Anti-Ukrainization within Ukrainization

In Ukraine, the Great Terror of 1936-8, according to Lev Kopelev, “began with the year 1933,” long before Kirov’s murder.³⁸ But preparations to unleash this terror started even earlier, shortly after the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921.³⁹

Despite its victory over the anti-Bolshevik forces that year, the central party (as well as the CP[b]U) remained suspicious of most of the members of the Soviet creative intelligentsia in general and the advocates of Ukrainization, in particular.⁴⁰ Already in late November 1922, the Moscow headquarters of the GPU prepared an extensive report on the anti-Soviet attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia in 1921 and 1922.⁴¹ In a secret circular issued by the Moscow headquarters of the GPU on 23 November 1923 to all provincial (gubernia) heads throughout the USSR, the GPU’s leaders set up a system to observe and record the political feelings and activities of the intelligentsia in the universities, publishing houses, independent creative organizations, and cooperatives.

At the end of March 1926, the Ukrainian GPU issued a secret circular, “About Ukrainian Society,” reaffirming that the organization should keep track of the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s attitudes and opinions concerning do­mestic and international matters.⁴³ Shortly afterwards, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine approved the GPU’s recommendations, which targeted members of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, its president. After claiming that dangerous “right­wing” (anti-communist) groups spread throughout Ukraine, the GPU put into place an extensive system for observing its citizens and probing their political pulse.⁴⁴ The party’s central organs took Kaganovich’s witticism (“every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist”) very seriously.

Several weeks after the Ukrainian GPU’s recommendations, Stalin met with Alexander Shumsky, the Ukrainian commissar of education and a strong advocate of Ukrainization. In his description of this private discus­sion in a letter to Lazar Kaganovich (then the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine) the central party’s leader claimed that Shumsky be­lieved that Ukrainization was progressing “far too slowly, that it is looked upon as an imposed obligation, and is being carried out reluctantly and haltingly,” and needed more support from party and trade union leaders.⁴⁵ Shumsky, according to Stalin, asserted that Ukrainization had to be “car­ried out first of all within the ranks of the party and among the proletari­at,” where it encountered much resistance.⁴⁶ The Ukrainian commissar criticized Kaganovich’s methods and advocated changing the top party and Soviet leaders in the Ukrainian SSR.

In response to Shumsky’s assessment of Ukrainization, Stalin agreed that a broad movement favouring Ukrainian culture and the use of Ukrainian in the public sphere had attracted large numbers, but warned that many com­munists did not “realize the meaning and the importance of the movement and are therefore taking no steps to gain control of it.”⁴⁷ Most importantly, he insisted that Shumsky committed two serious ideological errors in his criticisms of Ukrainization’s implementation. His first, Stalin declared, con­fused “Ukrainization of the apparatus of our party and other bodies with Ukrainization of the proletariat.”⁴⁸ Stalin agreed that the apparatus of the party and the Soviet Ukrainian government should be Ukrainianized. But he misleadingly asserted that Shumsky advocated the need “to compel the mass of the Russian workers to give up the Russian language and Russian culture and accept the Ukrainian culture and language as their own.”⁴⁹ Stalin claimed that the forcible Ukrainization of the proletariat from above would be a “utopian and harmful policy, one capable of stirring up anti-Ukrainian chauvinism among the non-Ukrainian sections of the proletariat.”⁵⁰

Shumsky, according to Stalin, also failed to recognize the “seamy side” of Ukrainization.

Shumsky’s ideological errors, in Stalin’s view, were interconnected. Shumsky presumed that leading Ukrainian-speaking cadres could easily replace Russian or Russian-speaking ones, but he did not understand the “question of tempo,” that this transition was a lengthy, spontaneous, and natural process.⁵² Stalin implied that although Ukrainians would eventual­ly constitute the majority of the Ukrainian party and government leaders in the near future, the indigenous communist cadres were not yet qualified for higher positions. Maintaining a steady pace of Ukrainization without stirring up anti-Ukrainian chauvinism among the non-Ukrainians within the working class or allowing the Ukrainization movement to fall into hands of “hostile elements” remained the most important challenge. How could the party establish and maintain the proper tempo? By controlling not only Ukrainization’s rhythms, Stalin implied, but Ukrainization itself.

Stalin’s concerns, communicated to Kaganovich, may have spurred the Ukrainian party leader to intensify the surveillance of the Ukrainian intel­ligentsia. In September 1926, four months after Pilsudski’s coup in Poland, Ukraine’s GPU issued another memorandum, a short overview of the “separatist tendencies” among Ukrainian “counter-revolutionaries,” those men who led the Ukrainian National Republic.

This report claimed that these men and women may have publicly recog­nized the Soviet Ukrainian government but sought to undermine it from within by seeking to create an anti-Soviet “cultural front.” Many of these former exiles retained a chauvinistic ideology, professing that Ukraine re­mained Russia’s economically exploited colony, even after the Bolshevik Revolution. According to this memo, many of these emigres asserted that all government positions should be in the hands of “true Ukrainians” and sought to re-establish ties with the kulaks and their other former supporters in the countryside. Most ominously, the report highlighted the “fact” that a group of students from the Ukrainian-speaking Kuban region aspired to create a powerful, separatist organization of peasants (the Ukrainian Peasant Union) in Ukraine and in the Russian Federation’s Kuban, Crimea, the western Don, and the southern parts of the Kursk and Voronezh areas.⁵³ All in all, the GPU concluded, Ukrainization provided anti-Soviet emigres with the fig leaf to subvert the Soviet regime in Ukraine. Their possible re­connection with the Ukrainian peasantry and Ukraine’s ultimate secession from the USSR remained the GPU’s worst-case scenario.

What needed to be done? The September memorandum repeated many of the conclusions from the March circular on the need to watch the emi­gres, their relationship with the countryside, and with Ukrainian society as a whole.⁵⁴ The GPU organized this widespread surveillance program shortly afterwards.⁵⁵

As implementation of the first five-year plan unleashed massive tensions, fears, and conflicts throughout the USSR, Stalin started to deliver mixed messages concerning Ukrainization.

We must strive to ensure that a worker and peasant coming to a factory or plant or to an agricultural enterprise is literate, having at the very least, a fourth-grade education... In what language can this be achieved? In Russian?

Or in the native language? If we want to raise the broad masses of people to the highest level of culture... we must give maximum development to the native language of each nationality, since only in the native language can we achieve this.⁵⁶

Without employing national cultures in raising the masses to the higher level of culture, “we will not be able to make our industry or agriculture suitable for defense.”⁵⁷

But Stalin tempered his support for Ukrainization with references to the Russian push-back against Ukrainization. When asked by a writer about the possibility of a transfer of the majority Ukrainian-speaking ar­eas within Russia’s Kursk and Voronezh provinces and the Kuban region to the Ukrainian SSR, Stalin replied that “it makes no serious difference, of course, where one district or another of Ukraine or the RSFSR be­longs.” But this issue and other matters, he asserted, evoked “strong resis­tance from some Russians.” As a consequence, “this question must be dealt with in a careful manner, not getting too far ahead of ourselves so as not to cause a negative reaction among this or that part of the popula- tion.”⁵⁸ By the late 1920s, Stalin recognized that the Russians constituted the most important component of the USSR’s diverse population and con­cluded that the party should appease them.⁵⁹

More ominously, Stalin defended the anti-Bolshevik Mikhail Bulgakov’s play, The Days of the Turbins, which was then being performed in one of Moscow’s theatres.

Oleksa Tesniak, a writer from Kiev, asserted that when he watched the play, “the thing that struck me most was that Bolshevism defeats those peo­ple [Russian Whites and Ukrainian nationalists] not because it is Bolshevism, but because it is creating a ‘unified, great, and indivisible Russia’ [a slogan of the anti-Bolshevik movement]. This is the message which strikes every­one who sees the play, and we would be better off without this kind of victory of Bolshevism.” Another writer backed him up by asserting, “It’s become almost a tradition of the Russian theater to show Ukrainians as some kind of fools or bandits.”⁶¹

All of the Ukrainian poets, novelists, and critics at this meeting wanted the Kremlin to ban the play. But Stalin claimed that, despite its disdain for Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language, Bulgakov’s work provided “more pluses than minuses,” inasmuch as it portrayed “the invincible might of communism.”⁶² He justified his response by pointing out the ease “to cancel this thing or that thing or another thing. But you must understand that there is such a thing as an audience and it wants to see [plays].”⁶³ Explicitly, Stalin asserted that satisfying the tastes of the audience repre­sented an important factor in Soviet cultural policy. Implicitly, he hinted that the preferences of the Russian audiences should drive Soviet cultural policy.

At the meeting, an unknown writer pointed out that the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 defined two sets of national deviations confronting the Soviet regime: great-power (Russian) chauvinism and local (non-Russian) chauvinism. Although Ukrainians have assimilated this “perfectly well,” he claimed, the leading organs, “even in Moscow,” have not properly un­derstood these ideological aberrations.⁶⁴ In the 1920s in Ukraine, local de- viationists, such as Shumsky, had been condemned and their specific ideological mistakes exposed thoroughly, but this was not the case with Russian deviationists.⁶⁵

When some of the writers agreed and named a number of prominent party leaders who spread anti-Ukrainian views, Stalin dismissed these men as insignificant. He claimed that only a small number of minor and way­ward officials embraced the ideological error of “great power chauvinism.” Stalin’s responses to The Day of the Turbins and to this question demon­strated his reluctance to implement full Ukrainization, which might upset the sensitivities of the Russian public in Ukraine (as well as in the RSFSR).⁶⁶

For the Ukrainian intelligentsia, full Ukrainization represented full de­colonization, a complete break with the tsarist past. For many leading Russians and Russified communists in Ukraine, Ukrainization threatened to de-Russify the cities and undermine their status and power. Many of them possessed a sense of political entitlement. Russia had ruled this area for several hundred years. As leaders of the world’s first revolutionary, working-class, anti-imperial, and “affirmative-action” state, they viewed themselves as superior to the local Ukrainian population and would not accept marginality in the near future. For these men, as for Bulgakov, ur­ban centres represented the foundation of progress, culture, and civiliza­tion; “barbarian Ukraine” started “where the city ended.”⁶⁷ Stalin shared their apprehensions and sought to mobilize them for his own purposes.

In response to his justifications for the need to respect the sensitivities of the Russians, one unknown writer quipped: “It’s hard to catch a great­power chauvinist by the tail.”⁶⁸ Stalin then abruptly brought the long meet­ing to an end.

In dealing with the national question, the party had to confront national deviations, efforts to adapt “the internationalist policy of the working class to the nationalistic policy of the bourgeoisie,” which would “undermine the Soviet system and to restore capitalism.”⁶⁹ In the 1920s the Communist Party of the Soviet Union acknowledged the existence of two national de­viations, great-power nationalism and local nationalism. Of these two, party leaders singled out Russian great-power chauvinism as the greatest danger.

By late 1932, the central party reversed its heretofore public approval of Ukrainization (as the above-mentioned decrees of 14-15 December 1932 show). Its critics claimed that this preferential policy represented a Trojan horse for Ukrainian nationalism, which would lead to separatism. In ear­ly March 1933, the Ukrainian Politburo sent Stalin a draft of a resolution assessing Ukrainization. Stalin corrected it and expressed his own concerns:

We fought and undermined the bases of Great Russian chauvinism in order to establish national equality. But in view of the fact that this struggle was frequently waged by nationalistic elements, not always in a Bolshevik man­ner, not always in the name of internationalism, quite often Great Russian nationalism was supplanted by Ukrainian-Galician nationalism and instead of national equality there emerged another inequality, Ukrainian chauvinism and Ukrainian centrism, not internationalism but nationalism.⁷⁰

Stalin’s interpretation represented a new approach in assessing Soviet nationality policy and its implementation in Ukraine. In a November 1933 speech that Stalin heavily edited, Stanislav Kosior, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, asserted that “Great Russian chauvinism is still the main danger throughout the Soviet Union and the entire VKP(b). However, this in no way negates the fact that in certain republics of the USSR, particularly in Ukraine, the main danger at the present time is Ukrainian nationalism, which is allied with the imperialistic intervention- ists.”⁷¹ In late January 1934, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, Stalin as­serted that in Ukraine until “only very recently, the deviation towards Ukrainian nationalism did not represent the chief danger, but when the fight against it ceased and it was allowed to grow to such an extent that it linked up with the interventionists, this deviation became the chief dan- ger.”⁷² His view now became the new party line. Ukrainization, as imple­mented by Shumsky and Skrypnyk, had to be crushed.