Communism
Soviet historiography has not succeeded, despite great efforts, in tracing the origins of Ukrainian communism to pre-revolutionary roots. To be sure, Bolshevik groups existed in Ukraine before 1917, but they drew their membership from the Russian and Russified Jewish urban ethnic minorities.
The few ethnic Ukrainian Bolsheviks stood completely outside their country’s national-liberation movement. It is impossible to point to a single Bolshevik who, prior to 1917, made the slightest contribution to Ukrainian letters, scholarship, or social thought.Ukrainian communism is an offspring—although the fact is hotly denied in Soviet historical literature—of the national revolution of 1917. It was the strength and the mass character of the Ukrainian liberation movement that induced Lenin and the Communist Party leadership to give some consideration to Ukrainian national aspirations. The first Soviet government in Ukraine, the so-called People’s Secretariat, was formed in December 1917 for the purpose of countering the Central Rada. If there had been no independent, democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic, it is very doubtful whether a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic would ever have come into existence.
Bolsheviks of Ukrainian background, however, did not remain untouched by their country’s national rebirth. While retaining loyalty to the Party and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, they also began to think of themselves as Ukrainian. The local Bolshevik groups in Ukraine were given a common organization in 1918, although the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP[b]U) remained a regional branch of the Russian Party, completely subordinated to the central leadership in Moscow. The national element in the CP(b)U was strengthened by the influx of some former Ukrainian Social Democrats and Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (the left fringe of the democratic-populist trend) who in the course of the Revolution had broken away from their parent parties.
Thus the old Bolsheviks of Ukrainian background, whose national consciousness had been activated, as well as the ex-SDs and ex-SRs who had turned communist, gradually gave the CP(b)U a more pronounced local colour, which it had originally lacked. Nevertheless Ukrainian nationals remained, until well into the 1920s, a numerical minority among the members of the CP(b)U.Communism is the only one among the four major trends of Ukrainian political thought which may claim to have succeeded. After all, there exists today a Soviet Ukrainian Republic, while both the Ukrainian People’s Republic OfHrushevsky and Petliura and the Ukrainian State of Hetman Skoropadsky collapsed in a rather short time. But this apparent communist triumph has one very questionable side: it was due primarily to Soviet Russian military intervention. There is, in this respect, a basic difference between Russian and Ukrainian communism. In Russia the Bolsheviks were the legitimate heirs of their nation’s revolutionary tradition, and they had conquered and retained power by their own devices. In Ukraine, on the other hand, the communist regime was only weakly rooted in the native tradition, and it could not have been established without the “fraternal aid” of the Russian Red Army. Thus, Ukrainian communists have never been masters in their own house, and they were condemned to the thankless role of intermediaries between their own people and the overlords in Moscow.
Still, the 1920s witnessed a considerable growth OfUkrainian communism. The younger generation of the intelligentsia in the Ukrainian SSR felt that the traditional populist-democratic outlook had become outdated and provincial. Communist ideology had an appeal for them because of its dynamism, supposedly scientific foundations, and world-wide perspectives. On the Ukrainian communists devolved, by force of circumstance, the defence of their homeland’s national and state interests. At that time Soviet Ukraine still possessed a measure of effective autonomy, especially in educational and cultural matters, and it was possible to believe in good faith that the process of building a Ukrainian socialist nation was under way.
The cultural achievements—in letters, scholarship, and art—of the decade 1923-33 were impressive. This cultural work was largely carried out by non-party intellectuals who were still schooled in the older democratic tradition, but the movement was officially sponsored by Ukrainian communists. An achievement which must be credited to them particularly was the Ukrainization of urban life. The pre-revolutionary Ukrainian movement was ideologically and organizationally oriented toward the countryside, while the cities resembled alien enclaves. Now, for the first time in modem history, Ukrainian culture began to assume an urban character, while the cities gradually became more Ukrainian in language and general tenor.Evidence of the vitality of Ukrainian communism in the 1920s was the fact that it was able to make recruits outside the frontiers of the USSR, where it was not backed by the might of the state. Communist and proSoviet sympathies were very noticeable among Ukrainians in Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, emigres in the countries of Western Europe, and Ukrainian settlers in the United States and Canada. The appeal of communism—besides the usual economic grievances—was to some extent also patriotic: the positive national achievements in the Ukrainian SSR provided an attractive contrast to the oppression and humiliation to which Ukrainians were exposed in other countries, especially under the chauvinistic and vexatious Polish domination of Galicia and Volhynia. The spread of pro-Soviet sympathies also reflected the crisis of the traditional democratic-populist outlook. It was certainly symptomatic that some former leading personalities of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, such as Hrushevsky and Vynnychenko, proclaimed their adherence to the Soviet system; the former even returned to the Ukrainian SSR.
But the development of Soviet Ukraine was bound to clash with Moscow’s centralism. Violations of state and national-cultural rights of the Ukrainian Republic—rights nominally guaranteed by the party program and Soviet law—provoked reactions on the part of some Ukrainian communists.
This was the origin of the so-called nationalist deviations within the CP(b)U, which were a frequent occurrence during the 1920s. The very fact that there were communists willing to defend the rights of their nation to the point of conflict with Moscow proved that communism had become a Ukrainian political trend, and not simply a tool of Russian imperialism, as anti-communist Ukrainians have often asserted. At the same time, these deviations illustrated the tragic dilemma of Ukrainian communists: the difficulty of reconciling two incompatible loyalties, to the party with its demands of total conformity on the one hand, and to their own nation on the other.The basic text of Ukrainian “national” communism was the treatise by Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl Shakhrai, Do khvyli: Shcho diietsia na Ukraini ³ z Ukrainoiu (On the Current Situation: What is Happening in Ukraine and to Ukraine, 1919). It contained a drastic critique of the ambiguities of Bolshevik policy toward Ukraine and culminated in the program of an independent Ukrainian Soviet Republic, allied with Soviet Russia and other socialist states on a footing of genuine equality, and of a separate Ukrainian Communist Party, associated with the Russian Party only through the Communist International. Of the numerous nationalist deviations in the CP(b)U perhaps the most interesting intellectually was the case of Mykola Khvylovy. Khvylovy (1893-1933), a noted communist novelist and essayist, turned from a favourite of the regime into its sharp critic. A man endowed with a charismatic personality who exercised a strong influence on the young and the intelligentsia, Khvylovy preached a reorientation of Soviet Ukrainian culture toward the West, away from Russia. Nationalist deviations in the Ukrainian SSR had repercussions among Ukrainian communists in other countries. At one point, the majority of the Central Committee of the underground Communist Party of Western Ukraine sided with the national opposition in the CP(b)U.
The catastrophe of Ukrainian communism came in the 1930s. Virtually the entire old leadership of the CP(b)U was purged by Stalin. Af-
fected were not only those who had been identified previously as deviationists, but also the former loyal upholders of the official party line. One of the early victims, driven to suicide, was Mykola Skrypnyk (1872-1933), the Leninist stalwart, who for many years had been the authoritative interpreter of party policy on nationality issues. Stalin’s reign of terror, the artificially induced famine of 1933, and the renewed Russification drive in the Ukrainian SSR delivered a heavy blow to Ukrainian communism. A reliable barometer of the crumbling of communism as an indigenous Ukrainian trend was the rapid and irreversible decline of pro-Soviet sympathies among Ukrainians outside the USSR. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, the communist movement in Galicia and Volhynia had dwindled to the point of insignificance, retaining some influence only in Transcarpathia (in Czechoslovakia), the most backward and nationally most underdeveloped of all Ukrainian lands.