After Kirov’s Murder
With the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Communist Party boss and popular Politburo member, on 1 December 1934, the NKVD unleashed a new wave of terror throughout the USSR.
In 1935 and 1936, Soviet security agencies arrested more spies, Trotskyists, Zinovievites, and former members of non-Bolshevik political parties in the Ukrainian SSR than in any other region of the Soviet Union.104Between October 1936 and November 1938, during the so-called “Great Terror,” the NKVD arrested more than 1,575,000 people and executed 681,692 for counter-revolutionary crimes throughout the USSR.105 In Ukraine in 1937 and 1938, this dreaded organization arrested 267,579 men and women and executed 122,237 of them. Victims included former party leaders and hundreds of the members of the republic’s elite, people with non-Bolshevik political affiliations, industrial managers and engineers, intellectuals, clergy, and national minorities, such as the Poles and Germans, who suffered disproportionately as potential “enemy spies.”106 Alleged “kulaks” and “Ukrainian nationalists” also endured extensive repressions.107
In addition to real and perceived political opponents, Stalin attempted to annihilate people from formerly privileged classes, such as the nobles; immigrants from foreign countries; fugitives and de-kulakized peasants; marginal people, such as the poor and unemployed; priests and their families; and people who associated with foreigners.108 The mass terror operations of 1937-8 re-emphasized the need to crush “kulak elements,” religious believers, and the “Trotskyist agents of the German-Japanese counter-intelligence services.”109 All in all, the NKVD shot nearly seventy- one thousand inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine during this kulak operation, nearly one-fifth of all executed in the USSR as a whole.
Of these seventy- one thousand, over half were accused of Ukrainian nationalism.110 Most did not experience ordinary trials. Instead, the NKVD tried and sentenced many of them with its three-member “Special Sections.”The Postyshev era ended in mid-March 1937, when the authorities abruptly reassigned the Ukrainian party’s second secretary to Kuibyshev, where he continued his struggle against “wreckers,” “Trotskyists,” and other well-entrenched “counter-revolutionaries.” One year later, he was recalled to Moscow, where he was arrested, then disappeared. Balitsky shared his fate.
Delegates to the Thirteenth Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine (held ten weeks after Postyshev’s transfer) may have imagined that they had avoided the tidal waves of purges which engulfed the USSR. But shortly after this meeting ended, the authorities arrested the Red Army’s entire high command, including top army commanders in Ukraine, and shot them. The NKVD also detained many members of the CP(b)U and the Soviet Ukrainian government.111
Beginning on 9 July, Moscow’s Pravda published a number of attacks on the All-Ukrainian Radio Committee and on cadre problems in Vinnytsia, in the Komsomol, and in Ukraine’s regional communist party newspapers. All of these attacks directly or indirectly blamed the Ukrainian party’s newly elected Central Committee for its lack of vigilance.112 The Ukrainian Central Committee’s public response to these charges in Pravda failed to stop the onslaught.113
In August, the central Politburo sent a special commission, consisting of Viacheslav Molotov, Nikolai Yezhov, and Nikita Khrushchev to Kiev. They called a plenary session of the CP(b)U Central Committee and expressed no confidence in it or in the Soviet Ukrainian government, headed by Panas Liubchenko. Newspapers soon accused Liubchenko of being a member of an anti-Soviet bourgeois-nationalist organization of former Borotbists. (He had been a Borotbist before joining the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1919.)114
Shortly afterwards, Liubchenko committed suicide.
The Kremlin then recalled Stanislav Kosior, the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, to Moscow, and arrested his closest advisers. Stalin’s loyalists liquidated the overwhelming majority of the leaders of the CP(b)U, including sixty of sixty-two members and candidate members of the party’s newly elected Central Committee, and most of the leading governmental officials.115 The Central Committee could not hold meetings because it lacked the required quorum.116A small group of emissaries from Moscow, men who held no publicly defined posts, made all of the political decisions in Ukraine.117 M.I. Bondarenko, who had served under Postyshev in the Kharkiv party organization, became the chair of the People’s Commissars on 1 September 1937, but only for another four to five months.118
In late 1937, a new updated post-Postyshev order started to emerge when Stalin appointed Nikita Khrushchev as the acting first secretary of the CP(b)U. Stalin’s viceroy arrived in Kiev on 27 January 1938, and on 22 February Damian Korotchenko became the new chair of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Ukrainian government. In June, the election of a new Central Committee at the Fourteenth Party Congress (13-18 June 1938) of the CP(b)U ended this year-long period of political uncertainty. This new Central Committee immediately chose Khrushchev as its permanent first secretary.
Taking his responsibilities seriously, the new party chief claimed that Ukraine’s difficulties during collectivization were organized “on the orders of Pilsudski and the German fascists” and vowed that the Ukrainian party must “mercilessly smash spies and traitors. And we shall smash them and finish them off.”119 Although Khrushchev did not discuss kore- nizatsiia or Ukrainization in any detail at this congress, he reaffirmed the new political reality that “we Bolsheviks develop the national culture of each people, but we develop each ‘national in form and socialist in content.’”120 Socialist content, as defined by Stalin’s inner circle, now became more important than national form.
Born in Russia’s Kursk province in 1894, Khrushchev and his family moved to the Donbass mines in 1908.121 Nikita Sergeevich had started his party career in the Ukrainian Republic in the early 1920s and became a prominent member of the Moscow regional party apparatus, reaching the position of its first secretary in 1935. Now he returned to Ukraine to head its devastated party, which barely survived several sets of radical purges. Its membership dropped from 433,500 in 1934 to 285,800 in 1938.122 Because most of the major Ukrainian party leaders had been arrested before his arrival, Khrushchev brought his own group of assistants, men he could trust, and with them reconstructed the Ukrainian party from the ground up. In 1938, Ukraine’s new party leader assigned a young Leonid Brezhnev to head a department of the Dnieprodzerzhinsk Provincial Committee and then promoted him to secretary of that committee.123
Even after Stalin dismissed Yezhov as the head of the NKVD in December 1938, the security services continued to take large numbers of men and women into custody.124 Between 1938 and 1940, the Ukrainian NKVD apprehended another 165,565 men and women on various political charges.125
Seventeen years after the start of the revolutionary period, the Communist Party decisively conquered the Ukrainian agricultural areas. After securing the collective farm system in 1933, the authorities moved the capital of Soviet Ukraine from Kharkiv to Kiev in 1934. Mass collectivization, extensive grain requisitions, famines, the Holodomor, and the purges completely overturned the uneasy political balance established by the NEP and by Ukrainization in the early 1920s. The proportion of those who identified themselves a Ukrainians in the CP(b)U fell from 60 per cent to 57 per cent between 1933 and 1937, before rising to 63 per cent in 1940.126 But this quantitative increase of Ukrainians did not represent the predominance of Ukrainian speakers within the party’s ranks or the emergence of “home
rule” for Ukrainians within the USSR. By employing mass violence, the Communist Party transformed the second most important Soviet republic into a Stalinist satrapy.