food. Since they did not have the strength to return home, they lay down under the haystack. Many died there and he added, pointing to fresh earth, ‘There are the mounds where we buried those individualists. What trouble the Khakhals have been.’”

The younger and more venturesome fled to other Soviet Republics in search of work and food. Thousands departed from Ukraine without permission, for this was not given, and crowded the offices of the railroads, the wharfs and the junctions. They often found a tragic end. Prof. O. O. tells of a case of which he was a witness. “In March, 1933, at the station in Vladikavkaz (Caucasus) there gathered a mass of peasants with bags on their backs, waiting for a freight train. Agents of the NKVD held them up and took away their grain. They begged together and singly and prayed but it did not help. Then one peasant climbed out on a high tree near the station and began to cry out about all the horrors of the famine in Ukraine. He cursed the party, the government, its leaders and the NKVD. A crowd quickly gathered and soon came the agents of the NKVD who began to harangue the hearers and urged the ‘orator’ to come down quickly, threatening him with life imprisonment. He was immovable; then the NKVD called for the local fire department who were told to turn their hoses on the tree. The peasant climbed higher and then suddenly threw himself down like a stone.”

In the spring of 1933 the starving masses with their gray faces moved into the large cities. They formed lines for the “buying of bread”[1] or, begging, they surrounded the mills. They died by thousands in the streets of Kharkiv, Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, and the other cities. In many cases the police cars simply picked up the dead and dying every morning and carried them out of the city where they were thrown into pits. There were established in the cities and their environs “therapeutic hospitals” near which were vans covered with tarpaulins. These were used to collect the sufferers and the hospitals were simply places to separate the dead and the dying.

[1] In the beginning of 1933 at the height of the famine in Ukraine, the USSR opened shops in the cities where grain was sold at a doubled price, i.e. commercial prices—4 karb. for 1 kg. of white and 3 karb. for 1 kg. of black bread. The peasant received from the government for the obligatory “sale” of grain 90 kop. for 16 kg. of wheat. These commercial prices had to be paid for in foreign currency or in gold or silver.

The children suffered terribly and thousands were picked up on the streets. Parents often abandoned their children, usually near police stations, in the hope that they would be picked up and taken to refugee camps but here they were little better off. Prof. M. M. testified that near Kharkiv the “NKVD opened a large children’s concentration camp, the ‘Barracks of death’ as it was termed” and here by poor treatment at least forty percent of the ten thousand gathered in, died.

The urban population felt the shortage because of the reduction of the bread ration for the unemployed to two hundred grams a day. The majority could not patronize the commercial shops for they had nothing with which to pay and the legal allowance of other products as fat, sugar and barley were either reduced or omitted. Even the more highly qualified of the intelligentsia were obliged to sell all their trinkets and gold teeth to secure some food. The prices allowed were ridiculous. One teacher at these stores received for a silver dollar “500 grams of sugar, a piece of soap and 200 grams of rice.”

Physicians were forbidden to enter “hunger” in the records of illness and death. They were ordered to give as the cause of death “BBO” (absence of white corpuscles). Sometimes it was recorded as “childish” or “old age” weakness, “paralysis of the heart,” “diarrhea,” all symptoms of death by starvation.

It is impossible to estimate accurately the number of deaths, for even the indefatigable NKVD gave up the attempt to list the deaths along the roads, in the fields, and in the streets of the cities. Villages died out and this was indicated by the use of black flags on certain houses. In these cases no attempt was made to keep the records in order. The so-called “therapeutic hospitals” did not turn over their records or admit to their files the workers of the ZATS (The Records of the Acts of the Civil Population), who were the collaborators of the NKVD. Thus, in one of these therapeutic hospitals in Kiev there were at least 5,000 deaths from starvation that were not recorded in the official statistics.

Of course, none of these hardships were felt by the highly placed Communists and party officials. They received their food through party channels which were not accessible to the ordinary residents of the city or the kolhosps.

It is difficult to estimate accurately the number who perished in the famine, but it was approximately 4,800,000. This is certainly an underestimate, although certain other calculations will place the number between five and six million.

There is the frequent idea that the famine was specifically directed against the rich peasants and the kurkuls. This is utterly false, for these had been liquidated earlier. The blow of 1933 fell chiefly upon the poorer classes who had always supported the Soviet regime and who regarded their suffering in the beginning as a mistake which Moscow would do its best to correct. In the same way it was the Ukrainian workmen of the smaller cities who bore the brunt of the hardships. It was the direct triumph of the Russian Bolsheviks over the Ukrainian poor.

Another proof that the famine occurred in connection with the plans of Moscow was the fact that Postyshev, besides his official post, held that of general inspector of the Ministry of Grain Production for resettlement. It turned out later that he was given the general task of preparing a plan for an immigration into Ukraine from various portions of the Soviet Union. The dislocation of the population was worked out in detail. Millions of Russians, Byelorussians, Uzbeks, etc., were to be sent in to complete the work of rerussification. Especial pains were devoted to the regions close to Russia on the Left Bank of the Dnieper and there was talk at one time of annexing to the Russian Republic the Kharkiv-Donbas industrial region, but this did not fall in with the plans of Stalin.

The result of the famine was the final stabilization of the collective system of agriculture and the breaking of the old mode of life throughout the whole of Ukraine. More than that, it established the fact that in the economic sphere Moscow could direct Ukrainian life as it would. It overawed the population for the moment but it did not reconcile them to their fate and it went hand in hand with the attempt to exterminate the old Ukrainian cultural life.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Famine, the Soviets and the World

It is impossible to overestimate the significance of this artificially induced famine in what had been one of the richest portions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Taken in connection with the collectivization of agriculture which had served already to uproot and exile or liquidate many of the most industrious and successful parts of the population of the Ukraine, it was distinctly noticed that the history of the Soviet Union had entered a new phase which might be glossed over for public consumption but still represented a formidable menace to the general development of the entire area.

During the years of the New Economic Policy and the period of Ukrainization, much had been accomplished, not only to repair the damages of the Civil War and the period of Militant Communism, but great strides had been made in the development of Ukrainian culture. The collectivization of 1929-31 had, in a sense, menaced some of the economic gains but while the menace of Moscow was being felt on the material field, it had not hitherto been regarded in the same way culturally. It is true that there had been going on a great debate between Khvylovy and his rivals but it is doubtful if either Khvylovy or Skrypnyk had fully appreciated the forces that were now unleashed.

There had never been any question that every few decades Ukraine had undergone severe droughts which had produced local famines, especially in the Ukrainian steppes. The disorders of Militant Communism had coincided with one of these periods and had produced the situation in 1921-2. Still, at that time, for his own purposes, Lenin had allowed relief to be sent from abroad to the victims. The agricultural situation in 1931-3 was not so serious and the country might have escaped, had it not been for the methods of the government in draining off from the population the last possible reserves of food.

There can be no doubt that this was done deliberately, for every measure taken by the government was intended to increase the difficulties of the population and to prepare for the final crushing of the Ukrainian renaissance that had been proceeding with ever increasing force. Every measure, too, was intended to render it more difficult for the outside world to secure any actual knowledge of the conditions in the country until it was too late for the world to do more than register vain protests, for it was very definitely at this period that the censorship methods of the government and its apprehensions of what knowledge might bring to the world actively commenced to draw an iron curtain around Ukraine. Foreign correspondents were forbidden to visit Ukraine on one pretext or another and they were forced to send out such news as the government wished or to leave the Soviet Union.

The collectivization and the famine had coincided with the beginning of the attack on Ukrainian scholarship and the arts, as we shall see, but these attacks by their very choice of victims had been directed against those men who had not been closely connected with the Communist Party in the past, even though they had not been entirely hostile. Along with the famine the tide turned, and soon the victims were those persons who had dared to hope for an equality of treatment (with the Great Russians) in the Soviet Union.

The famine was obviously intended not only to crush the population already impoverished by the collectivization but to administer a sound chastisement to all classes who were interested in the preservation and development of local and republic interests.

The famine was at its height in the winter and spring of 1933 and was only somewhat alleviated after the harvest of that year was brought in. It was only natural that, despite the efforts of the authorities, word of it would gradually seep out, in spite of the censorship. The news was most accessible to the Western Ukrainians, for as yet all communications had not been satisfactorily broken, and early in the summer they began to seek permission to organize relief abroad for the benefit of the sufferers. On July 14, 1933, such a body was already formed in Lviv and soon in the other sections of Western Ukraine, while their appeals were heard by the Ukrainian emigrés abroad.

In August, Theodore Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna had been convinced of the truth of the famine and he appealed for aid for the starving. In the same month the General Secretary of the Congress of European Minorities published his summary of the conditions, as gleaned from all available sources, and the League took action at its meeting in September. In the same month the matter was brought up before the League of Nations in Geneva and relief was referred to the International Red Cross.

The movement spread to the Ukrainians in North America and on November 3, 1933, the sixth convention of the United Ukrainian Organizations of the United States appealed to the government of the United States, urging that an impartial commission be sent to Ukraine to report on the truth of these reports.

This growing wave of protests among the Ukrainians and the emigrants from Ukraine was met by a stony silence on the part of the Soviet authorities, by absolute denial or by charges of unfriendly propaganda. The Soviet government refused to lift its barrier on any visits to Ukraine by foreign journalists or by any foreign visitors until after the harvest of 1933 was brought in and then they induced such journalists as Walter Duranty to recant previous statements as to the extent of the famine and report on September 18, 1933, that the harvest of that year was excellent “and all talk of famine now is ridiculous.”

Almost the first detailed account of an American journalist was given by William Henry Chamberlin on May 29, 1934, on his return from the Soviet Union, when he estimated that between four and five million peasants were starving and he also quoted the speech of President Kalinin of the Soviet Union, made the year before, “The collective farmers have passed through a good school. For some, this school was quite ruthless.”

This was a polite hint again that it had been the policy of the government to allow the famine to run its course in the hope of breaking any possible opposition on the part of the collective farms and the individual peasants.

The famine then on the domestic scene marked a definite turning point, a definite shift of emphasis in the relations between the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Soviet Union, and that shift was extended to the individual Ukrainian. Yet, the very reports that emanated from the stricken country were not without their significance for the world.

1933 was a fateful year for Europe. The order to apply the maximum pressure on the Ukrainians came on January 24th. On January 28th, just four days later and before the news could have leaked out, Kurt von Schleicher resigned as Chancellor of Germany and was succeeded by Adolf Hitler. Within a month came the Reichstag fire and all the turmoil connected with the advent of the Nazis to power.

A world that had still not been fully convinced of the dangers of the Communist regime was only too ready to magnify its benefits and its possibilities for good as compared with the apparently more pressing menace of Hitler. The period of the popular fronts began in all the European countries and it coincided with the coming into power of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the American bank crisis.

Under such circumstances, the rumors of the Ukrainian famine were heavily discounted by all except the most bitter anti-Communists and they obtained short hearing before world public opinion. No one wanted to believe these reports, and the troubled conditions when the reaction to the right seemed the menace to a world desirous of peace made it seem logical that the democratic world could secure some aid in its struggle from the Communist regime. All the old talk of the artificiality of the Ukrainian struggle that had circulated in 1918 was now reburnished and repropagandized.

The result might have been expected but it showed Stalin and the Soviet leaders that they had played their course well. They secured recognition by the United States in November of the same year, just as the real news of the extent of the tragedy was beginning to leak out. Anger and disgust at Hitler was the dominant mood and behind that veil, the Soviet leaders were able to plan their further actions.

It is hard to tell what might have been the result, had the world awakened in that year to a realization of the dangers from the two totalitarian leaders, who were later to unite and start World War II. Yet already the evidence was there, if men would only understand.

In the period of Militant Communism the victims had been chosen more or less at random and the world was largely aghast at the results, even though they did not understand. Now, by deliberate action the same thing was being done on a larger scale and under the guise of law and order. This method proved successful and advanced the Soviet Union to a place of preeminence among nations, while it enabled the authorities to dupe many idealists in other countries.

From this point of view the deportation of the kurkuls in 1930-1 and the famine of 1932-3 represented the use of new methods of terror as an instrument of national policy. That policy was continued in the massacre of the Polish officers in Katyn and the Ukrainian peasants in Vinnytsya. It was continued in the purges that marked the thirties and in the show political trials that have marked the history of Communist rule in the satellite countries. They were the inauguration of a new policy that was not to meet with failure until its extremes began again by their ruthlessness to disturb an uneasy world in the days of the new cold war.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Early Trials

The change of economic policy which had ushered in the collectivization of agriculture seemed at first to offer no threat to the cultural movement which was going on in Ukraine. Despite the open criticisms that had been made of Khvylovy and the more secret opposition that Skrypnyk was meeting, the cultural work continued in all its aspects. Politically the Commissariat of Education was still continuing its work, the new literature was proceeding with more and more important works being produced, and outside and somewhat apart from the political life of the day, Ukrainian scholarship was producing ever more serious works.

No one openly thought of overthrowing the regime although latent discontent could be discovered among the entire population. It had been years since there had been any open opposition. The unruly leaders who had appealed to arms had either gone abroad or quieted down and there was no one who was even suspected of the kind of disloyalty that had been widespread during the period of Militant Communism.

Then, in 1929, just as the compulsory collectivization was being prepared, the Ukrainian Soviet government announced that it had discovered the evidence of the existence of a secret society, the Society for the Liberation of Ukraine, and it commenced a series of arrests of some of the outstanding intellectual leaders of the scientific world. This resulted in a public trial and condemnation of the accused but for the most part they received relatively light sentences.

Who were involved? For the most part they were individuals who had played more or less important roles in the Ukrainian National Republic, who had gone abroad after its collapse and who had been invited back to take part in the work of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The government produced what seemed to be definite evidence against these people but the curious fact was that this evidence was strangely inconsistent with all of their previous activity. On the prisoner’s bench were such men as Serhey Yefremiv, the leading scholar of Ukrainian literature and a relative conservative, the academician Mykhaylo Slabchenko, a former Social Democrat, Prof. Joseph Hermayze, a former member of the Executive Committee of the same party, and the well-known writer L. Starytska-Chernyakivska, who was close to Efremiv and who had more or less dropped out of the modern literary movement and was living in practical retirement.

The Soviet record of the trial strongly suggests that all those factions which, during the existence of the Ukrainian National Republic had utterly failed to come to any agreement, had somehow or other composed their differences in the days when Ukrainian sentiments seemed to be dominant in the ranks of the Communist Party and when there were outstanding Communists, like Khvylovy and Skrypnyk, pleading the Ukrainian cause. Yet, as was to be the case in almost all of the later trials, the court record based upon the testimony of the NKVD did not give any clue to the treasonable acts of which the defendants were accused and if they did, the stories passed belief. There was, likewise, no indication of the serious plans on which the organization was working or any details of its formal organization.

All the information that was revealed suggested that it was a definitely anti-Communist movement engineered by a group of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists who objected to the Communist program of Ukrainization. There was no hint that the accused had any connection with the derussification program of Skrypnyk or the demand of Khvylovy and his friends of the Vaplite for the development of a definite Ukrainian Communism. The Society for the Liberation of Ukraine appeared like a ghost from the past and the prosecution seemed to have the tacit support of even those elements which were working for Ukrainization.

Up to this moment the only open manifestation had been the demand of Skrypnyk that Communists be included in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences but this had apparently been answered satisfactorily and, with slight changes, the Academy was working as before. The most that could be said was that the leaders of Ukrainian thought in the Academy had not properly in their old age kept pace with the development of Marxo-Leninist thought but even this was hardly sufficient for the outburst which was loosed against a group of widely respected scholars.

Another curious aspect of the situation was that the most severe sentences were not given to the announced ringleaders and chief culprits but that there was unearthed on the occasion another society, the SUM, the Society of Ukrainian Youth, which consisted of relatively obscure students, village intelligentsia, peasants and workmen who were shot by the hundreds and thousands without being brought before any tribunal. The head of this group, Mykola Pavlushkiv, was involved in the trial but once again there was no indication that any members of the SUM had been engaged in any form of sabotage or anti-governmental work. Members of the organization who have escaped abroad have testified that the SUM was organized only on the basis of personal friendships and never undertook or planned any deliberate acts of sabotage.

The discovery of the Society for the Liberation of Ukraine with its assumed anti-Communist tinge was the signal for the opening of a campaign against the most respected older non-Communist members of the Academy. The usual method was by the device of demanding Communist self-criticism, and criticism. Its practice was brutally simple and effective.

The Communist organs, especially the GPU-NKVD, decided which of these scholars were to be broken ideologically (and morally) and which were to be removed without fanfare. The latter disappeared. The former group were forced to appear for public “self-criticism.” This was preceded by a series of attacks in the newspapers as to the mistakes in Marxo-Leninism which the victim had committed.

Then, on an appointed day, a meeting was arranged in a large hall to which the public was invited by the display of large placards and other notices. Selected speakers attacked in the most scurrilous and abusive language various aspects of the work of the accused and ascribed to him the grossest errors. Then came the (obligatory) speeches of those who “wished to speak,” i.e. his collaborators and students. These were carefully prepared by the Communist nucleus in the Academy or the Committee. The accused was then compelled to admit his mistakes and promise hereafter to work “in the spirit of Marxo-Leninism and the decrees of the Communist Party.” These performances usually lasted for two or three sessions and then the critical “testing” of the work went on in special scientific meetings or scientific publications or in the torture chambers of the GPU. If the accused did not humiliate himself sufficiently or if the collaborators showed themselves insufficiently critical, “rotten liberal,” “compromising,” “opportunistic” or leaving “ideologically (or class) hostile loopholes,” the process was repeated with still more bitterness against the main culprit and his collaborators or witnesses who had attempted to defend him were attacked with equal ferocity and their testimony was sent to the proper places for “consideration.”

This was the treatment accorded to Prof. Hrushevsky who, in 1930, was criticized publicly and then arrested and deported to Moscow where he was prevented from doing any work and only after he was completely broken was he sent to a rest-house in the Caucasus to die in 1934. With his removal, the old historical studies almost came to an end. The Academy was reorganized as the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and nearly all the work in the humanities were stopped. The Historical-Philological Section was combined with the Social-Economic Section and nearly all of its special fields were abolished, while at the same time there disappeared a large number of valuable books and collections which were ready for publication.

This destruction of the older scholars in the Academy was justified by grouping Hrushevsky with his historical studies in the same category of public enemies as Mazepa and Petlyura, and the three came to form a trinity subject to constant attack. Their leading crime was declared to be bourgeois nationalism, the object of which was to separate the Ukrainian from the Russian people and to deny the great significance of the teachings of Marx and Lenin.

In 1931 the Soviet authorities found traces of another organization, the Ukrainian National Centre. This is even more mysterious than was the preceding case, for it involved a number of apolitical figures who were living in retirement, as Holubovych, but at the same time it commenced the liquidation of the leaders of the former Borotbisty and Ukapisty. Still heavier sentences were imposed upon these men and large numbers were deported.

Then came an announcement of the extension to Soviet Ukrainian territory of the work of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under Colonel Konovalets, and a number of more prominent Ukrainians were executed or deported for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained.

At the same time the Soviets seem to have spread rumors in connection with collectivization that there were movements for an uprising against the regime. They endeavored to have pseudo-Ukrainian patriots from Poland establish contacts with former officers of the Ukrainian National Republic who had dropped into obscurity and then, at a given signal, called for a revolt and easily overpowered their dupes.

Thus these trials eliminated from Ukrainian life the older scholars who had been trained before the period of Communist rule. They justified in the minds of the emigrés the correctness of their position in refusing to listen to the blandishments of the Ukrainian Soviet government during the apparently rosy years of the New Economic Policy, when it seemed as if there was to be a rapprochement with the West. How far the activity of these men, who had put themselves into the lion’s mouth and perished, served to renew the Ukrainian courage and self-reliance has been much debated, especially in view of the fact that they were all destroyed as bourgeois, long before any serious danger seemed to threaten the position of the various groups of Ukrainian Communists. Khvylovy, despite the attacks upon him and Skrypnyk, still continued to work for the greater Ukrainization of the population and of the cities and, so far, he had not been subjected to any too severe criticism. That was to come next.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Turning of the Cultural Tide

The Ukrainian Communists did not realize what they were doing when they launched their campaign against the bourgeois intellectuals and the aged scholars in the Academy of Sciences. For the first time since the period of Ukrainization had started, they had definitely called the attention of Moscow to the existence in Ukraine of a survival of the old independent mode of thinking which had animated the Ukrainian leaders in the struggle for an independent state of their own and they had coined a name for it, bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism. That was to recur again and again and lead to their own ruin.

It is remarkable that neither Skrypnyk nor Khvylovy realized this earlier. Both men in their own way were seriously threatening the unity of the Soviet Union, to which as an ideal they were loyal. Both men, Skrypnyk in the political field and Khvylovy in literature, realized the danger to Ukraine of substituting Russianism for Communism. Both men accepted in different senses the basic ideals of Communism and both believed in a Communist International which would offer all peoples full rights of cultural and political development. Neither one understood that the Comintern was a shadow structure which was totally dependent upon the forces operating in Moscow and that the situation in 1928 and 1929 was basically different from that ten years before.

In the RSFSR the charter of liberty for the fellow travellers which had been promulgated in 1925 was practically abolished by the granting of extreme power of control to Averbakh and the RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) which, to all intents and purposes, was issuing orders as to how the writers should support the Five Year Plan.

It was perfectly natural that a similar situation should develop in Ukraine. The various schools of serious writing, as the Vaplite, stood out against this regimentation and ably defended their position, but that position was indefensible in the face of political pressure and without being conscious of any inconsistency, Skrypnyk, as a good Communist and a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) was willing to exert pressure to bring the literary organization of Ukraine in line with that of the All-Union Communist Party at the very same time when he was deliberately thwarting the unifying tendencies of that party.

The first sign of the changed order came with the arrest and deportation of M. Ivchenko for his novel Working Powers because it endeavored to express in a concrete form the problem of fitting the ideals of the various national groups into the stereotyped formula which was now fashionable. Next came the difficulties of Khvylovy over his novel Woodsnipes, despite his willingness to secure an opportunity for further work by the destruction of the second part of the novel.

It must be remembered that the groups which were now being attacked were not by their essential declarations anti-Communist. They reflected, rather, the disillusionment of many people with the prevailing manifestations of Communism, the growing realization that the Communist regime was not giving the people that ideal reality which its teachings indicated they should easily win. That was the gist of the drama by M. Kulish, the People’s Malakhy, which reflected the contrast between the ideals of a high-minded but somewhat simple village Don Quixote and the realities of life on any particular level. This, as other of his plays, was well presented in the Berezil Theatre, directed by Les Kurbas, a Western Ukrainian who had developed in Kiev into one of the great producers and had pushed the Ukrainian theatrical art to its highest development. Writings of the same character had marked some of the early Russian works of A. N. Tolstoy after the revolution but, being a Great Russian, he was not involved in the endless controversies over the national questions and, like most of the Russian authors, he was able to work out a satisfactory agreement with the Stalin policies. This was not true of the Ukrainian authors who felt a steadily increasing pressure from the Communist authorities.

The vast majority of the more mediocre authors who had sought to follow unhesitatingly the party line found it very natural to form themselves into the VUSPP (the All-Ukrainian Society of Proletarian Writers) in 1927. They published a monthly journal, Hart and the Literary Journal, and to show their real internationalism they supported a Russian proletarian journal, the Krasnoye Slovo (the Red Word) and a Jewish paper, Di Royte Welt. It was only natural that this group should seek support by applying for membership in the VOAPP (the All-Union Society of Proletarian Writers) which, of course, was completely under the domination of the Russian Section, the RAPP. They thus became the thinking or unthinking agents by which the Russians could direct their blows against Ukrainian literature.

On the other hand, there came during these years a similar concentration of those writers who rejected bourgeois ideas but who still were working to develop a Ukrainian Communism in the true sense of the word. Yet they were forced to shift their positions constantly and hence there came a hectic but yet vital series of publications.

The Futurists who denied the value of the past and worked in experimental efforts were naturally the opponents of Khvylovy and the Vaplite and finally, in 1927, they united with some of the other radical groups (in the literary sense) to form the New Generation which continually published declarations of policy and of adherence to Communist ideas, but this group also drew upon itself the criticism of the VUSPP because it aimed for the adaptation of literature to the Ukrainian scene.

On the other hand, the Vaplite was very soon compelled to disband. It did so voluntarily but the bulk of the abler writers immediately started to publish the Literaturny Yarmarok (The Literary Fair) in which, under the guise of apolitical writing, they poured out scarcely veiled criticism of their opponents. This, too, was soon under attack and then it was reorganized as the Prolitfront (the Union of Studies of the Proletarian Literary Front). This device was also too obvious, for the new journal continued to criticize the Russian policy and in 1931 it was forced to disband and most of the members who wanted to continue to write passed into the VUSPP, which, with all its rigid adherence to the party line, could not be too sure as to what that party line really was.

At one point in his career Skrypnyk, who was in many ways opposed to Khvylovy, dreamed of the establishment of a Federation of the Unions of Revolutionary Writers of Ukraine. He succeeded in forcing this upon the Futurists and many smaller leftist groups and also the New Generation, but his failure to make this real in 1931 was but a sign of the future.

By this time the VUSPP, along with the RAPP, had become the dominating force politically and Skrypnyk was forced to give up his endeavors and to allow most of his Federation members to join the VUSPP. This was but another step in the decay of all literary schools and it reflected the period of uncertainty and of a definite degree of opposition to the domination of the RAPP.

By the end of the twenties, the opportunities for independent thinking in literature had grown exceedingly few and scattered. There were still, in general, only the two currents of Ukrainian and Russian Communism, and the former was definitely beginning to wane under the continual attacks that were delivered both by its opponents and the Communist Party through its official organs. Still, up until 1931, Ukrainian literature continued to develop and the literary disputes, often over minor points of literature, thought and culture, animated society and lent a zest to the various writings. These now more than ever began to reflect a growing apprehension over the conditions as they were and the impossibility of equating the ideals of Communism and the realities of the Russian domination of the country.

A more decided blow was given by the decree of April 23, 1932. This ended all literary discussions and abolished all literary societies and groups throughout the entire Soviet Union. In place of these, Stalin announced the establishment of a single society throughout the entire Union, the All-Union Association of Soviet Writers, and turned this over to Maksim Gorky, perhaps the most prominent Russian writer of the day but a man who was bitterly anti-Ukrainian and scornful of the national cultures of all the Soviet Republics. His object seems to have been in Ukraine to force the literature to accept the Russian pattern. The new doctrine of socialist realism was promulgated and it was very soon made clear that the destruction of the VUSPP and all the old groups was not a step toward the restoration of freedom for creation but a new move to strengthen, on a somewhat different basis, the government’s control over everything that was published.

It was highly significant for this that at the early meetings of the Ukrainian Section, its organizer, I. Kulyk, appeared in the uniform of a frontier guard of the NKVD as a silent warning to all of those who might be regarded as heretical in any sense. Furthermore Zhdanov as a member of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party, explained the situation. In his keynote speech, he declared:

“Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does that mean? What obligations does it lay upon them? It means first that they must know life, so as to represent it faithfully in artistic works, to represent it not scholastically or in a dead way, not simply as an objective realism but to picture reality in its revolutionary development. In this the truth and historical concreteness of artistic representation must coincide with the tasks of the ideal reworking and development of the working people in the spirit of socialism. This method of artistic literature and of literary criticism are what we call the method of socialist realism.”

Whatever might have been the effect of the new organization on Russian literature, which had been handicapped by the domination of the RAPP, its effect on Ukrainian literature could not fail to be disastrous. In effect, it standardized all literature on the Russian model and it indicated that henceforth literature and literary men were to be treated as organs of the Communist Party and of the Moscow regime. It was the definite answer to the efforts of the Ukrainian writers of nearly all the conflicting schools to adapt literature to their own purposes and ideals. It took away from the writers all inspiration and desire to use their talents for their own artistic enjoyment and it rendered it possible for the central government to abolish that sense of republican patriotism which had been so marked during the preceding period in all the non-Russian republics.

In place of the ideas of the old Ukrainian life which was being brought to an end by the compulsory collectivization and the establishment of the collective farms, in place of the old visions of the unity of the Ukrainian people and those ideals of a new national life that had dominated Ukrainian literature from the time of Shevchenko, in place of the efforts to establish in Ukrainian literature all those branches of art and culture which were stirring in Western Europe, there was now given to the writers, young and old, the command to celebrate and to glorify the actual process of socialist construction in Ukraine, as elsewhere. By 1934 Kulyk, as the organizer of the Ukrainian section, could write of the definite end of the old bourgeois nationalist sentiment as preached by Yefremiv and of the efforts of Khvylovy to reorient the psychology of Ukrainian literature on that of Europe. In his article on the modern Ukrainian literature in a volume on the Literature of the Peoples of the USSR published in 1934, he could pass over in silence, for obvious reasons, all of the great names which had appeared during the preceding ten years and shower his praise upon the young proletarian writers who were willing to follow blindly and, to the best of their ability, the new course.

There were, of course, some of the older and even of the more prominent men who were willing to compromise with the new regime. Among them the outstanding figures were Tychyna and Rylsky. Both of them, after consideration and treatment by the authorities, tried to bend their works to the new ideas but there were many who were unwilling or unable to be untrue to their artistic faith and for them there was not even the choice of silence or writing. They were compelled to conform or vanish and it was not long after the organization of the All-Union Society of Soviet Writers when this was made abundantly clear.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Debacle

The Ukrainian Communists, as Skrypnyk and Khvylovy, could not fail to be horrified at the spreading famine which broke out in the autumn of 1932 and raged throughout the winter. Whatever they might have thought in the beginning of the compulsory collectivization, they were aghast at its results. They could not fail to recognize that it meant the end of the old Ukrainian life which they had tried to remodel in accordance with their own ideals and that it meant a widening breach with the outside world. They could not fail to see that it meant the ending of that world Communism in which they had tried to believe and in which they saw the hope of humanity and justice.

They could hardly fail to recognize almost immediately how they had played into the hands of the enemies of Ukraine by their attacks on the older scholars, for they were now to learn that they had unwittingly forged the tool that was to be used against them.

Postyshev arrived in Ukraine in January, 1933, to superintend and make more rigid the rules for the collection of grain. He brought with him his own staff, his own detachments of the NKVD, and while he nominally had the post of second secretary, he had the instructions from Stalin that made him the complete dictator. He soon showed what that meant.

Among his earliest acts was the removal of Chubar from his post as head of the Soviet of People’s Commissars and he replaced him with the more pliable P. Lyubchenko, a former Borotbist. Skrypnyk was forthwith demoted from Commissar of Education to Chairman of the Ukrainian State Planning Commission, a position of no special importance, once the conduct of all Ukrainian life was to be administered in accordance with a plan drawn up in Moscow. He was replaced by Volodymyr Zatonsky, who had been one of the foremost advocates of russification.

The axe was used still more widely on the entire Communist Party in Ukraine. Within ten months, Postyshev removed two hundred thirty-seven secretaries of regional party committees, two hundred seventy-nine heads of regional executive committees, and one hundred and fifty-eight heads of regional control commissions. Nearly one thousand prominent Communists were removed, not to speak of lesser members. Since there were little more than 125,000 Communists in Ukraine, it is easy to see that a large proportion of the Party was unceremoniously eliminated. Elimination meant not only demotion but it was practically a death sentence, for those expelled were charged with that most serious crime against the state, bourgeois nationalism or sabotage, and the vast majority were either shot or deported.

Postyshev turned his attention to the Academy of Sciences which had already been purged of its leading members. Here he found some two hundred and fifty more who were removed on charges of Ukrainian chauvinism or sabotage. In their place, he introduced ordinary Communists or Russians with more regard to their reliability and their loyalty to Stalin than to their capability or scholarly qualifications.

Postyshev’s object was the rerussification of the country, for it had already been commented in Moscow that there were too many of the young Ukrainians who were securing an education only in Ukrainian without knowing the master language of Russian. Skrypnyk had paid no attention to these complaints, for he retorted that in Moscow the young Russians were not learning Ukrainian and he assumed that all the Soviet Republics had the same rights. He was soon to learn differently, for from now on Russian was to be the official language of widest use.

In every considerable city Postyshev established Russian newspapers which had almost completely vanished during the period of Ukrainization. He opened Russian schools in the leading cities and he introduced Russian into all the other schools on an equality basis with Ukrainian. He established Russian theatres in the larger cities and sent them Russian companies from Leningrad and Moscow to show the greatness of Russian art, while at the same time he had Les Kurbas arrested at the end of the year and closed the Berezil Theatre, the leading company in Ukraine, and even abolished its name as Catherine the Great had abolished the name of the Zaporozhian Sich one hundred fifty years before.

The fundamental object was to re-Russianize Ukraine as rapidly as possible. In pursuance of this idea, Zatonsky even suggested that the students should be encouraged to talk a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian in the hope that they could thus be more quickly induced to accept the alien tongue. That was a rash thought, for as soon as it was reported to Moscow, there came a strong protest from Gorky that such a procedure could only injure the purity of the Russian language by mixing foreign elements in it. Zatonsky hurriedly withdrew his suggestions but it was too late and only a few years later he was to pay the penalty for his rash proposal.

It was small wonder that Khvylovy, who knew well that he was threatened with arrest and execution, committed suicide in despair on May 13, 1933 and he was followed on July 6, by Skrypnyk who was too familiar with the workings of Russian Communism not to realize that he would be steadily demoted until he could be finished off without comment as a fallen idol.

The terror and the destruction proceeded apace and after the murder of Kirov in Leningrad on December 21, 1934, new investigations were ordered and it was discovered that the bulk of the Ukrainian authors were involved in the conspiracy. In a very short time their ranks were almost completely decimated. In the same month H. Kosynka, O. Vlyzko, I. Krushelnytsky, K. Burevy, and D. Falkivsky were shot on various pretenses. Nearly all the former members of the Vaplite, the Neo-Classicists, the groups connected with the MARS in Kiev and the New Generation, were liquidated in one way or another, either by execution or deportation and deportation was practically the equivalent of death, for scarcely one of the deported ever returned to the Ukraine or made his presence or his present place of dwelling known to any of his friends.

It would be too long to mention the list of names, but among them were all the outstanding names of the preceding years, Kulish, Yalovy, Yohansen, Epik, Zerov, Dray-Khmara, Kosynka, Pidmohylny, Semenko, Vuzko, etc. These men were not only put out of the way but every attempt was made to prove that they had never existed. Their books were removed from the libraries and bookstores and, so far as possible, even references to them and their work were expunged from encyclopedias and reference books and the movement which they represented and which, but a short time before, had been patronized by the Commissariat of Education was rendered non-existent. Only the name of Khvylovy remained as an example of anti-Russian work and he was presented as a pupil of Petlyura, Hrushevsky and the Western imperialists and a believer in bourgeois nationalism, a term which was now extended to cover anything hostile to the general line of the Party.

Faced with the certainty of sharing the fate of their colleagues, some of even the more prominent authors began to waver. Among this number were Tychyna and, a little more reluctantly, Rylsky. In fact, it required a term in prison to bring the latter to an appreciation of the beauties of the new order. Both proved themselves valuable converts, even if they were compelled to forget all their old mannerisms and perfections of style and produce tasteless propaganda poetry, while the official organs boasted of their slow but steady growth in realism. Thus, in 1934 Kulyk could say of Tychyna, “The collection of The Party Leads represents an unquestionable achievement. Nevertheless we should be rendering poor service to Tychyna himself if we failed to point out the uneven tenor, and sometimes even hesitation, in the artistic expression of themes and ideas new to him. Stronger organizational ties with the realities, emancipation from artificial, at times purely bookish culture, such are the conditions on which depends further progress by Tychyna along the new road chosen by this great Ukrainian poet.” Rylsky and Bazhan were treated in the same way, while such writers as Panch and Holovko were told it was their task to get over the old notion that “Mother Ukraine” had the same interest in all her sons, whether they were working men, peasants or intellectual nationalists. Both of them later revised their works under the kind leadership of the Party.

The proletarian writers and those who were content to write upon the prescribed or recommended themes were in their element. Kyrylenko and Mykytenko wrote glowingly and woodenly about collectivization and the elimination of the kulaks, “the dregs of society.” Korniychuk, a young dramatist, presented in his plays all the appropriate Five Year plan subjects and gloried in the defeat of the old in the factories and on the collective farms. Everything in the literary field that glorified the Communist Party and rejected those ideas which had flourished under the preceding regime was applauded and the successful received honors and wealth and Stalin prizes for literary achievement.

The same development or retrogression was to be noted in the more purely scientific fields, especially where they touched studies dealing with the Ukrainian language, history or culture. Skrypnyk had removed some of the more distinguished members of the Academy of Science. Postyshev purged most of their followers and then he went on to reorganize the institution in the Communist way. The Academy was changed into a series of separate institutes, each of which was subject only to a carefully chosen Presidium.

Then, at the end of 1934 all of those institutes connected with the old Historical Section and which dealt with such subjects as Ukrainian archaeology, history, history of law, Western Ukraine, etc. were abolished. The study of the humanities was practically ended and the old staff was excluded. There were left only institutes of language and material culture to care for the past and all other subjects were handed over to the network of the VUAMLIN, the reorganized and strengthened network of Marxo-Leninist institutes, which could serve as a more reliable means of spreading Communist doctrine in a pseudo-scientific form. They created a new complex of societies as the Society of Marxist Historians, all of which had the avowed purpose of glorifying the regime at the expense of any form of scientific truth.

In the field of studies in the Ukrainian language, under the leadership of A. Khvylya who had already distinguished himself by his attacks on the entire process of Ukrainization, new steps were taken to counteract all that had been gained by any school of thought.

In the beginning Naum Kaganovich had tried to show that the scholars of the preceding period had worked under the influence of “populist” theories of language. He was soon forced to change this to a statement that the work had been “bourgeois nationalist,” the favorite slogan for anything that was not Russian. In his article, The Language Theory of Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalism, he wrote: “Here under the conception of the people emerge the kurkul circles; the bourgeois nationalists have shaped the development of the Ukrainian language on the speech of the kurkuls.” In another passage he declared: “By this approach to the people the bourgeois nationalists understand the removal from the language of everything that is connected with the October revolution, the removal of all features which bring it closer to the language of the Russian proletariat and the workers of the other republics of the USSR and the implanting of everything that is outmoded, conservative and permeated with the nationalist bourgeois spirit.”

It was easy to see at what these new “scholars” were aiming. The old arguments as to whether the local dialects of the peasants or the newer literary language which had been developed for over a century was the better Ukrainian were now replaced by the definite statement that the proper form was that which was the language of the more “advanced” classes, i.e. the Communists and their sympathizers, who were the least connected with any special area and were the least affected by any considerations of locality or traditional culture or usage. Even during Ukrainization the Communists of high rank coming from Moscow had been officially relieved of the task of learning Ukrainian. Now this was expanded and those who, of their own volition, learned a few words were adjudged the best authorities on Ukrainian because of their Communist knowledge and standing.

The new authorities set themselves the task of rooting out those attempts which the “bourgeois nationalists” had made to bring together the Ukrainians of the east and of the west. They declared that the preceding group had sought to bring back capitalism and to separate Ukrainian from the “brotherly” Russian and to remodel it on Polish and German standards. They attacked any system of orthography and transliteration which differed from that used in Russian and in their attacks on Polonisms in Ukrainian they went so far as to call Polish any Ukrainian form which differed from the Russian, even when the Polish word in fact had the same form as the Russian and differed from the Ukrainian.

In the small dictionaries that were printed only those words were admitted that revealed Russian relations and the academician Krymsky once remarked of one of these that it was merely a Russian-Russian dictionary, so far had the process been carried.

In 1933 Khvylya published a new orthography for Ukrainian. This repudiated the work that had been done earlier to bring together Eastern and Western Ukrainian and sought to take as the standard those Ukrainian dialects that had been most thoroughly russianized, although at the same time he carefully avoided explaining the policy on which he was working.

Thus, during these years there developed a definite policy of disintegrating the language from within. It was based very definitely upon the old theories of the nineteenth century, that Ukrainian was merely a corrupt form of Russian and could not have any independent development, but such a statement which would have satisfied Nicholas I and Belinsky was not expressed clearly. It was enveloped in a mass of Communist jargon which appealed to the great names of Bolshevik ideology and covered a complete ignorance of any of the facts of language or of popular usage.

At the same time in another field Postyshev saw the opportunity to deliver further blows under the guise of progress and of satisfying Ukrainian aspirations. He moved the capital of the Ukrainian Republic back to Kiev from Kharkiv. There were good reasons for this. The Soviet regime had been established at Kharkiv, because it was nearer to the Russian boundary and hence could more easily receive support from Russian military sources during the civil war. Kiev, as the centre of traditional Ukrainian life, was more liable to sympathy with the Ukrainian national movement, as the Russians had found on more than one occasion. Now, with the country prostrate, it seemed advisable for the Communists to mark their triumph and endeavor to identify themselves with the masses by recognizing Kiev.

Yet, it brought with it another blow to Ukrainian prestige. Of all the cities in Ukraine, Kiev was the richest in the monuments of the past. Therefore, to mark the Communist triumph, they decided to rebuild large portions of the city and to erect buildings that would be worthy of the new regime. It was easy to find as the proper sites the areas where the old Kiev had stood.

From the very first days of Bolshevism and Communism, the regime, with its atheistic trends, had devoted itself to the robbing of the churches. Even the ikonostasis of St. Sophia had been melted down to recover the gold ornaments with which it had been decorated. The museums had been largely pillaged. Some of the contents had been removed to Moscow on various pretexts, but still more had been wantonly destroyed.

Now work began in earnest to wreck the surviving monuments of the past. In quick succession the Communists ruined, blew up or levelled a large number of churches which spoke too strongly of the past greatness of Kiev and the Ukrainians. These included the Cathedral Church of the Golden Domed Monastery of St. Michael of the twelfth century, with a bell-tower of the seventeenth, the Church of the Three Saints of the twelfth century, the cloisters of the Monastery of St. Irena of the eleventh century, the finest monuments of the period of Mazepa at the end of the seventeenth century, including the Cathedrals of the Theophany of the Brotherhood Monastery and the “Great Nicholas” of the Ustyno-Mykolayiv Monastery, the work of the architect Joseph Startsev, with a bell-tower of the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century, the “Little Nicholas” and the Church of St. George of the eighteenth century, a large number of structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the Kievan-Mezhyhirye Monastery of the Transfiguration, the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Podil of the eighteenth century, the bell-tower of the Kiev-Kiril-Troitsky Monastery of the eighteenth century built by the architect Ivan Hryhorovych-Barsky, the Church of Sts. Borys and Hlib of the eighteenth century, the Church of the Birth of Christ and the “good Nicholas,” built by Andry Melensky at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Church of the Tithes, the celebrated statue of Samson by Hryhorovych-Barsky, and a long series of other monuments and buildings.

Almost all of these buildings came from those periods when the Ukrainians were the most free from Russian influence or, as in the case of the Mazepa baroque, had the closest contacts with the West. It was a deliberate part of the Communist attempt to rewrite the Ukrainian past.

Of course, their excuse was that the old primarily ecclesiastical culture stood in marked contradiction to the modern era of industrialization and collectivization, the “glorious age of Stalin” which called for the development of a new type of architecture. Still, in a surprising number of cases these new buildings did not make their appearance and the ground was left empty or covered with insignificant structures which could better have been placed on the site of those half-ruined shacks and hovels which were the real expressions of the Communist paradise.

The primary object was the annihilation of the Ukrainian spirit and represented part of the broad general movement which had been launched for the rerussification of the country and the stopping in every way of that spontaneous outburst of development which had been called into being by the downfall of tsarism and the founding of the Ukrainian National Republic. The general debacle was now complete.

Within four years, before the ending of the first Five Year Plan a situation had been brought about which seemed to the Soviet authorities a guarantee of their final victory over what they were pleased to call bourgeois nationalism but which was, in reality, the logical outgrowth of the Ukrainian aspirations throughout the centuries.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Thirties

With the completion of the compulsory collectivization, the ending of the famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance, the country entered a new phase. The position in which it found itself was almost the opposite of the twenties. As, at the end of Militant Communism, the land was ruined and exhausted, so it was again. The number of domestic animals had dropped almost to the level of the earlier period, agriculture had been rendered prostrate, and material well-being had disappeared as the peasants were forced to labor on the collective farms.

On the other hand, there was none of that excitement and desire for work that had accompanied the introduction and development of the New Economic Policy, when the relaxation of the restrictions and the end of the lawlessness of Militant Communism had restored the possibility of profit to the people and when they could hope to see the results of their own labor.

More than that, the earlier period had been marked by the belief of the Ukrainian Communists that they could find an independent place in the Communist International. Then there was a conflict between those who wished a development of Ukrainian ideals and traditions, a union of the old and the new, and those who adopted a strictly Russian point of view. Now there was only one dominating force—the Russian. It had been made clear that there was to be no open antagonism. The Russian point of view was the only one that could hope to find acceptance in Communism, the Communist International had become a mere adjunct of the Russian Communist Party, all Ukrainian sympathies and expressions were banned, and the Ukrainian spirit was forced on the defensive and compelled to fight a rearguard action for maintaining its existence.

Step by step, Stalin and the Russian Communist Party was changing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics into a Russian empire with its non-Russian dependencies and, despite the Constitution of the Union and of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, it was becoming ever more and more clear that the latter was to be treated merely as a geographical colony of the new Russian-dominated union, with no attention to its wishes or its needs.

This had been evident from almost the first days of the Five Year Plan. Whatever might have been the original blueprint of this, it early became evident that the Soviet Union could only carry out its work of industrialization and collectivization, if everything were forced into a single plan. In connection with this, the various republic commissariats had been reduced to All-Union commissariats and all independent power of judgment or planning had been removed from the local organs. If it were a question of developing a mine, of building a new factory, of introducing a new and more profitable crop, of constructing a new road or railroad, the authorities of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic had to refer the matter to Moscow and receive the permission to act from the central authorities of the Union. How could it be otherwise?

The central government had assumed the responsibility for the development of the country and it could not carry this on, if the local communities or republics had the power to meet any but the most primitive needs without consultation and permission. Moscow had decided how industry was to be developed, which branches were to be built in the RSFSR, which in Ukraine, which in the other republics. That plan was almost absolute and, warned by the fate of the fallen Communist leaders, the new successors were ultra-cautious in venturing to express an opinion.

The OGPU had been remodelled into the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, but this was placed under the same Yagoda who had been the head of the OGPU and he merely assumed greater powers and greater responsibilities for the safeguarding of the Soviet order.

The crying need of the Ukrainians was for consumer goods. Odesa and Kharkiv requested that they might be given the power to build textile mills to supply the needs of the local population. The request was denied, for the authorities had decided that the textile industry was to be concentrated in the RSFSR. The iron and steel cities requested that they might be given the permission to build factories to complete the fabrication of certain delicate types of machinery. The request was refused because it was to be only in the Moscow area that such articles were to be made. It was to be the task of Ukraine to furnish the raw material, the iron ore from Kryvy Rih, the coal of the Donbas, and to prepare the semi-finished pig-iron and other forms of semi-fabricated material that were needed by the central plants.

The plan not only provided for construction. It went even further and specified the exact amount of products that were to be turned out by each individual plant. While it was possible to secure some profits from the over-fulfillment of the plan, regardless of the effect that this might have upon the plan as a whole, any under-fulfillment was treated as a gross failure of obligation to the state.

This led, in turn, to additional restrictions on the freedom of the workers. Punishments were ordered for tardiness, for absence from employment even for a single day without a satisfactory reason, for an attempt to change the place of employment. These regulations were not the product of the governing bodies of the republics but of the Union authorities themselves and they were transmitted from Moscow to the national republics through the liaison between the All-Union commissariats and their subordinate organs.

It was the same with agriculture. Moscow knew what each collective farm, each kolkhoz, each sovkhoz was to furnish, and woe to the group that failed. The famine had been the result and that had been used to break the spirit of resistance of the Ukrainian villagers. The government specified the acreage that was to be devoted to wheat, to barley, to all of the crops that could be raised and it did no good if the local agronomists pointed out new methods, new possibilities. Their actions were interpreted as merely a defiance of the central government, a new case of wrecking or of sabotage and were treated accordingly. In the first rush of collectivization, the network of agricultural centres that had been developed in Ukraine during the twenties as a responsible answer to the local appreciation of the problem was wiped out and most of their leaders paid the penalty for their temerity in standing by their own studies and their own achievements.

There were only the slightest concessions finally made to the peasants. They were allowed to sell a certain amount of the surplus grain to the government at a somewhat higher price. The individual families were allowed to possess about an acre of land on which they could raise their own produce, provide their winter food as a result of their own labors and they were allowed to sell their own produce in what may best be described as a legalized black market, but this meant merely the privilege to sell themselves in some of the larger local centres, and to many of these they were allowed to go only if they secured the appropriate permits from the heads of the collective farms and the local representatives of the NKVD.

Even these slight concessions, while they could not bring prosperity to the peasants on the collective farms, rendered it possible for them to keep body and soul together despite the steadily dropping standard of living and the almost complete lack of consumer goods which were furnished in quantity only to the inhabitants of the more favored regions, as Moscow and Leningrad. At the same time, the peasants felt, ever more bitterly, the fact that the new conditions of living prevented almost all those home manufactures which in the earlier period had enabled them to compensate in some degree for the lack of proper articles of industry.

There was thus a growing material impoverishment of the village communities and a loss of the old spontaneity and gaiety that had marked Ukraine even under the hardest conditions of the past. Attempts were made to utilize this for forcing peasants to leave the villages and join the industrial masses in the cities and work in the new plants. Others were encouraged to leave the country for less populated districts in the east, while, on the slightest suspicions, whole families were deported, separated and exiled, and their places taken by people from other Soviet republics who were brought in to destroy the racial unity that formerly existed in the villages.

To appreciate the difficulties of the peasants on the collective farms, we must remember that the involved bureaucratic system had ample opportunities for extorting the grain for little or no payment. Thus the Motor Transport Stations which controlled all the machinery were supported by payments from the collective farms of grain and other products in kind and this usually approached 21.5% of the total yield, while the Stations took over 23% of the crop for the government. Another 15% was retained by the kolhosp for sowing and for various insurance funds that were prescribed by law and another 18% was kept for fodder and for the compensation of the full-time administrators. Thus, there was barely a quarter of the produce left to be distributed among the working population and this was the variable quantity since all of the payments and collections were based not on the actual harvest but on the harvest as planned by the central authorities. Thus, in the case of a bad harvest, the share allotted for distribution was the part that was cut and the government, so far as possible was provided with its expected supply.

This amount was divided among the individuals and families on the basis of the labor days which they had worked. In the beginning a labor day meant labor for a day, no matter how many hours of labor were required, but even before World War II, this simple definition was replaced by a specification that it covered a definite amount of work and it might very easily happen that a slow or poor workman would have to work more than one day to make a labor day. Thus, there was the possibility of still further exploitation of the workmen, who could not know accurately until the end of the year on what they could count.

There was also distributed, likewise in proportion to labor days, a certain sum of money which the kolhosp received from the government in return for the sale of grain over the amount collected for the tax in kind. This was a negligible sum and the average member rarely received more than one ruble per labor day. This sum was, of course, insufficient to provide for the goods which the family needed to purchase, and since their share of the grain was rarely sufficient to feed them, their situation became hopeless, while of other products the individual received about one litre of oil, fifty kilograms of potatoes, thirty-five kilograms of fruit, and five-tenths kilograms of meat and fat.

The real significance of these figures is shown in the prices that were charged in the state stores. There a kilogram of bread cost ninety kopecks, ten eggs brought eight rubles, a kilogram of beef twenty-four rubles, and a pair of boots four hundred and fifty rubles, while a farmer’s suit of clothes cost five hundred rubles.

It made the peasant really dependent upon his individual plot of land if he was to secure any necessities. This was far too small and its use was bound with many restrictions. Thus, no family was allowed to hold more than one cow and two calves, one sow, up to ten goats, an undefined number of chickens and up to twenty beehives. In the beginning it was possible for the peasant to secure a certain amount of food for these animals from the common store. He was allowed to retain the manure and it was thus possible for him to improve his own individual plot and thus to secure larger returns. It was a liberal application of such principles that had rendered possible the general improvement which was noticeable during the years 1934-6, when the government was endeavoring to make the system of collective farms workable.

It can be easily seen that the system of allowing individual incomes was based on a principle opposite that of the New Economic Policy, for it would require scarcely a legislative enactment to reduce these amounts while the New Economic Policy presented a norm of profit to the workers. Yet with each year, once the government was convinced of its success, it found it possible in various ways to tap this new source of income for its own purposes.

The favorite method was by taxation. Thus, by 1939 if we should assume that the average family received in cash four hundred and eighty karbovantsy, they would be required to pay twenty-two and a half karb. in taxes, twenty in rent, fifty as a special tax and they would be required to volunteer to take at least two hundred in government bonds.

Even this did not cover the total payments to the government. With its usual love of double-talk and subterfuge, the government, which controlled every branch of human activity in the USSR, talked of the establishment of socialism and levied indirect taxes on all transactions so that the actual cost to the villagers of any manufactured article was about three times what it cost the government as producer. The whole subject was carefully veiled as a state secret to protect the Soviet Union against capitalist intrigues but the unfortunate population were the unwilling contributors to this new order of life.

Under such conditions it is extremely difficult to pierce the veil of percentages as to cost and production and give a reliable estimate as to the amount of money received for the government or the relationship between the sums spent in maintaining the operation of the Moscow-controlled factories in Ukraine and the amount spent upon the needs of the population either individually, as families or as citizens of the UkSSR or of the UkSSR as a governmental unity within the Soviet sphere. From those figures which the Soviet has let out, it is possible to see that the yearly budget of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic has run from 2½%-5% of the budget of the USSR while the population has been at least 18% of the total population.

With the villages compelled to yield the last pound of grain, etc., that could be extracted by force, and receiving in return almost no manufactured goods, the position of the city workmen and the intelligentsia was little better. The wages of the workmen were always insufficient, the housing conditions were hardly endurable, and the only point of betterment was that the larger places and some of the plants especially favored by the regime received more manufactured goods of a poor quality and at a high price which the fortunate people might be able to secure. They could also, if they still had preserved any valuables, dispose of them through the Torgsin stores which sold imported wares for foreign currency and precious metals.

Of course, neither in city or village did any of these restrictions apply to the more important Communists who possessed their own stores at which the government supplied them with the necessary articles to allow them to live in comfort and luxury as a welcome investment for the regime. The line of demarcation between the poor and the rich, the ordinary people and the Communists, became steadily greater, until it was often wider than it had been in the old tsarist Russian empire.

All these measures which had been adopted in Moscow were in theory supposed to apply to all sections of the USSR equally, but it was not long before the natives of Ukraine realized that however impartial the laws might seem, they were not sufficiently flexible to take account of local and republican differences. The central regime was interested in advancing and developing the Moscow industrial area and it expended on this in various grandiose efforts, as the Moscow subway, enormous sums of money. It is safe to say that the expenditures in that one area alone equalled the entire budget and money spent by the central government in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. It classified Ukraine as one of the regions where the supply of manufactured goods was less necessary.

The crushing of the Ukrainian Communists, the suicide of Khvylovy and Skrypnyk, no less than the complete altering of the land code of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the substitution of the new policy of collectivization, showed perfectly well where the real power of the USSR lay in the thirties and it was accompanied by such acts as the introduction of Russian as the standard language of instruction and of the army. This was followed by the formal transfer of the Ukrainian divisions to the Red Army and a number of other acts which completed the subordination of the UkSSR. Already in 1930, during difficulties on the Soviet-Manchuria borders, the Red Army had not hesitated to greet the Communist Party with news of its victories and allowed this even to take precedence over a notice to the Soviet government which had hitherto claimed to be predominant.

To regularize all these changes of practice, Stalin ordered a new constitution and this was approved on December 5, 1936. It was a marvel of inconsistencies, for it was drawn up to express all of the old slogans and the modern facts.

Here was, in Article 17, the old talk of the right of free withdrawal of any Union Republic from the USSR but there was also a provision that the Supreme Soviet could annul any action of any Union Republic contrary to its wishes. There was a careful definition of the three classes of Commissariats but when the book is read critically it is easily seen that the only subjects within the competence of the Union Republics were Education, Local Industry, Communal Economy and Social Security and their decisions could legally be upset by Moscow. Article 15 provided for almost full independence, subject to Article 14, which made the Presidium of the Moscow Communist Party and of the USSR the almost undisputed master of the Union Republics, and Art. XIII, read in conjunction with this, made it possible for the Presidium to amend or change any article of the entire Constitution.

Along with all the democratic phrases in many articles was the confirmation of the unified state budget and the provision that any act of any subordinate Soviet could be easily nullified.

At the moment the democratic nations of the west were so preoccupied with the threat offered by the Nazis that they were thinking only of efforts to make a common popular front with the Soviets. They found a convenient possibility in the new Constitution and they were little disposed to pay any attention to all those phrases which formally and almost explicitly nullified all that they wished to see.

Thus, the legal basis was provided for the extension of the power of the Moscow government. Once the new Constitution was adopted and in force, the last rights of the Union Republics were nullified de jure as well as de facto and the central government was given a free hand in its work of bending all the Union Republics to its will. The stamp of state approval was set upon the new system of administration and with that accomplished, there was small reason why the regime should not go further with its work of russification and unification.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ukraine in the Late Thirties

With the power of Moscow thus defined and reasserted by the free vote of the Moscow-controlled Communist representatives of the various independent republics that formed part of the USSR, the way was open for the next step. Stalin had not only prepared himself legally at home by a clever use of contradictory expressions but he had taken advantage of the good will of the liberals and progressives of the rest of the world by exploiting the distrust which they felt for Hitler and the Nazis and had infiltrated Communists through the media of popular fronts into nearly all the governments that boasted of their democracy.

Next came the bewildering series of trials which were now held in Moscow. In quick succession Yagoda, the dreaded head of the NKVD, was removed from his post, arrested and shot by his successor Yezhov, whose name was soon to become even more detested. Then, in a series of three public trials which extended from the end of 1936 to 1938, nearly all of the old Bolshevik leaders who had played important roles in Soviet life during the period of Lenin’s domination were condemned for counter-revolutionary activity and either shot or sentenced to long terms of deportation, from which they did not return. The list included such names as Bukharin, the former theoretician of the Party, Zinovyev, the master of the Leningrad Soviet, the leading supporters of Trotsky, Rykov, etc. At the same time Marshal Tukhachevsky, the commander of the Red Army in its unsuccessful drive against Warsaw in 1920, Marshal Yegorov, the leader of the southern wing of that army with which Stalin himself had served as political commissar and most of the other leading officers were removed and suffered the same fate on the ground that they were intriguing with Hitler or with the capitalist imperialists.

The Yezhovshchina, as it was called, raged over the entire territory of the Soviet Union and was directed with especial fury against all the leading men in all walks of life, directors of government offices, directors of factories, directors of collective farms, and army officers, if they could possibly be suspected of being disloyal to the Stalinist regime or of having independent thoughts.

The world looked on in amazement, for the Moscow regime seemed to have gone completely mad in its accusations and suspicions. The charges that were made against the outstanding personalities seemed fantastic and contradicted everything that any one knew of the character and actions of the outstanding Communist leaders. To some it seemed as if the revolution were devouring its own children, for Stalin was executing men for proposing policies which he had later adopted himself, as he had in the case of both the right and left deviationists from the general line of the party. To others it seemed an alarming example of the infiltration of all forms of life by the agents of Nazism. All agreed that the actions were extreme and far reaching.

As the purge of the administrative machinery went on, its range increased. Once the head of a bureau or a factory were implicated, the way was open to charge all of his subordinates who had not denounced him with being accessory to his crimes and they were called up and punished or, in rare cases, were acquitted and promoted. The storm continued until late in 1938 when Yezhov himself was removed and suffered the same fate at the hands of the Georgian Beria, who guided the NKVD through World War II.

If such was the fury in the RSFSR, it can well be imagined what were the results in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Communists had set the fashion of accusing their opponents of bourgeois nationalism. When the storm broke, Postyshev, who had been sent down in 1933 to wipe out bourgeois nationalism, to organize the famine and to break the Ukrainian renaissance, was among the first to go. He was removed and disappeared at the hands of Kaganovich, who reemerged for a while as the strong man of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Lyubchenko, who had been appointed the Prime Minister of the UkSSR on the single program of suppressing Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, was called to Moscow to confront the self-confessed leaders of the nationalists and, on his return to Kiev, he shot himself. His successor, Bondarenko, disappeared without a trace.

Who were these self-confessed leaders? Prominent among them was A. Khvylya, who had been the champion of the general line against Khvylovy and Skrypnyk and who had been the dominant figure in the attack on the Ukrainian literary men and scholars. For years he had resorted to all kinds of attacks to bring Ukrainian grammar and language closer to Russian. He now “voluntarily” confessed that he had worked against the “elder brother” and had joined and aided in developing a secret military force several million strong for the sole purpose of separating Ukraine from the USSR and he swore that in this he had the active aid of Lyubchenko and most of the officials of the UkSSR. Finis.

Zatonsky, the Commissar of Education, was accused of another crime. He had drawn years before the fire of Gorky for suggesting that a mixed language be introduced into Ukrainian schools as the means of absorbing Ukrainian into Russian. He had speedily withdrawn his recommendations under fire and all had seemed forgiven. It was not, and Zatonsky disappeared in the holocaust.

It then came the turn of the writers. Men like Kulyk, who had run roughshod over the older writers and had called for their liquidation, were now found guilty of bourgeois nationalism and with them most of the authors who had emerged during the shattering of the Ukrainian renaissance and who had celebrated the turning of the Ukraine into a collectivized and industrialized state. Each and every one of them confessed that they had been guilty of bourgeois nationalism and they received the due reward for their crimes.

There was hardly a family in Ukraine which did not suffer the accusation of at least one member. The survivors who have escaped abroad have given lurid tales of the extent to which the feeling of distrust and suspicion spread among all classes of the population. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters hardly dared to speak to one another, to say anything lest their closest friends and relatives had been compelled to join the NKVD or had turned informers for their own selfish purposes. For one arrest of a guilty bourgeois nationalist, a hundred people who had done nothing amiss and had scarcely dared to think, were deported.

The Ukrainians were taken out of Ukraine in large masses and the concentration and labor camps in the far north and in eastern Asia were filled to overflowing as the Soviet authorities continued their policy of developing their industrial centres east of the Urals. The places in the cities and the collective farms thus emptied were, in turn, filled by the importation of Russians and citizens of the other Soviet republics as a means of producing not Ukrainian or Azerbaijanian Soviet loyalty but as a means of establishing a new universal Soviet patriotism and of separating the nationalities from their republics which were henceforth to be mere administrative and economic subdivisions of the Soviet state.

The object of these purges and these changes was the breaking up of the population into individual entities who would recognize no bonds of attachment to anything except the state. It was in a sense the culmination of the efforts to break the sense of national or even racial or clan unity which had been so strong in 1917, when the Ukrainian National Republic had been established. The Communists had broken this by playing upon class feelings; they had broken down the class into families and now, under the relentless pressure of Yezhov, they tried to go further and to break the families into individuals.

In line with this policy there came a complete ending to the interest in the Ukrainians in the RSFSR and the other Soviet Republics. Skrypnyk had done his best to educate the several million of these in Ukrainian and at the moment of his fall the UkSSR was sending papers, books, and theatrical companies, as well as teachers, to educate and maintain their Ukrainian feelings as loyal members of the Soviet Union. That was abruptly changed in 1932 and the pressure upon them to declare themselves as simply Russians was constantly increased. It was almost forbidden to mention the name Ukrainian in connection with the older settlers in Kuban, along the Don, in the Green Wedge along the Amur, etc. and it was a matter of perplexity as to what language they could be said to speak or what dialect in connection with later studies of the dialects of the Russian language. It was inadmissible to regard them as speaking a peasant dialect in view of the attitude of the authorities in recognizing some sort of Ukrainian, but it was even worse to believe that Ukrainian could exist in those regions and so they were simply passed over and forgotten, while the newcomers, usually being under some kind of a ban, were simply treated as Russian deportees.

Even this was not the whole story, for in such cities as Vinnytsya during these same years, the population was slaughtered by the thousands and buried secretly in carefully hidden burial places which were then turned into parks and playgrounds to conceal the extent of the crimes. This was repeated in many places but the situation in Vinnytsya attracted especial attention because during the War, the Germans found the places of burial and revealed the thousands of bodies of the victims, many of whom had been buried alive. The extent of these massacres was as great as was the killing of the Polish officers in Katyn, which was likewise brought to light during the war.

By the time the census of 1939 was taken and this was the last one published, the growth of the number of Russians and the diminution of Ukrainians showed clearly that there was a large scale transfer of nationality which completely reversed the figures in some sections of Asia without regard for the natural laws of reproduction and mortality.

In this atmosphere the nature of the intellectual and literary work in the UkSSR can well be imagined. The Ukrainian scholars were forced to accept the full Russian theories of the Ukrainian past. This led to a complete revaluation of all the “outstanding figures.” In 1933 the career of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was condemned on the ground that he was a typical representative of the noble classes. By the outbreak of World War II he became a Russian patriot for signing the Treaty of Pereyaslav and bringing the Zaporozhian Kozaks under Muscovite domination. It was so in every branch of historical study. In back of the conception of the Soviet man and Soviet patriotism began to emerge with ever greater clarity the conception of Russian patriotism, as the doctrine of the “elder brother” who had given culture and civilization to the other nations of the Soviet Union became clearer and clearer.

It was the same thing in language. Khvylya and his friends had been working on a Ukrainian-Russian dictionary but this was immediately criticized by Pravda for its divisive tendencies, and the guilty compilers were liquidated. A new edition was started in 1938 on still a new principle. The Ukrainian and Russian words were to have the same number of synonyms and these were to have identical value. If, in any particular case, this did not prove to be true, it was so much the worse for the Ukrainian. If there were more words in Ukrainian to express various shades of one idea that there were in Russian, the words were banned. If there were fewer, the Russian words were supplied in order to show the influence that Russian had had upon the cultural development of Ukrainian.

The result was the reverse of what Zatonsky had proposed. He had suggested a mixed language with the idea that the Ukrainians would develop by practice toward the use of standard Russian. Now the new Commissariat of Education was introducing Russian into Ukrainian, forbidding the use of Ukrainian syntactical constructions which had no parallel in Russian in order to train the Ukrainians to speak Russian by infiltrating it into their native speech. The result would have been perhaps the same, but the important difference was that it preserved the supremacy of the Russian language in a pure form and corrupted the Ukrainian beyond recognition.

This procedure was too violent, even for many of the poets and writers who were most ardent in their support of the Stalinist regime. Men like Bazhan, who had put his pen entirely at the disposal of Moscow, continued to use some of the forbidden words and even obtained rewards for their obsequious phrases couched in this taboo language. It was necessary if the whole theory of the USSR was not to fall by the wayside and the authorities in Moscow were becoming aware of the growing danger of Nazism.

They encouraged the writers, as Tychyna and Rylsky, to write narrative and other poems on themes of the old hostility of the Ukrainians to the Polish nobles and to stress the assistance which, in those ancient days, the Ukrainians had received from the Muscovite authorities. They fanned again the fires of the civil war when the Ukrainian Communists, backed by their Muscovite friends and masters, were warring against the Ukrainian National Republic and Petlyura.

In fact, during these fantastic years, Tychyna, Rylsky, Yanovsky and similar writers, as well as Korniychuk, found it easier to maintain their freedom by this fanning of Ukrainian chauvinism into flame than did those authors who, following the narrow interpretation of socialist realism, sought to trace the transformations in the contemporary life and the growth of confidence in the Russian ideas of industrialization and collectivization. Again and again these men were called to account for allowing their local and national sympathies to run away with them and to include descriptions which were perhaps nostalgic but which could be twisted in the perverse logic of the NKVD into hidden criticisms of the great Stalin, the leaders of the people, and the all-wise and beneficent rule of Moscow.

By 1939, the situation in the Ukraine had changed entirely from what it had been in 1929 when the first five year plan was getting under way. The salient features of the Ukrainian economic life had been destroyed. Yet Moscow was not yet satisfied.

Despite the increased taxation and the reduction in the income of the average dweller on a collective farm, the Communist Party demanded each year a larger part of the grain and of the cash income. The voluntary donations for the benefit of the armed forces were increased and steps were begun to demand taxes in kind from the returns which the peasants received from their individual plots. Thus a peasant was required to contribute so many eggs per year to the government, which did not concern itself as to whether or not that peasant was raising hens. The government demanded its share of the manure from the private cattle and it made no difference as to whether or not the individual raised cattle.

At the same time the heads of the Communist Party sought high and wide for misuse of state property. Again and again they discovered that on collective farms the administration and the peasants were in agreement that the best way to allow some improvement in the general economic situation was to permit the peasant to cultivate and have the income from a slightly larger plot of land. The increased productivity in this way often more than covered the apparent use of state income from the operations of the farm but to the leaders of the Communist Party this was as severe an offence as was the failure to fulfil obligations, for it dared to question the superiority of the policy of collectivization. During 1939, the Party made strenuous efforts to stop such abuses and they even went further in urging and commanding a reduction in the individual allotments of land, which had been the only means of winning even a grudging approval of the Ukrainian peasants for the idea of collectivization.

Of course, with the outbreak of World War II there came a slight relaxation of this pressure, for Stalin and his friends apparently became aware that an excessive attack upon the peasantry might lead them to make common cause with the opponents of the Soviet Union. Yet, this relaxation of pressure was very slight during the years 1939-1941, when the alliance of Stalin and Hitler seemed to be firm and steady and when the Soviet Union was expanding in accordance with its own powers and its own intrigues. In all this the Ukraine remained aloof, closely guarded against the importation of new ideas and the population dragged on their weary existence, scarcely daring to dream that anything could happen to change their unhappy lot.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The First Occupation of Western Ukraine

After the expulsion of the Soviet Forces from Western Ukraine in 1920, the territory, including Eastern Galicia and Lviv, had remained under Polish rule and had been subjected to a policy of Polonization and colonization by a Polish population. There had been during the period between the wars many clashes and much unpleasantness between the two nationalities and the ill will thus generated promised disastrous consequences for Poland in case of a new war. At the same time the Polish domination had never threatened the fundamental forms of Ukrainian social life, as had been the case in the UkSSR; the Ukrainians had a certain representation in the Polish Parliament, and they had been allowed, despite hindrances, to develop their own economic life. With the possible exception of the one district of Boryslav, there was very little Communism among the population, who were well aware of the handicaps under which their brothers in the UkSSR were living. At the same time the Nazi refusal to support the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine in the spring of 1939 had placed them on their guard against the Nazis.

Thus, when World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, the revolt of the Ukrainians which many Poles expected did not take place. However, the Polish government in the first days arrested and placed in concentration camps many of the Ukrainian leaders but they were freed by the rapid advance of the German forces and the Polish retreat, which forced into Lviv and the neighborhood many thousands of refugees.

On August 23, 1939, when the Nazis and the Soviets signed a non-aggression treaty, it was provided that if Poland were disintegrated, Germany and the USSR would divide the territory roughly along the line of the Narev, the Vistula, and the San. This gave to the USSR the bulk of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian territories included in pre-war Poland and Germany also expressed her disinterest in the fate of Bukovyna and Bessarabia, where there was a Ukrainian population under Rumanian rule.

The collapse of the Polish forces before the German onslaught was so rapid that by September 17, 1939, the city of Lviv was practically in German hands. Then the Soviets, hiding their aggressive designs under the pretext that they were liberating their Ukrainian and Byelorussian brothers from the rule of the Polish lords and capitalists, declared that the Polish government had come to an end and that the Red Army was crossing the Polish border to restore and unite the population with the Soviet republics. At the approach of the Red Armies the Germans withdrew, and Lviv and the old Eastern Galicia remained in Soviet hands.

The Soviet army had advanced with either anti-Polish or anti-capitalist slogans without any opposition, but it was met with little real enthusiasm, for the Western Ukrainians were apprehensive as to what the future might bring. Some of the more openly anti-Communist leaders dropped out of sight or made their way into German-occupied territory. The bulk of the population remained passive, for they remembered the Russian invasion of 1914 and knew what those Ukrainians who had cooperated suffered when the Austro-Hungarian government returned the next year, and they could not believe that this time the Soviets would be any more fortunate.

The first days of the occupation were devoted to a conscious Ukrainization of the territory. The bulk of the population assisted in rounding up of the Polish police and security forces which had made themselves objectionable during the Polish domination, and without any hesitation unfurled the old Ukrainian blue and yellow national flag. The co-operation of the old Ukrainian political leaders was politely rejected but there was a large number of young, educated Ukrainians without special political experience whose aid was welcomed.

The old newspapers ceased at once to appear, but the new occupants started in all of the main cities new Communist newspapers as the Free Ukraine in Lviv and the Soviet Ukraine in Stanyslaviv. They allowed also a Communist Polish newspaper the Red Flag and a similar paper in Yiddish.

The old officials were at first encouraged to return to their posts, whether they were Polish or not but in a very short time they began to disappear and they were replaced by Ukrainian-speaking persons, some from the neighborhood and some from eastern Ukraine. At almost the same time, while preparations were begun for the proposed plebiscite, the authorities quietly picked up and incarcerated most of the old political leaders, especially those of the UNDO, the Ukrainian National Democratic League, the representatives of those parties that had sought a normalization of relations with the Poles.

In the same slow and unobtrusive way the Polish police of the different cities were replaced by a “national militia.” This was composed of armed groups of young men who more or less volunteered for the work of maintaining order. The Ukrainian and the Jewish organizations tried to bring these self-appointed groups under control but this proved a difficult task for, in many cases, the new Soviet authorities had encouraged some of the more lawless and tumultuous elements to undertake the work so as to profit themselves by the resultant chaos and to facilitate the calling in of their own people.

This era of anxiety on the part of the population and of extreme moderation on the part of the occupying forces lasted for almost a month, while preparations were being made for the election of representatives of all organizations, factories, and groups to a National Assembly for the consideration of reunion with the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Meetings were held everywhere, at which attendance was compulsory, and everywhere there was expressed by selected speakers the gratitude of the people for their liberation from the Polish lords and the imperialistic capitalists. Khrushchov and other high functionaries arrived from Kiev to conduct these elections and to superintend the preparation of the lists of delegates. Yet it was almost at once noted that while there were a few well-known persons on the various lists of delegates, the vast majority were either completely unknown or were definitely recognized as representatives of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic or of the occupying forces.

The election on October 22 was carried on in the regular Bolshevik fashion with no opportunity for any choice of candidates. Over 90% of the people were marshalled to the polls and it was made clear that they had no choice but to approve the selected list. The response was, of course, practically unanimous and the next step was then in order.

On October 26, the National Assembly met in Lviv. The delegates, acting under definite orders, elected a presidium which included Stalin and the officials of the UkSSR. The first act was to pass a resolution of gratitude to Stalin and the Soviet leaders for their liberation of the country. Then there were a few laudatory speeches and the resolution was adopted to apply for membership in the USSR, to nationalize trade, industry and the banks, to divide the land of the state, the large landowners and the church among the landless and poor peasants, and to send a delegation to Kiev and Moscow to ask for the incorporation.

All this was a cut and dried performance to satisfy the Communist love of paper democracy and to justify their occupation of the country under the guise of liberation. There was no discussion allowed and once again the resolution was accepted unanimously.

On November 1, the selected delegation met Stalin, and the Presidium of the USSR in Moscow formally welcomed the liberated brothers and annexed their territory to the UkSSR. It was noteworthy that the action of Moscow completely overshadowed any reception at Kiev but this was only natural in view of the nature of the entire enterprise. There were none of those demonstrations that had marked the union of the two sections in the Ukrainian National Republic in 1919, when the vote and the union represented the will of the people.

Once these formalities had been accomplished, the Soviets felt free to act and, at a steadily increasing tempo, they went through in a few months a refined version of what they had accomplished in the eastern Ukraine in the course of twenty years. At first their actions were moderate but with the passage of time they began to develop and to reveal those tendencies which had marked their course in the east.

The first task was the reorganization of the country geographically. On September 28, they had come to a new agreement with the Germans, whereby Germany had given up her claims to Lithuania in return for the area between the San and the Buh Rivers. So the Soviets assigned Wilno and its territory to an independent Lithuania; they annexed the region further south to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the rest to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This left to the Germans four sections of Western Ukraine, Kholmshchyna, Pidlyashshya, Posannya, and Lemkivshchyna, which were included in the Polish Government General and were governed directly by the Nazis, who allowed the appointment of a Ukrainian Central Committee to represent the Ukrainians before the higher authorities, especially in question of relief, etc.

The Soviet territory was divided into six districts with their centres at Lviv, Drohobych, Stanyslaviv, Ternopil, Rivne and Lutsk. Each of these was then divided into rayons or regions with about 25,000 population. The centres of these regions were often small towns but the division was made quite arbitrarily and each centre was amply provided with bureaucratic machinery.

The economic condition of the country was extremely bad and the only saving feature was that the harvest had already been gathered, so that there was a good chance for a large part of the agricultural population, even of the poor, to survive during the winter. Yet the influx of refugees fleeing before the German advance filled the cities and the severance of connections with the west prevented the arrival of any more manufactured goods or supplies and, of course, none came from the east.

On the contrary, there came a new swarm of Soviet officials who were themselves amazed at the wealth of goods in what, to the natives, seemed impoverished markets. They brought with them liberal sums of money to buy whatever they wished and they were the more favored because the Soviets equated in value the Polish zloty and the Soviet karbovanets. When we take into consideration the fact that prior to the war a pound of meat in Poland cost four zloty and in the UkSSR twenty-five to thirty karbovantsy, the vast purchasing power of the Soviet officials can be seen. Then in December, to ruin the native population, they arbitrarily stopped the zloty as legal tender, so that the Ukrainian population lost everything, except those fortunate persons who had succeeded in exchanging their Polish money for German marks by clandestine trade across the border.

This swarm of officials was of various kinds. Those who were attached to fields like military affairs, the railroads, the posts and telegraphs, etc., i.e. those branches which were directly under the All-Union Commissariats, made no concealment of the fact that Russian was from now on to be the chief language. Other sections which were under the Commissariats in Kiev first adopted Ukrainian as their official tongue, but by the middle of 1940 they, too, had passed over to the use of Russian, exactly as had been done in all the offices in Kiev.

By the end of November, when the supplies in the stores were already becoming exhausted, the actual work of nationalization commenced. The former owners were often thrown out, if their establishments had been of any size, and as former wealthy individuals they were refused food tickets and other privileges on the ground that they belonged to the non-laboring element and were enemies of the people. This meant that they were compelled to sell upon the black market everything that they had been able to save or which they possessed and which had not been confiscated, and during the winter many of them, like the Polish landowners and the police who fell into Communist hands, were deported under atrocious and inhuman conditions to Kazakhstan and Central Asia to disappear.

On the other hand, the Soviets introduced at once the idea of dining halls for the workers and special stores for Communists and higher functionaries where they could secure easily and cheaply whatever there was to be obtained in Western Ukraine.

At the same time the nationalization of the land was commenced and this gave a good excuse for the elimination of another class of formerly prosperous people, whether they were Poles or Ukrainians. At first this was carried out along the lines of the Ukrainian land code of 1922, for the authorities were eager to get crops in when spring came. Still, during the summer of 1940 they began to urge the formation of collective farms. The peasants in some of the more backward regions listened to these ideas willingly, but in the better areas where agriculture was on a far higher and more efficient plane than in large sections of eastern Ukraine, they were very cool and meetings had to be postponed again and again if disorders were to be averted in the middle of the war. Still the Soviet authorities felt that they could waste some time until a real peace was restored and their hands were definitely free.

In regard to the educational establishments and all questions of organization, they acted without delay. In the first days of the occupation, the Soviet commissars seized the property of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and prevented all further work by confiscating the building and its contents and preventing all further publications. On January 14, 1940, they forced the complete self-liquidation of the Society. The president, Prof. Rakovsky, at once fled to the west and during the next uncertain months a large part of the active members made their way to Krakow in the Polish Government General, where they endeavored to resume their work. The Society was then turned into a branch of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR and was placed under the control of the administration in Kiev, while part of its collections and its work was placed under the University of Lviv, which was now ostensibly Ukrainianized and given the name of Ivan Franko, the great Western Ukrainian scholar and writer. This was not for long, for very soon here, too, the lecturers to win Soviet approval began to switch over from Ukrainian to Russian.

All other societies of every kind were abolished and fitted into the Soviet scheme of things. The cooperative network, especially such great societies as the Maslosoyuz (Dairy Cooperative Society) and the People’s Trade were made governmental organs. Various firms were turned into branches of one commissariat or another. By the spring, while there had not yet been a full communization of the country, the process was well advanced and no resident of Western Ukraine could doubt as to the future of the area.

In Eastern Galicia, where the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite was the predominant religion, the Metropolitan Archbishop Andry Sheptytsky was not personally touched. He was placed under more or less surveillance and found it impossible to exercise his normal activity. However, all the religious schools and seminaries under his charge were closed, the church and monastic lands were seized, and all ecclesiastical printing was suppressed. Finally, the clergy were compelled to hand over to the representatives of the government all the baptismal and other records which were incorporated in the work of the ZATS, the Soviet bureau of vital statistics. The clergy were treated as a non-working class and were thus deprived of all means of livelihood, except for the free-will offerings of their impoverished parishioners.

In the eastern sections, where the Orthodox Church predominated, the same regulations were put into force with the additional proviso that the clergy had to transfer their allegiance from the Polish Orthodox Church to the locum tenens of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow. This was a first step in improving relations between the locum tenens and the Soviet government and in making the authorities of the Russian Orthodox Church a definite instrument of the government in the spreading of Russian Communism.

On the other hand, there was a considerable patronage of Ukrainian art. Certain scholars were rather favored. The Ukrainian theatre was supported on a more liberal scale than it had been under the Polish rule and there were in some quarters hopes that there might be a happy future. It was again a short dream, for as 1940 came to a close, there began again the insistent but unobtrusive attempts at russification. Russian theatrical companies began to visit Lviv and other cities. The publications of the publishing firms of Lviv fell off and once more they found it necessary to produce Russian books. The libraries were carefully purged of those authors who had fallen under the displeasure of Moscow during the crushing of the Ukrainian renaissance and their works were forbidden, just as in Eastern Ukraine. The books that were sent from Kiev were chiefly in Russian. Furthermore, those authors, poets, and artists who were still in Western Ukraine now found themselves regimented. They were given elaborate projects but they found that their success depended upon their ability not to express themselves freely but to satisfy the demands of the Soviet authorities. As a result many of them endeavored to get, in one way or another, to the west where even if they were under Nazi rule they still had more possibilities at the time than they did under the highly organized system sponsored by Moscow.

It was thus abundantly evident that the “liberation” of Western Ukraine was but the exchange of one master for a still sterner rule. The realization of this fact came quickly and it very soon evoked a corresponding reaction which began to unite the entire population, the more so as even those few Communists in Western Ukraine who had remained true to their convictions were now seized by the Soviet authorities and punished on the ground that they were Trotskyists or were believers in one of the various deviations from the general line of the party. There were to be no Communists except those who had passed through the Soviet training school and those people who had believed that their Communist faith would be of profit to them found themselves in as wretched a position as had Eastern Ukrainian Communists like Khvylovy and Skrypnyk who had gained nothing by their independence, except death and destruction.

Thus, by the spring of 1941 conditions in Western Ukraine were rapidly assuming the same form that they had taken in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Any hopes that there would be any exception or any toleration for the area were once and for all annihilated when the Soviets attacked Finland and, still more, when, in the summer of 1940, they absorbed and turned into Soviet Republics the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Soviets were shown clearly to be on the march and it was for the people to protect themselves as best they could.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Western Ukrainian Reaction

To appreciate the next step in the relations between the Western Ukrainians and the Soviets, it is necessary to go back and look briefly at the conditions that existed under Polish rule. The two peoples were distinctly hostile but their relations were very different from those between the Eastern Ukrainians and the Russians.

The old Austro-Hungarian Empire, unlike the Russian, had not denied the existence of a Ukrainian people, even though it had not favored their development save as a counterbalance to the Poles in Eastern Galicia. Yet there was a considerable number of Western Ukrainians who had been trained to fill the lower offices in the old Hapsburg system. They had the right of voting for the provincial diets and when the Hapsburg Empire disintegrated, they immediately voted for the establishment of a Western Ukrainian Republic. When this failed to establish itself and to win recognition by the Western powers and the League of Nations, the vast majority of the Western Ukrainians under the leadership of the UNDO voted for representatives to the Polish Parliament and continued the struggle in a legal and parliamentary manner to win rights for themselves.

A minority which was finally organized into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under Col. Evhen Konovalets continued the illegal and revolutionary struggle through sabotage and terroristic attacks on outstanding anti-Ukrainian Poles. It was in vain that the Polish government endeavored to suppress this group by the forced pacification of Eastern Galicia and by other violent tactics and, after the murder of Colonel Konovalets, his place was taken by Colonel Melnyk.

In 1932, in connection with the suppression of the Ukrainians in the UkSSR, the claim was advanced that the OUN had commenced work in eastern Ukrainian territory. However that might be, the small group continued to operate in Poland. It trained young men in secret military organizations, in operating without detection, and in undercover political education. In this work it was opposed and imitated by some of the legal political bodies, usually of a more leftist but still anti-Communist type, which likewise prepared their own cadres of semi-trained men who would be ready to act, if need arose.

The events of 1939, with the rise and fall of the independent Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, won many adherents to these groups and organizations, and after the outbreak of the war and the occupation of Western Ukraine by the Communists, the latter advertised their existence by their talk of an active Ukrainian underground.

With the first months of the occupation the network of these groups spread throughout the country but even under these conditions there was little or no cooperation between them and similar Polish groups which persisted in maintaining the Polish supremacy and waited only for the Soviet defeat to reassert their hegemony in the area. Some of the leaders went abroad and there was considerable confusion aroused in their ranks but, by the spring of 1940, when the full weight of the Soviet changes was beginning to be felt by the population, the attitude changed toward these groups and they began to be looked upon as the leaders of the Ukrainians who objected to the introduction of the Communist regime.

The general turmoil that existed with anti-Nazis fleeing to the east, the outstanding Ukrainians trying to get to the west, the sending of members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to the villages as teachers and the general disorganization, gave them relatively good conditions for developing and making their principles and knowledge available to the villagers. These were made aware of the fact that any opposition to the new regime would be instantly punished and as their normal pre-war life was now converted into a criminal existence, they showed themselves more ready to cooperate.

Unfortunately, during this preliminary period discord broke out in the OUN. One faction under Stepan Bandera objected to the leadership of Colonel Melnyk and demanded the change of several prominent leaders. When this was refused, a split came in the organization with Melnyk at the head of one faction and Bandera in control of the other. It is very possible that this split was the result of German intrigue to prevent the formation of a strong Ukrainian movement but it had the result of weakening it, even though both Bandera and Melnyk fell into German hands and were imprisoned during the rest of the war. Their followers continued and intensified the feud and even came to armed clashes.

Both factions of the OUN and similar groups strengthened themselves first along the borders and commenced to smuggle arms and ammunition from the west, so as to be prepared to act in case there came an armed clash between Germany and the USSR. Then, as the months passed, the network extended further into the country and the OUN became organized on a territorial basis under a Country Executive and the Country Leader, who were assisted by expert advisers on military affairs and propaganda.

While the two imperialistic powers were still friends, there was little possibility for open sabotage. The chief work of the Ukrainian patriotic underground was the spreading of the national spirit, the encouraging of the spirits of the oppressed, and the secret education of the masses in the hope of later action. They sought to counter-balance the Soviet propaganda and their efforts to enlist the young people in the Komsomols and train them as Communists. They worked upon some of the eastern Ukrainians who were moved by the Soviet regime to the west and they brought it about that some of these remained behind and joined their ranks when the break finally came in 1941.

Despite the efforts of the leaders to hold their followers in check, they were not always successful for some of the younger members were so enraged by the Bolshevik tactics that they could not be restrained from attempting individual acts of reprisal. These usually failed and involved not only the punishment of numbers of the innocent but also called the attention of the Communist leaders to the existence of the organizations and made them more vigilant in tracking down suspects.

Some of the members, to secure more adequate military training, even enlisted in the Red Army, sometimes with the approval of the heads of the underground but this proved an expensive process, for the alerted Communists usually moved these candidates for training well to the east where they would be harmless in case of a general conflict. Numbers of them were sent to the Bashkir ASSR and to the central Russian areas.

By the spring of 1941 there were many members of these underground associations hiding in the forests of Eastern Galicia and Volynia and the Soviets sent out armed detachments to pursue them and to locate the caches of arms which they had not only smuggled in but had taken from the Poles during the last days of the Polish opposition and which they had seized from small and often unsuspecting Soviet detachments. These searches often resulted in armed clashes in which the Red forces often emerged victorious, thanks to the ever greater numbers of soldiers who were assigned to them.

The work of the courriers between the different units and sections became more arduous and dangerous as the Soviets tightened their control over the population and strengthened the border guards on one pretext or another. What had once been a relatively open border, the area between Sokal and Turka, was now guarded by barbed wire and the Ukrainian population, which was suspected of complicity with the underground, was removed.

In the same way, the Soviets prepared one device after another to attack the Executive of this underground movement. They succeeded three times in capturing and trying many of the leading members and in the spring of 1941 they were starting a fourth trial in which they hoped to assert their power and to crush the movement finally. Yet, their plans for this were finally upset by the opening of hostilities between Germany and the USSR.

It was no easy task to organize this movement under the very eyes of a ruthless invader. Many of the agents who were engaged in it fell into the enemy hands and were executed ruthlessly. It was still harder to bring together the groups that were working for the various Ukrainian parties and to arouse them to a realization that, in the face of the threat from the east, those differences which had seemed so important during the parliamentary struggle against the Poles were to be forgotten in the face of the common danger to all those things which the various parties had in common. Yet they persevered despite heavy losses and by the spring of 1941, while their position still seemed hopeless, they had succeeded in creating a nucleus of organized opposition to Soviet rule which was really widespread and had some repercussions in the ranks of the Red Army, especially among the eastern Ukrainians and some of the other non-Russians who had been mobilized and sent for service in the area.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania

The agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union had stated that the former was not interested in the fate of Bukovyna and Bessarabia, both of which contained a large Ukrainian population. It was therefore obvious that once the Soviet hands were freed from the Soviet-Finnish war, they would endeavor to acquire these additional territories.

In both Bukovyna and Bessarabia the Ukrainian cause had been less developed, although there had been far more work in Bukovyna than in Bessarabia, which had been under Russian rule. The Ukrainian uprising in Chernivtsy had not been successful in 1918 and when the territory was added to Rumania, that country put a stop to all Ukrainian work, including education although a Ukrainian theatre had developed and there was considerable secret work being done.

As a result, there was a sense of stagnation which was very different from the situation in the lands under Poland. There was less sense of coordination and when in June, 1940, the Soviets requested Rumania to hand over the new provinces, Rumania had only to submit. Most of Bukovyna and the part of Bessarabia inhabited by Ukrainians were annexed to the UkSSR. The rest of Bessarabia was added to the Moldavian ASSR, which was later raised to the dignity of a Union Republic and intended for propaganda use against Rumania.

The Soviet policy was then much the same as it had been in the area taken over from Poland. There was the same amount of propaganda declaring the “liberation” of the country from the Rumanian nobles and from international capitalism. There was the same voting for annexation to the USSR, the same enthusiastic reception in Moscow, and the same process of nationalization, of the arrest of outstanding figures, and the same destruction of the established forms of life in both areas.

The Soviets were, however, less advanced in these provinces for the application of their system required time and their stay in the area was eight months less than it was in the territory taken from Poland.

The anti-Communist leaders fled either into Rumania proper or Germany or made their way to the Polish Government General in Krakow. On the other hand, despite the attempts to seal off the country, the OUN found ways of extending its influence into Bukovyna and appealed to the more alert classes of the population.

In general the Ukrainians in these two areas formed rather a secluded enclave in the general mass of Ukrainian history and they did not play a role in proportion to their numbers. They thus scarcely enter into the account, although for a while, in 1941, there was organized a force of some 2,000 who sought to impede the Rumanian return to the country. Yet, their opposition was fruitless and when they endeavored to cut their way out, they were either destroyed by the Germans or dispersed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The German Attack on the Soviets

During the period from 1939 to 1941, the German policy toward those Ukrainians who had escaped from the Soviet occupation into the Polish Government General was not too severe. It was possible for the Ukrainians in Krakow and elsewhere to carry on a considerable amount of educational work, to form themselves into relief organizations and, in general, to work for the establishment of normal relations.

When the breach between the two totalitarian states came on June 22, 1941, the Germans pushed ahead rapidly not only in the Baltic area but also in Ukraine. By June 30, they had occupied Lviv with the aid of some Ukrainian units, both from Carpatho-Ukraine and from Galicia.

During these days the Ukrainians had high hopes that the Germans would seriously liberate them from Bolshevik tyranny and wherever they had the slightest possibility, they endeavored to seize the cities so as to put a stop to the massacres which the Communists were perpetrating before they fell back. In some places they were successful but in Lviv, the Communists killed over 10,000 prisoners, before their bloody regime could be brought to an end.

In the first days of the war, although there were no clear promises made to the Ukrainians, the impression grew that there would be established some form of a Ukrainian administration. The political leaders set up a Ukrainian government and appointed Yaroslav Stetsko as the first head of the state on June 30, 1941. A short time later this was broadened by the appointment of a Committee of Seniors under the leadership of Dr. Kost Levytsky, who had been the Prime Minister of the Republic of Western Ukraine in 1918. These developments had the support of Metropolitan Sheptytsky, although he knew that they did not yet rest on organized public sentiment.

It was well recognized by the influential Ukrainians that the situation was very different from what it had been at the end of the Hapsburg monarchy, but they went through the motions of setting up a government on the possibility that the Germans would allow them some real concessions and that it would be mutually advantageous to be already prepared for all eventualities.

It is perhaps possible that a part of the German armed forces looked with a certain toleration at these developments, for at least a part of the officer class realized that the task of the German government would be greatly facilitated, if they were able to normalize the situation and win some support from the population, as they had in the Polish Government General. This did not suit the Nazi element who believed that the advance of the German forces was only to secure more Lebensraum for Germany. This faction struck and struck hard at the new regime and secured the arrest of Stetsko, Levytsky, Bandera and Melnyk, all of whom were taken to prison in Germany where they were kept for nearly four years.

The arrest of the leaders, while it was a crushing blow, still was not completely fatal. The advance of the German troops was so rapid on the way to Kiev that the Ukrainian leaders continued for some months to inspire the population not to resist the Germans, the more so as the western regiments of the Red Army surrendered in large masses. Thus when Kiev fell, some 675,000 of the Red Army surrendered with scarcely a blow.

On the other hand, the Soviets attempted to devastate the country before they withdrew, shooting the Ukrainian intelligentsia indiscriminately and trying to seize as many as they could for evacuation beyond the Urals. They demolished factories, tried to remove finished articles and mined the cities before they abandoned them. Then, when they exploded the mines, they spread the story that the total work of demolition had been carried on by the Germans.

On August 1, the Germans made a new division of the country and assigned the whole of Galicia to the Polish Government General. At the same time they returned Bukovyna and Bessarabia to Rumania and then set up a new section around Odesa under the name of Transdnistria which they likewise placed under Rumania. It was in vain that the Ukrainians who tried to organize their own national rada in Kiev protested against such actions, for their protests were not received and the Nazis went on with their policy of ignoring all the wishes of the population.

Later in the month, the Germans established the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine and placed it under the control of a fanatical Nazi, Erich Koch, who set himself during the next years to crush anything and everything that was done to aid the Ukrainians and to win for himself the detested title of the butcher of Ukraine.

In the early months of the German occupation and especially during the period of rapid military movements, much was done for the rebuilding of the country after the ravages of the Bolsheviks. Nearly 115 Ukrainian newspapers were established, plans were made for the opening of schools and during the transition from the military rule to the rule of Koch, the Ukrainian agents were in the front ranks of the German army, spreading their propaganda and trying to rouse the population against the Bolsheviks.

Yet this work did not please the Germans. Everywhere in eastern Europe the old governments that had been suppressed by the Bolsheviks tried to recreate themselves but everywhere there came the arrests of these leaders and their deportation, so that it was not many months before the sober thought of the liberated peoples turned against the new occupants and the people realized that their hopes were going to be in vain. By the end of 1941, it had been made clear to them that there would be no relaxation of the pressure exerted upon them.

In the Reichskommissariat which, in fact, represented little more than the right bank of the Dnieper area, for the army retained the control over the regions to the east of the river, it speedily became impossible for the Ukrainians to improve their own condition. The Germans were guided by a strictly logical program. Inasmuch as all the land was organized in collective farms and the title to these rested in the Soviet government, they as conquerors merely took over the land of their defeated rivals. They continued the same kind of collectivized agriculture, since it brought them the greatest advantages and they had no intention of doing anything for the Ukrainian population. Koch made it clear that the Ukrainians had no rights that the Germans were bound to respect. Their property was not theirs but it was reserved for Germans and once the system was in the saddle, as shown by Koch’s Twelve Commandments for the regulation of the relations of the two peoples, he did everything to destroy completely the Ukrainian intellectual life.

By the winter of 1941-2, the Germans in Kiev were executing Ukrainian writers as O. Teliha and Dr. Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych, who were accused of plotting against the new masters. Soon there began extensive deportations of Ukrainians to Germany for slave labor and the number of victims from the ranks of the cooperatives rapidly grew.

These German actions naturally roused the Ukrainians to a more vigorous opposition and resulted in the formation of numerous armed bands which, from secure hiding places in the forests and swamps, raided German convoys and at times extended their open control over large areas of the country. Among the first of these bands to appear was that of the Polyssian Sich under the command of Taras Bulba—Borovets which operated in Polissya and Volynia. Other significant and important movements were started by the followers of Bandera (the so-called Banderivtsy) and of Melnyk. Yet these groups were not alone for almost spontaneously there sprang up many other local units, all interested in the same goal of Ukrainian independence. Some of these units were organized primarily to fight against Soviet irregulars. Others had seen from the beginning their most dangerous foe as the Germans but whatever their origin, the overbearing brutality of the Germans swung these groups to a determined warfare against them.

This process continued during most of 1942 with the Ukrainian forces taking over more and more control from the Germans, menacing their lines of communication and rescuing young Ukrainians who were being deported for labor service in Germany. It was during this year that the leaders came to feel the need for closer cooperation and a unification of their efforts. This was hard to achieve and there were even clashes between different groups of Ukrainian patriots. Yet, toward the beginning of 1943 the more important groups had effected a rough union in the U. P. A., the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which took on the characteristics of an organized military force.

By the middle of 1943 this army had acquired considerable strength and it was able to deal shattering blows to isolated German detachments and to drive out both the local German administration and any Red partisans that tried to operate in the area around the Pripet marshes. In May, 1943, they were even strong enough to ambush and kill the head of the Nazi S. A., Viktor Lutze, in the neighborhood of Kowel-Brest Litovsk.

The policy of the U. P. A. was to destroy the local German administrations which were scattered in the smaller communities and to avoid battle with the greater concentration of forces in some of the leading centres. In this way the Ukrainians were able to take over the practical administration of large parts of the Ukraine and to restore a considerable amount of normal life, while they checked the deportation of thousands or released them from the slave trains. The U. P. A. during these years had its own training schools, it set up on a small scale its own factories for arms and some of the most necessary manufactures, and it governed with the approval of the Ukrainian population.

At this period it had its own printing presses and put out a large number of journals and books of various kinds. These were not only in Ukrainian but, as the U. P. A. grew in size and strength, it attracted the attention and won the sympathies of all the other nations oppressed by the Russians. It formed units of Byelorussians, Azerbaijanians, Uzbeks, etc. and finally on November 21, 1944, it called the First Conference of the Oppressed Peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia, which was attended by some thirty-nine delegates representing thirteen peoples. The Germans tried to break this up but they were unsuccessful and the police battalion which was assigned to the operation was destroyed. Out of this Conference developed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations which adopted as its program, “Freedom to peoples, freedom to the individual.”

It would take too long to describe the actual nature of the military operations which the U. P. A. carried on. At the height of its power it controlled more than 200,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory and numbered some 220,000 soldiers divided into four main bands: the U. P. A.-North, operating in Polissya and northern Volynia; the U. P. A.-West in Eastern Galicia and Kholmshchyna; the U. P. A.-South in northern Bukovyna and the provinces of Kamyanets Podilsky and Vinnytsya; and the U. P. A.-East north of Kiev and Zhytomyr. There were separate detachments in most of the cities and important towns.

To oppose its operations, the Germans resorted to mass executions and on more than one occasion detached forces of one or two divisions to try to destroy its centres. These attempts failed and the U. P. A. by its constant efforts played an important part in isolating the German forces, upsetting their communications and sapping their strength. All this was very costly, for after every major blow the Germans executed large numbers of innocent Ukrainians as their one weapon against the movement.

At first there was relative peace in Galicia, but in the summer of 1943 a Soviet partisan detachment entered the province. The Germans took little action and the U. P. A. came to the support of the population and soon had established strong centres in the Carpathian Mountains, where the difficult terrain facilitated their maintenance of strong positions.

The Germans in the beginning did not want to admit that their policy toward the Ukrainians had evoked such a strong response. Koch and his associates were only too willing to believe that the Ukrainians were an inferior race, undeserving of education or of consideration and they went out of their way to label the U. P. A. the product of Communist intrigue and a movement of support for the Jews, etc.

In general, the military unification of the armed groups proceeded more rapidly and favorably than did the political concentration. Here the followers of Bandera established in March, 1944, a temporary committee and at a general assembly in June appointed a Supreme Council of Ukrainian Liberation (the UHVR) which assumed the functions of a government. At the same time, through the agreement of the representatives of the Ukrainian National Council in Kiev, the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv and the National Council of Carpatho-Ukraine, there was formed in September in Kiev the All-Ukrainian National Council (rada) which appointed as its president Prof. Mykola Velychkivsky, the Rector of the Kiev Polytechnic. This was rather under the control of the Melnykivtsy, and was opposed to the UHVR. Yet these differences tended to become academic, in view of the strengthened position of General Taras Chuprynka, the commander of the U. P. A.

The opposition of the U. P. A. to the German forces was therefore in a sense an opposition behind the lines. It had been facilitated by the German tendency to base their hold on the country through various strong points, while their main forces were advancing to the east and fighting against the Red Army. With the German defeat at Stalingrad in the RSFSR, they began a new retreat and this brought the Soviet forces back into the picture and placed new burdens upon the U. P. A.

In Galicia there had been formed with German toleration a regular Ukrainian division, the Galician Division, on the condition that it would only be employed against the Bolsheviks and would be maintained as a distinct unit. Yet the Germans had no intention of allowing this division to gather strength. They soon replaced the higher officers with Germans and officially called it the 14 Waffen Grenadier Division der Waffen SS., even though in no other case were Slavs of any kind assigned to the SS. This division took part in some battles with the Bolsheviks in the Carpathians. With the breaking of the German front, the German military men made renewed efforts to enroll this division and to create other units in a regular Ukrainian army under General Shandruk but it was already too late. There had been too much bad blood created during the earlier years when the Nazi commanders expressed their contempt for everything Ukrainian to accomplish anything in the hour of German defeat. Germany had lost her chance and in the last days of the war, the Galician Division made its way to the west, surrendered, and was interned in Italy.

The development of the U. P. A., with its constant warfare against the Germans, was a clear result of the German fantastic attitude, with all of its arrogance. Had they been willing to cooperate in the first days of 1941, they might easily have secured considerable resources in men and supplies from these people who had been suffering under the Bolsheviks. They avoided any such action and it was their own stubbornness that kept them from receiving the help which they might have had. For years they did not want any assistance from the Slavs and by the time that they had learned their lesson the war was so nearly over that they could not profit.

Yet the German defeat did not produce peace. No one of the Ukrainians doubted that the receding of the German wave would produce a new Soviet invasion and as the Germans retired to the west, the U. P. A. and its associated organs prepared for a new struggle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Return of the Communists

The struggle of the U. P. A. against the returning Communists was no less bitter than the struggle with the Nazis but it was under very different conditions and the forces involved were more unequal. In the first place, the bulk of the fighting came after the conclusion of the hostilities of World War II and at a time when the Sovietophilism of the Western democratic powers was at its height.

The Nazis were during the entire period engaged with the Soviet forces beyond the borders of the Ukraine and while they attempted to maintain their position in the Ukraine, they frequently counted upon their ability to hold the chief road junctions and communities and exerted less effort to keep their garrisons in every separate village. The Soviet policy was to master the entire country and subject every aspect of Ukrainian life to their own power and control. They could therefore the more easily rely upon the use of overwhelming forces and endeavor to maintain a steady and never-ending pressure, while at the same time they could invoke every weapon in their propaganda arsenal to blacken their opponents in the mind of the democratic world.

Then, too, with the ending of formal hostilities there was no longer the possibility that the U. P. A. by its attacks upon one of its enemies could secure the weapons that would serve it in good stead against the other. This had been a marked feature of the earlier campaigns, for the Soviets had reconquered Kharkiv in the late fall of 1942, only to lose it in early 1943 and to recover it again later in the year. The Red Army recovered Kiev on November 6. In the spring of 1944 the Germans were forced to evacuate Lviv but they recovered the city and held it until the end of July. Thus, during this period of German retreat, the U. P. A. had been able to acquire large stores of munitions, which they could not hope easily to replace, once the major hostilities were over.

It was very soon evident that the efforts of the U. P. A. against the Soviet forces would take quite a different shape from their attacks on the Nazis. In the last stages of the war Stalin had organized many of the mobilized Ukrainians into various Ukrainian armies, so as to give the Western powers the idea that the Ukrainians were loyal to the Soviet Union. This added elements of a civil war to the struggle and the members of the U. P. A. decided to reduce their efforts against these Ukrainian forces of the Red Army and to substitute propaganda for a free Ukraine. In this respect they met with considerable success and through their masses of printed material and through personal contact, they more or less neutralized the Ukrainian divisions of the Red Army.

Instead, they concentrated their efforts against the NKVD detachments which were brought in from remote parts of the Soviet Union and in which the Russians formed the predominant personnel. It was the NKVD and the staffs of the Motor Tractor Stations who were now the chief part of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus in the country and so the U. P. A. devoted its chief interest to working against these and to encouraging discontent on the collective farms, for the war was scarcely over when it was made clear that conditions were to be even stiffer and harder than they had been in the past.

The war in the Ukraine had reduced the population to still worse depths of poverty than had been the case after 1918. Nevertheless, almost at once the villages were expected to make liberal gifts of grain to their beloved Stalin and the elder brothers, the Great Russians, who had, in the words of Stalin, won the victory over the Nazis and who would still protect them from the capitalists and warmongers of the West.

The events of the last months of fighting had shifted many of the organized forces of the U. P. A. to the Carpathian areas and this section which had struggled for its freedom against Hungary in 1939, now received a new master. As soon as the Soviet forces entered the region in the autumn of 1944, they immediately began a campaign to liberate this area from Czecho-Slovakia and reunite it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was the same old story carried on in the same way as in 1939. There was a mass of petitions apparently prepared by the native population asking for liberation, but these were in reality the work of a handful of carefully selected Communists.

They speedily reached their goal and on June 29, 1945, President Benes of Czechoslovakia recognized the justice of their claims and by an agreement handed over the entire province which was duly reunited with their brothers in Moscow. This brought together under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic nearly all the Ukrainians, except a few who were still living in Poland and in a small stretch of territory which the UkSSR voluntarily ceded to Poland to satisfy the increasing claims of the Polish Communists and their needs in their efforts to cement their power in that state.

At the same time the realization by the Soviet authorities of the seriousness of the situation offered by the U. P. A. and the unrest among the Ukrainians led them to act on both the foreign and the domestic front. On the former they mobilized all of their friends and dupes abroad to stress the connection of the U. P. A., the “Bandera bandits,” and the Nazi criminals and they achieved considerable success in closing the eyes of the west until they had won considerable victories over the various U. P. A. groups, for too many Western leaders failed to see the inconsistency that they preached. At one and the same time the Soviet authorities boasted of their complete control of the territory of Western Ukraine, thanks to the love of the population for the Red Army and in almost the same breath they declaimed against these armed forces which were holding up the advance of the Red Army and the NKVD in the very areas where the people were thirsting for liberation.

On the domestic front in the autumn of 1945 they sent a large force of men into the Carpathian area under the command of Khrushchov as Premier of the UkSSR and General Ryasny, the Minister of War, to endeavor to suppress these bands. Despite unprecedented torture of the population, the Soviets found that their progress was not so great as they had expected, for few of the Ukrainian units in their forces were enthusiastic about the campaign, when they saw the measures that the government was taking against their own families.

In the spring of 1946, they made another attempt, this time using some fifteen divisions of NKVD troops from the Far East, Siberia and Leningrad under the direct control of General Colonel Moskalenko. The authorities had been goaded to this renewed demonstration of force by the fact that the town of Stanislav in the Carpathian area had been seized by five battalions of the U. P. A. on October 31, 1945 as a discouragement to the Ukrainians to participate in the Soviet elections called for February 10, 1946. Despite the efforts of the Soviet guards, a considerable portion of the population failed to vote and when the attacks upon them were pressed, a detachment of the U. P. A. succeeded on May 3, 1946, in ambushing Moskalenko and killing him and his chief aids. This ended another campaign and still left the U. P. A. in control of parts of the Carpathian area.

In addition to these operations on purely Ukrainian territory, the U. P. A. undertook several raids across the borders in order to encourage dissatisfaction with Soviet rule among some of the neighboring peoples. Thus they established contact with similar groups in Slovakia, Byelorussia and Lithuania, while others cut their way across Hungary into Yugoslavia to join forces with the opponents of Communism in that area.

The raids into Slovakia were especially successful throughout 1945 and 1946 and were continued on a smaller scale during the next years. They served as an encouragement for the anti-Communist elements of the population and, of far more importance in the long run, they attracted the attention of Western journalists who for the first time began to realize the extent of the discontent that prevailed in the Soviet Union. More than that, with every step to the West, they were brought closer to the Western Zones of Germany and Austria and several well-armed detachments have during the past years fought their way into the American Zone, laid down their arms and surrendered. These brought the first really definite information to the West and while they have not received the attention that they deserved, they have undoubtedly encouraged the almost frantic desires of the Great Russian emigrés to pretend that they have an efficient underground operating at home.

The result of these raids produced an impression even upon the Czechs. Before the Communist coup d’état which placed the Communists in control of that country, the Czech Minister of War under Dr. Benes was approached by the Soviet authorities and asked for joint action with the Soviets and the Communist Poles to check the opposition to Soviet rule and to project joint operations on a large scale.

On March 29, 1947, General W. Swierszczewski, the Communist Polish Vice Minister of War, was killed near the town of Baligrod. This again was too startling a revelation of the discontent and on May 12th of the same year, the three governments of the USSR, Poland and Czecho-Slovakia concluded a treaty of mutual assistance against this movement.

Faced by the increasingly organized power of the Communist regimes, the U. P. A. has been obliged to proceed with more caution and it has largely replaced mass movements with operations on a smaller scale with the idea of keeping alive a spirit of resistance within the country. It is becoming increasingly difficult for it to publish and circulate pamphlets but it is still able, in case of necessity, to impede seriously the Soviet attempts at deportation of the Ukrainian population and again and again it is able to damage severely the Motor Tractor Stations.

On March 5, 1950, General Chuprynka, the commander of the U. P. A., was tracked down and killed in the village of Bilohorska in the very neighborhood of Lviv. He had proved himself a more than competent leader and had been the soul of the U. P. A. since its foundation in 1943. His parents, his wife and his children had all perished in the struggle but he had never wavered in his belief in a final victory and he had become an almost legendary figure.

His death did not end the fighting, for he was succeeded in command by Colonel Vasyl Koval. Even operations were not suspended, for it is known that late in September of the same year, a detachment of the forces seized the town of Mukachiv in the Carpathians and retired to the mountains with the records of the MVD office there and two prisoners who had made themselves particularly obnoxious by their cruelty and their abuse of the local population.

Thus under the present circumstances the primary task of the U. P. A. is to maintain itself in being as an armed underground, to encourage the population, both of the Ukraine and the other groups oppressed by the Russian Communists, and to carry on certain types of propaganda and of terroristic work which will serve to keep on the anxious seat the masters of the Kremlin. At the moment it does not have the possibility of undertaking by itself those extensive operations that it has done in the past but it is not idle and in the well-hidden bunkers and the forests, it is fostering those traditions which can be again galvanized into activity, if the moment for action arrives.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Soviet Ukraine During World War II

In the preceding chapters we have briefly traced the efforts of the Ukrainians to profit by the clash between the two totalitarian powers of Germany and the USSR and the Ukrainian hopes of being recognized as an independent state. These hopes had been thwarted by the Nazi refusal to treat the Ukraine as anything except a field for German expansion and the Western refusal to recognize the Ukrainian struggle for independence.

This, of course, does not tell the entire story. From the earliest days of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, many of the leading Ukrainian patriots, writers, artists and scholars, including a large part of the staff of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, had seized the opportunity to retire to the west into the Polish Government General but there were many more who were picked up in the early deportations and deposited along with the Poles in Central Asia. Some of these, during the brief period of friendship between the Poles and the Soviets, were again able to make their way to the west along with General Anders and found themselves again at freedom, while those who had retired to the west were forced to undergo increasing persecution at the hands of the Nazis as these became more desperate.

On the other hand, when the break finally came in 1941 and the Ukrainians, including those mobilized in the Red Army, began to surrender in masses, the Soviets began to deport to the east all of the outstanding people on whom they could lay their hands and whom at the first moment they did not wish to exterminate. In this number there were such Ukrainian writers as Tychyna, Rylsky and others who had showed their loyalty to the regime by their tasteless flattery of the regime in Moscow.

In the same way, the authorities gathered up in frenzied haste machinery, finished products, and records and started them likewise to the east with the hope of setting them up somewhere in a safe place and using them to increase the Soviet war potential. All this was a hurried and confused process, for it was contradicted by the Soviet orders to reduce the Ukraine to a heap of ruins and to leave nothing available for the invaders.

The clash between these two ideas was vividly reflected in the destruction of Kiev. Some sections of the Academy of Sciences of the UkSSR were hurriedly packed on trains and moved to Ufa. Other sections for little better reasons were abandoned in the general confusion or were mined for immediate destruction. Priceless books and records, no less than boilers and lathes, shared the two fates, while Kiev, thoroughly mined, was exploded and set on fire without regard for the needs of the people. The Soviet authorities, well aware that they could not evacuate the entire population, destroyed the food supplies of those who were left behind while other detachments massacred the helpless population indiscriminately.

The situation at Kharkiv and Odesa was far better and far more logical for the Soviets had a few days longer to sort out what they wished to remove and what they wanted to destroy, but even in these places there was the same wanton destruction which conflicted with the avowed aims of the Soviet authorities.

Then ensued a series of mutual recriminations, and it is still not 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.

In the same way the liberation of Moscow from the Tatar yoke, the 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.

Hence the leaders of the movement for a Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church were in a way powerless to regulate their relations with Orthodoxy as a whole. They had been unable to secure the support and assistance of any Russian bishops. They were turned down in an appeal to the Bulgarian Church and they obtained no response from the Patriarch of Constantinople.

Impressed by the sense of urgency and the justice of their cause, the leaders of the movement held a synod in Kiev on October 11, 1921 and proceeded to elect as bishops Father Vasyl Lypkivsky and Father Nestor Sharayevsky. Then, as they had no bishops available for their consecration, the members of the Sobor laid their hands upon them and consecrated them bishops without the participation of any bishops save relics of the saints preserved in Kiev. Lypkivsky was then made Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and he and his associate soon consecrated some 27 other bishops.

Yet the uncanonical nature of this original action drove a wedge between the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and the other Orthodox Churches and made certain that it would not later attract any validly consecrated bishops who would regularize the succession. On the other hand, other reforms, as the introduction of Ukrainian into the services in place of the old Church Slavonic, enabled the Russian opponents to classify it with the various movements as the Living Church which the Bolsheviks had fostered in their endeavor to disintegrate the Russian Church from within.

Still later, when the Orthodox in the succession states began to organize and came under the influence of the Patriarch of Constantinople, whose position had grown less critical with the strengthening of the new Turkey, it was too late for him to extend aid to the Ukrainian Orthodox as he did to those living under Polish rule by the recognition of a Polish Autocephalous Church in 1924. Thus the Ukrainian Orthodox were left almost completely isolated to face alone the atheistic Communist and imperialistic Russian Orthodox pressure.

Metropolitan Lypkivsky showed himself a very competent leader. The number of parishes under his control multiplied rapidly and by 1927 the Church had nearly 3,000 parishes and some 10,600 priests. It was no small achievement to establish and develop this under the harsh conditions of Soviet reality and for several years during the height of the movement of Ukrainization, the Church flourished and bade fair to restore the traditions of the old Ukrainian Orthodox Church and there were high hopes that sooner or later it would be able to heal the defects in the original consecration.

This was not to be, for after the death of the Patriarch Tikhon the power in the Russian Church passed into the hands of the Metropolitan Sergy who showed himself willing to effect such a compromise with Stalin and Communism as might be necessary. His offer was, to a certain degree, accepted and the Soviet regime, without changing its policy of persecuting all religious activity, began to throw a few crumbs of favor to the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in Moscow. Slowly but surely, the various Russian divisions, like the Living Church, slipped back into the general organization, and the Soviets soon grasped the possibilities of using Sergy and the Russian organization as a political weapon in their struggle for world domination.

Even before the ending of Ukrainization, the Communists began to put obstacles in the way of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church. The Metropolitan was refused permission to visit the various parishes under his control and to publish journals and other material for his flock. This was followed by more active measures. Metropolitan Lypkivsky was arrested and imprisoned. So were all of the other bishops and by 1930 there was not a single one of the bishops still in Ukraine who was not in prison or dead. The church was broken up and all of its activities stopped, but the spirit that had animated it continued to lie hidden.

When the Germans and the Soviets occupied Poland in 1939, a new possibility was sensed. The so-called Polish Autocephalous Church was composed ingly of Ukrainians and Byelorussians, with but a few anti-Communist Russians. Even before 1939, some of these Ukrainian clergy and laity had begun to take steps for the Ukrainianizing of the Church, even though they had been forced to introduce Polish into the services. When the storm broke, Russians like Bishop Sava made their way abroad and joined the Russians in exile. Bishop Oleksy (Hromadsky) in Kremyanets and Bishop Polykarp (Sikorsky) in Lutsk were forced to recognize the Moscow organization, which was coming into favor with Stalin because of its increasing subservience to the Soviet regime. On the other hand, Metropolitan Dionysy, who had been in that part of Ukraine that was included in the Polish Government General, now threw off any attempt at concealment and revived the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, which this time was provided with canonical orders in all grades. He consecrated two new Ukrainian bishops, Ilarion (O. Ohienko) for Kholm and Podlyasie and Palady (Vedybida-Rudemko) for Krakow and Lemkivshchyna.

This marked a new period and when the Germans attacked the USSR in 1941 and occupied it, Polykarp joined them, while Oleksy set up still another group, the Ukrainian Autonomous Church, for he refused to break his connections with Moscow.

The German permission for the formation in 1942 of a central organization was frankly ambiguous. On the one hand, they were glad of any movement that would rouse the people against Moscow. On the other, in religion as in politics, they were opposed to any movement which would prevent them from carrying out their policy of treating the Ukrainians as a subject and inferior race. As a result, they put every obstacle in the way of a reconciliation between the Autocephalous and the Autonomous groups and threw their support to whichever was the weaker in any given area.

The open support of the Soviet government by Sergy and his associates now under the pressure of war paid off. His protestations of sympathy for Stalin and the Russians were rewarded with medals and other honors. Then, in the autumn of 1943, as the final step in the process, Stalin gave permission for the restoration of the Patriarchate in Moscow and Sergy was duly installed. On his death in 1944, he was succeeded by Aleksey, the former Archbishop of Leningrad, the present Patriarch, and under his leadership the Russian Orthodox Church has embarked upon a policy of securing control for the Soviets of all other Orthodox Churches.

In the meanwhile, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church during the war displayed great activity in the occupied Ukraine. It speedily won the support of most of the clergy who were not in the Soviet service. It reopened churches that had been closed by the Soviets and it cooperated with the Ukrainian patriotic movement.

With the return of the Soviet forces, the leaders of the Church retired to the west with a large part of the priests, and the others joined the underground. The Ukrainian Church was again suppressed and brought directly under the Patriarch of Moscow and it is to be noted that the head of the Orthodox Church in the UkSSR, does not hold any special point of honor as does the Catholicus of Georgia, who is still recognized as the head of a satellite Church.

It is thus safe to say that despite the continued existence of the UkSSR as an independent nation for the purposes of the United Nations, there is now no distinctive Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It has been swallowed, as in the days of Peter I, by the great Moscow religious imperialism. It has no independence and it is thoroughly and in all points independent upon the Russian Patriarch in Moscow.

B. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH OF THE BYZANTINE RITE

When in 1939 the Soviet forces by their understanding with the Nazis occupied for the first time Eastern Galicia and the Western Ukrainian lands, they at once set to work to remodel the area on their own standards and to eliminate all the characteristic features of Ukrainian life and culture. This process was, however, rudely interrupted by the German attack in 1941.

The dominant religion in the area was the Greek Catholic Uniat Church, or, to be more precise, Catholicism of the Byzantine Rite. The Metropolitan of this Church, Andry Sheptytsky, was the most respected figure in the entire area and he was a religious and cultural leader in every sense of the word. During this first occupation, Archbishop Sheptytsky was not personally disturbed but he was deprived of his liberty and forced into a semi-retirement. His schools and other institutions were closed, the Church was deprived of its property and a considerable number of priests were punished on various charges. Yet there was no general holocaust.

In 1941, Archbishop Sheptytsky was one of the leading figures in the attempt to revive a native and independent Ukrainian government. This was, of course, prevented by the Germans and the Archbishop remained at Lviv scarcely more free during the German occupation of Ukraine than he had been under the Soviets. He continued his efforts to unite both the Ukrainian Catholic and Autocephalous Churches without effect, but he was able to do considerable for the well-being of his people. Still he was no longer free to act openly, although his advice was sought whenever and wherever it could be.

The Soviets reoccupied Lviv on July 27, 1944 and at once set to work more vigorously to introduce their system. Archbishop Sheptytsky did not long survive for he passed away on November 1 of the same year. He was succeeded in his post by Joseph Slipy, who had been one of his outstanding assistants and the rector of the Theological Academy which Metropolitan Sheptytsky had founded in the late twenties, when it had become evident that the Poles would not allow the creation of a Ukrainian University in Lviv.

Metropolitan Slipy had barely been installed in office, when the Soviets showed their hand and began to call for a condemnation of the Vatican by the Ukrainian Catholics and for their union with Moscow. It did not take long for words to turn into actions.

On April 15, 1945, the NKVD surrounded the Cathedral of St. George in Lviv and arrested the Metropolitan, Bishop Budko and Bishop Charnetsky together with many other leaders. They arrested all of the students of the Theological Academy and they likewise seized the Cathedral and turned it over to the Patriarch of Moscow as a Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time, they informed the professors of the Theological Seminary that the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite had ceased to exist.

At almost the same time the NKVD gathered in the other Catholic bishops in Western Ukraine, Bishop Khomyshyn of Stanislaviv and his vicar, Bishop Lyatyshevsky, while at the same time the Polish Communist regime seized Bishop Kotsylovsky of Peremyshl and his auxiliary bishop, Lakota. Bishops Khomyshyn and Kotsylovsky soon died under the treatment that they received.

The others were kept in prison and then in 1946, according to the best available information, Metropolitan Slipy and his associates were sent to labor camps in the far north in the Vorkuta coal mines. From that time they have disappeared from sight.

In 1947, the last Catholic bishop of this rite, Bishop Romzha of Carpatho-Ukraine, while travelling through his diocese “collided” accidentally with a Soviet tank and was killed and this ended the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy in their own lands. The following year the Rumanian government followed suit and likewise annihilated the hierarchy of the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite in Transylvania. In 1950 the Czech Communist regime arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment Bishop Hoydych and his coadjutor Hopka of the diocese of Prashev in Slovakia.

These actions were followed in each case by attacks upon the lower clergy, who were ordered to accept the supremacy of the Patriarch of Moscow. This was fully in the tradition of the old Russian Church, for each time that the tsars had bitten off a slice of Ukraine, they had applied the same methods to the Catholic hierarchy in the section, to the intent that the Byzantine rite could be performed only under the supervision of the Russian authorities.

In this case in 1945, on July 1, when the Soviet Ukrainian Commissar for Religion, Khodchenko, called on the clergy to recognize the new situation, the professors of the Theological Academy met in Lviv in the Cathedral of St. George and presented a request that they be given the liberties accorded to them on paper by the Stalinist Constitution. The answer was their arrest and imprisonment.

Then the government set to work. They secured the apostasy of one of the foremost of the Ukrainian Catholic priests, Father Kostelnyk, who willingly put himself at the service of the Patriarch and presided over a “sobor” which was called to ratify the switch from the Vatican to the Patriarch. Many of the priests who attended were apparently members of the NKVD in disguise. They willingly applauded Stalin and the Patriarch and armed with this authority, the Soviet regime set to work to seize all the churches and property of the Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite and preempt it for their own use.

This marked the end of the open existence of the Church. There were still priests who escaped and took refuge with the U. P. A. (the Ukrainian underground) but open worship was at an end. There has been enforced at least a superficial agreement with the Kremlin on all matters of religion. Nevertheless, the latent hatred still exists and it can flare up at any moment when the situation warrants it.

The movements represented by the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and the Ukrainian Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite still flourish in the emigration, where alone there is any opportunity for free thought. In the meanwhile, the Kremlin is maintaining its position in its traditional Muscovite manner and applying its savage punishments and deportations and executions to prove that Ukraine is happy and contented in following the example of the “elder brother.” Yet even so, the number of episodes when Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism appears make it seem as if the officials of both church and state were not too sure that the Ukrainian people fully sympathize with the Patriarch Aleksey in his deification of the foremost man of the ages, who still forbids Communists to have anything to do with the Orthodox Church. That has sold its soul for as little real value as did the Ukrainian Communists in the early years of the struggle.

Conclusion

On March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin, who had been the dominant force in the Soviet Union for 29 years, died in the Kremlin of a stroke. The man who had superintended the transformation of the country, the Georgian revolutionist who had espoused the claims of the Great Russians as had none of the Russian tsars, died peacefully in his bed, almost the only one of the Communist leaders since Lenin who has not died violently or in the slave camps of the north and the east. It was the end of an era.

The next day, his successor, Georgy Maximilonovich Malenkov, was installed in office with a complete realignment of the governmental organization and a large number of shifts, promotions and demotions among his associates. The announcement emphasized that the new regime would follow closely the lines promulgated by Stalin. In this new setup, Khrushchov, the former Russian tyrant over Ukraine, was confirmed in his position in the Presidium of the Communist Party, and his successor, another Russian, Melnikov, the present head of the Ukrainian Communists, was made an alternate in the same Presidium.

The day before, as Stalin lay dying, the Kremlin government issued a statement urging unity upon all the peoples of the Soviet Union and reiterated the statement that success in carrying on the policy was due to the loyalty to the Soviet regime of the Great Russians, the leaders of the Union. They were the only one of the Soviet peoples or the peoples under the Soviets mentioned by name.

Nothing in the careers of Malenkov or of Beria, who emerges with increased powers as the head of the Ministry of the Interior (including National Security), or any of the men mentioned for high office gives any indication that the old process of russification and centralization will be changed. Everything points to an intensification of it and perhaps an intensification that will be less original and even more mechanical. There seems little likelihood that there will be any diminution of pressure or any return toward the relative liberalism of the early years. We can only wait to see whether the transmission of power can be handled without any of the discords that followed the death of Lenin and whether Malenkov can succeed to the deified position which was demanded for Stalin during his later years.

The mystery that the Kremlin has thrown around itself has succeeded in hiding from the world the personal relations of the new leaders. Yet, the almost immediate attacks on American and British planes in all parts of the world reflect the determination of the new regime to continue the militant policy of its predecessor. On the other hand, the peaceful speeches of Malenkov and a few isolated acts of apparent diminished hostility have served to revive the hopes of many of the Western nations in the possibilities of better relations with the USSR. This is quite in accordance with Soviet plans to split its opponents, who still do not want to realize that gestures of friendship to the peoples beyond the Iron Curtain mean nothing more than gestures of friendship to the foreign Communists already dependent upon Moscow for their support and guidance.

By Soviet definition, the Communists are the peace-loving leaders of all the peoples of the world and the only ones entitled to speak for those peoples, while non-Communist governments are something to be deceived and overthrown from within, if possible. This has been the cardinal principle of Soviet policy since 1917 and explains the repeated failures of the free world to reach any definite settlement with Moscow. It should lead the West to reexamine its relations with the Kremlin and also those with the Great Russians who are now, in the Kremlin language, practically equated with the Communists.

It should compel the West to forget the dream of a Russian unity and the speeches and writings of the Russian emigrés should be considered critically in view of their attitude toward Ukraine and the other non-Russian peoples that were conquered by the tsars, reconquered by the Soviets and now in the name of Great Russian Communism subjected to a new period of russification.

At the same time, there is no new evidence that the regime of Malenkov is any more tolerant of the national differences or feelings of the non-Russian peoples than was the previous regime. The steady rise in influence of Khrushchov suggests the opposite and a still greater pressure upon Ukraine.

Since World War II, the attitude of the Kremlin toward the Ukrainians has perceptibly hardened. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a member of the United Nations. It has its own government, its own flag, its own national anthem. Yet, by the orders of the Kremlin, no diplomat from outside the iron curtain is admitted to its capital of Kiev. Its government conducts all of its affairs through Moscow.

The Ukrainians are to-day the slaves of Moscow in their own country. They are liable to be deported across its boundaries at any moment and their places taken by Russians or persons from anywhere within the Soviet orbit. They are compelled to think Russian thoughts, to interpret their past, their present and their future in terms acceptable to their elder brothers, the Great Russians. The slightest deviation from that path is met with the grim charge of bourgeois nationalism, the gravest offence in the entire list of crimes.

That same process in earlier stages is taking place in all the Soviet satellites. Step by step, the culture of the other countries is being remodelled on the Russian Soviet pattern. The Russian language is being introduced and forced into the dominant place. Step by step, their national traditions are being spurned, corrupted and altered, so that they will be worthy members of the Soviet Union under Russian Communist leadership. Their contacts with the outside world are being cut off, while the Moscow radio blares out day and night the statements that the Russians are the friends of peace while the nations outside are warmongers and imperialists.

We might be tempted to believe that Moscow is right but we can scarcely with normal intelligence and sanity believe that the millions of Ukrainians who have been condemned for bourgeois nationalism are anything but victims of a mania of persecution and of cruelty. We can hardly believe in the criminality of the increasing role of victims throughout the satellite states. We can hardly believe in the stability of a regime which can find itself menaced by the flight of a single citizen from its paradise.

When we add to this, the constant Soviet warnings of the danger of espionage, their secrecy as to all matters of economics, their isolation of foreign representatives, their unwillingness to let travellers and observers view their great achievements, we must become still more doubtful. We cannot give credence to the benign character of a state which proclaims almost every day that it has discovered new acts of disloyalty, of sabotage and of almost open revolt, which annihilates whole groups and nations for disloyalty.

One thing is obvious. The situation calls for a firm and progressively growing interrelation between the world outside, an interrelation in arms and in economics and in culture. It needs an awareness of the process by which this Soviet system has been built up. Then, perhaps in time, we may secure the answer to the question whether the Soviet Union will sweep the whole of humanity within its stereotyped laws because of its real strength or whether the power of the Soviet Union is based upon the disunion of the democratic world, its mutual jealousies and antagonisms. Will the successors of Stalin dare to risk a war or will their artificial structure fall apart, if it passes under too great a strain?

Yet, to answer such a question, we must know as much as possible of the methods by which that system is built up. It is here that the fate of the Ukrainians comes in again, for we can follow in their sad experiences the methods which the Russian Communists have ever employed.

In a very real sense Ukraine and the Ukrainians are the touchstone of the system. If the Kremlin can win a lasting victory, it has a chance of success. If it can persuade the Ukrainians to be happy in their new slavery, it may win out. If it cannot stop their opposition except by their total extermination, then we can be sure that the world can save itself if it awakes.

There is only one thing certain. Before the United Nations can function as it was intended, its members must be independent states and peoples. That means that the Ukrainian representatives must be free representatives of a free Ukraine who can contribute their part to the common welfare. In one way or another, that must come and the Muscovite domination must be ended. May it come soon and in a peaceful manner! Then, with that, will come of necessity the ending of the process, the restoration of liberty to the countries within the Iron Curtain and the possibility of the cooperation of men for the elimination of suffering, want, injustice and fear and the opening of a new and enlightened period in human history.

Index

- A
- Akhmatova, Anna, 196
- Aleksey, Patriarch, 210, 214
- Anders, Gen., 181
- Avvakum, 196
- B
- Bahaly, D., 75
- Bandera, S., 159-168, 170, 173
- Bazhan, M., 69, 124, 146
- Belinsky, V., 127, 198f.
- Benes, E., Pres., 177, 179
- Beria, L., 142, 215
- Blakytny, V., 37, 67
- Bondarenko, 143
- Budko, Bishop, 212
- Bukharin, 68, 141
- Bulakhovsky, L. A., 201
- Bulba, Taras-Borovets, 170
- Burevy, K., 123
- C
- Catherine II, Empress, 17, 123
- Chamberlin, W. H., 105
- Charlemagne, 195
- Charnetsky, Bishop, 212
- Chaykivsky, 63
- Chekhovsky, V., 19
- Chernyshevsky, 198f.
- Chicherin, 27, 31
- Chubar, 61, 121
- Chumak, V., 67
- Chuprynka, G., 65
- Chuprynka, T., Gen., 173, 179
- D
- Denikin, Gen., 16, 30, 32, 41
- Dionysy, Metropolitan, 210
- Dobrohayev, V., Prof., 84
- Dovzhenko, 83
- Dray-Khmara, 124
- Duranty, W., 105
- E
- Epik, 124
- F
- Falkivsky, D., 70, 123
- G
- Gorky, M., 26, 118, 199
- H
- Hantsov, V., 76
- Hermayze, J., 110
- Hitler, A., 106f., 141, 147
- Holoskevych, K., 76
- Holovko, 124
- Holubovych, V., 39, 113
- Hoover, Herbert, Pres., 44
- Hopka, Bishop, 213
- Hoydych, Bishop, 213
- Hrinchenko, M., 76

- Hrushevsky, M., Prof., 65, 74, 112, 124, 198

- Hrynko, 60f.
- I
- Ilarion, Bishop (Ohienko), 210
- Innitzer, Cardinal, 105
- Ivan III, Tsar, 195
- Ivchenko, M., 116
- K
- Kaganovich, L., 61, 82, 142
- Kaganovich, N., 126
- Kalinin, 105
- Kandyba-Olzhych, 170
- Kasyanenko, E., 37
- Khmelevtsev, 32
- Khmelnytsky, B., Hetman, 145
- Khodchenko, 213
- Khomyshyn, Bishop, 212f.
- Khrushchov, 151, 177, 189, 197, 215

- Khvylovy, M., 69, 79ff., 88, 109ff., 136, 157, 195

- Khvylya, A., 84, 126, 143, 146
- Kirychenko, S., 37
- Koch, Erich, Reichskommissar, 169ff.
- Konovalets, E., Col., 113, 159
- Korniychuk, 125, 188, 196, 200
- Kostelnyk, 213
- Kosynka, H., 123f.
- Kotlyarevsky, I., 17, 199
- Kotsylovsky, Bishop, 212f.
- Kotsyubynsky, G., 26
- Kotsyubynsky, M., 65
- Koval, V., Col., 180
- Krushelnytsky, 123
- Krymsky, A., Prof., 64, 76, 127
- Kulish, M., 69, 83, 123f.
- Kulish, P., 198
- Kulyk, I., 119f., 124
- Kun, Bela, 29, 35
- Kurbas, L., 69, 116, 123
- Kurylo, O., 76
- Kyrylenko, 125
- L
- Lakota, Bishop, 213
- Lapchynsky, Yu., 37, 63
- Lebid, D., 59

- Lenin, N., 15ff., 21, 27, 33ff., 45f., 51, 89, 104, 113, 141, 215

- Lesya Ukrainka, 65, 199
- Levytsky-Nechuy, I., 65
- Levytsky, Kost., 167f.
- Levytsky, O., 198
- Lunacharsky, 68
- Lutze, Victor, Nazi S. A., 171
- Lyatyshevsky, Bishop, 212
- Lypkivsky, Metropolitan, 208f.
- Lyubchenko, A., 69
- Lyubchenko, P., 37, 121, 143
- Lyzanivsky, 39
- M
- Magridge, 98
- Makhno, N., 32, 84
- Maksymovych, 61
- Malenkov, G., 215ff.
- Mannerheim, K., Baron, 28
- Manuilsky, D. Z., 30, 47, 186
- Marr, N., Prof., 202
- Marx, K., 113
- Mazepa, Ivan, Hetman, 113, 195
- Mazlakh, S., 29f.
- Melnikov, 189, 215
- Melnyk, Col., 159, 168, 170
- Mikhnovsky, M., 19, 56
- Moskalenko, 178
- Muravyev, M., 26, 28
- Mustapha Kemal, 207
- Mykhaylychenko, H., 67
- Mykytenko, 125
- N
- Naumenko, 198
- Neronovych, 26, 30
- Nicholas I, Tsar, 127
- Nicholas II, Tsar, 20
- O
- Oleksy, Bishop, 209f.
- Oles, O., 65, 198
- Osmachka, T., 70
- P
- Palady, Bishop, 210
- Panch, P., 69, 124
- Peter I, Tsar, 195f., 211

- Petlyura, S. Ataman, 19, 23, 30ff., 113, 124

- Petrenko, S., 39
- Pidmohylny, V., 84, 124
- Pluzhnyk, E., 70
- Poloz, 37
- Polykarp, Bishop, 209f.
- Postyshev, P., 97, 121f., 128, 142
- Pyatakov, G., 28
- R
- Radishchev, 189
- Rakovsky, I., Prof., 155
- Rakovsky, Ch., 31, 41
- Romzha, Bishop, 213
- Roosevelt, F. D., Pres., 106
- Rudnytsky, S., Prof., 63
- Ryasny, Gen., 177

- Rylsky, M., 67, 120, 124, 147, 181, 196, 198, 201

- S
- Samiylenko, 65
- Sava, Bishop, 209
- Semenko, M., 70, 124
- Sergy, Patriarch, 209f.
- Shakhray, V., 26, 28f.
- Sharayevsky, Bishop, 208

- Sheptytsky, Andry, Metropolitan, 168, 206, 211f.

- Shevchenko, Taras, 120, 198
- Shlikhter, 33, 64
- Shumsky, O., 37, 60f., 79, 81

- Skrypnyk, M., 22, 28f., 61ff., 77ff., 88, 103, 109ff., 136, 144, 157, 195

- Skoropadsky, Hetman, 23ff., 73
- Slabchenko, M., 75, 110
- Slipy, J., Metropolitan, 212f.
- Slynko, P., 37
- Sophia Paleolog, Tsaitsa, 195
- Sosyura, 199f.
- Stalin, Joseph, 15, 29, 56, passim, etc.
- Starytska-Chernyakivska, L., 65, 110
- Stefanyk, V., 68
- Steshchenko, I., 198
- Stetsko, J., 167f.
- Swierszczewski, Gen., 179
- Synyavsky, O., 76
- T
- Teliha, O., 170
- Tikhon, Patriarch, 206, 209
- Tikhonov, N., 197
- Tolstoy, A. N., 116

- Trotsky, L., 16ff., 27, 35, 56, 68, 79ff., 88, 141

- Tukhachevsky, Marshal, 141
- Turyansky, 61
- Tychyna, P., 67ff., 120, 124, 147, 181, 196
- Tymchenko, E., 76
- V
- Vasylkiv, 61
- Velychkivsky, Prof., 173
- Vlyzko, 123
- Volobuyiv, 84
- von Schleicher, Kurt, 106
- Vorony, M., 65
- Vuzko, 124
- Vynnychenko, V., 19, 30ff., 58, 65, 198
- Vyshnya, O., 39
- W
- Wilson, Woodrow, Pres., 34
- Y
- Yagoda, 132, 141
- Yalovy, 124
- Yanovsky, Y., 69, 147, 196, 200
- Yefremiv, S., Prof., 76, 110, 120, 198
- Yegorov, Marshal, 141
- Yezhov, 141f.
- Yohansen, M., 69, 124
- Z
- Zalyochy, A., 67
- Zatonsky, V., 26, 64, 122f., 143, 146
- Zerov, M., 67, 124
- Zhdanov, A., 119, 197
- Zinovyev, 27, 141
- Zoshchenko, 197

Transcriber’s Notes

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.

Minor typographical errors have been corrected.

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Table of Contents

Ukraine Under the Soviets

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Contents

CHAPTER ONE The Background of the Communist Triumph

CHAPTER TWO The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic

CHAPTER THREE The Period of Militant Communism

CHAPTER FOUR The New Economic Policy

CHAPTER FIVE Ukrainization

CHAPTER SIX The Literary Renaissance

CHAPTER SEVEN The Scholarly Revival

CHAPTER EIGHT Mykola Khvylovy

CHAPTER NINE The Five Year Plan

CHAPTER TEN The Famine

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Famine, the Soviets and the World

CHAPTER TWELVE The Early Trials

CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Turning of the Cultural Tide

CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Debacle

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Thirties

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Ukraine in the Late Thirties

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN The First Occupation of Western Ukraine

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The Western Ukrainian Reaction

CHAPTER NINETEEN The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania

CHAPTER TWENTY The German Attack on the Soviets

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Return of the Communists

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Soviet Ukraine During World War II

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Ukraine After World War II

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Soviet Cultural Policy in the Ukraine After the War

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Soviet Religious Policy

A. The Orthodox

B. The Catholic Church of the Byzantine Rite

Conclusion

Index

Transcriber’s Notes

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