Confusing Signals from Above

On 31 January 1944 Oleksandr Dovzhenko, together with four Ukrainian leaders and three other prominent writers, was invited to a Politburo meeting in Moscow to discuss his novel and movie script Ukraine in Flames, during which Stalin made a lengthy speech accusing the writer of ‘revising Leninism ’⁵ Dovzhenko had allegedly discarded the principle of the class struggle, blackened the party line and the kolkhoz system in Ukraine, and overemphasized Ukrainian patriotism In Dovzhenko’s novel, indeed, a decisive ideological shift from proletarian interna­tionalism to patriotism, history, and the nation is championed Its characters repeatedly attack the ideological device of ‘class struggle’ and suggest substituting this principal paradigm of early Soviet ideology with that of ‘national pride ’ For instance, the red pencil of some Kremlin ideologue underlined the following words of the novel’s two main protagonists, Zaporozhets and Kravchyna ‘Today I do not know class struggle and I do not want to know it I know the Fatherland¹’, ‘We were bad historians, weren’t we’ We did not know how to forgive each other National pride did not shine in our books [full of] class struggle’, ‘We are fighting for Ukraine For the only forty-million people that through the centuries of European history could not find for themselves a life worthy of humans on their own land ’⁶

During the meeting, Stalin quoted the fragment in which Zaporozhets tells the orthodox partisan commander ‘To hell with your [class] struggle You went mad, you grew addicted to class struggle as if to moonshine Oh, it will be our doom ’ He also cited tirades against the lack of patriotism in Soviet history books Dovzhenko and his heroes saw the homeland and the national past as alternative foci of allegiance, but, according to Stalin, the novel failed to stress that ‘precisely Soviet power and the Bolshevik party cherish the historical traditions and rich cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people and the other peoples of the USSR, as well as raising their national consciousness ’⁷

Together with Dovzhenko’s failure to denounce the Ukrainian ‘bourgeois na­tionalists’ for their collaboration with the Germans, the writer’s appeal to national memory enabled Stalin to accuse him of ‘nationalism ’ A public persecution campaign against Dovzhenko soon developed in Ukraine, where Khrushchev, who had imprudently approved the novel in August 1943, set an example by denounc­ing the writer for ‘revising Leninism,’ ‘slandering the socialist way of life,’ ‘attack­ing the party,’ and, finally, professing ‘militant nationalism ’⁸ At this stage, however, emphasizing Ukrainian national memory over class ancestry was understood as only one of Dovzhenko’s serious mistakes rather than as the principal mortal sin he had committed In a fit of bureaucratic fervor, KP(b)U Central Committee Secretary Lytvyn prepared an index of pages in Ukraine in Flames on which various ‘deviations’ surfaced ‘Slandering the party’ came first, with three page references, followed by ‘hatred of the idea of class struggle,’ with six references, and ‘slander­ing Bohdan Khmelnytsky,’ with three references ⁹

This last accusation was particularly misleading, since Dovzhenko actually attempted, in the form of a conversation among four uneducated peasants, to show what he understood to be the corruption of popular collective memory under the influence of prewar ‘class history’

chubenko Yes, it is said that not once m the past did they [the lords] impose a yoke on our brothers

N E kh o DA Who do you mean - they"'

chubenko Bohdan Khmelnytsky¹

TOVCHENYK Oh, he was a great villain Before the war, the museum in Chernihiv displayed his sabre And there was an explanatory note in big letters This is the sabre of a well known butcher of the Ukrainian people, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who suppressed the popular revolution in sixteen hundred and something So his sabre was behind glass, while twelve of his portraits were locked in the basement They were not shown to the people It is said that they created a haze in peoples heads That’s what they say

nekhoda What a villain’

tsar But who is the one on the horse, in the square in front of the church in Kiev¹¹ chubenko Thats a different one tovchenyk So it is not him’ nekhoda They are all the same¹¹⁰

Pretending not to recognize this mockery of their own past pronouncements, the Ukrainian bureaucrats accused Dovzhenko of slandering the hetman Since the novel had not been published at the time, dozens of Ukrainian intellectuals blindly repeated the same accusation at denunciatory meetings, with the result, ironically, of reinforcing Khmelnytsky’s place of honour in Ukrainian Soviet historical memory - precisely the aim Dovzhenko had had in mind when he proposed the establishment of the Order of Khmelnytsky and when he wrote Ukraine m Flames This paradox aside, the critique of Dovzhenko seems to have signalled a renewal of emphasis on shared Soviet patriotism at the expense of separate national ancestries, as well as the possible restoration of class struggle as the essence of the historical process Nothing indicated the Kremlin’s unhappiness with, say, the inadequate portrayal of Russian guidance

Moreover, the critique of Dovzhenko did not develop into a purge of‘national­ism’ in Ukrainian literature, although the preconditions for such an outcome existed In March 1944, when the official press began denouncing Dovzhenko, Fedir lenevych, the director of the Ukrainian branch of the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (IMEL), submitted to the KP(b)U Central Committee a report accusing Rylsky of nationalism ’ lenevych singled out Rylsky’s November 1943 speech, ‘Kiev in the History of Ukraine’ (discussed in the previous chapter), for critique On the one hand, the professional Marxist philosopher charged the poet with interpreting Soviet Ukrainian culture as simply an extension of pre-revolu­tionary, ‘non-Soviet’ Ukrainian culture, and insufficiently stressing the radically different ‘class character’ of socialist Ukraine On the other, lenevych decried the insufficient homage Rylsky paid to the Russian elder brother in his national narrative ‘It was necessary to stress in this speech the significance of the union between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples and the most important, decisive role that the great Russian people played in liberating Ukraine from the German imperialists Rylsky avoided all these questions and, in fact, devoted the greater part of his speech to idealizing the Ukrainian past, concealing the Russian culture’s influence on Ukrainian culture, and obscuring Soviet power’s role in the social and national liberation of the Ukrainian people - in the real revival of Ukraine Leonid Novychenko, a literary critic and the Central Committee expert charged with verifying lenevych’s report, seconded most of the accusations He found that Rylsky had idealized the Cossacks and had made uncritical use of the works of Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalist historians, particularly Hrushevsky The text of the speech was ‘imbued with a nationalist theory, according to which M Rylsky sees in the history of Ukraine only a struggle for national independence, a struggle conducted, in the author’s view, by the Cossack officers, the gentry, and the bourgeoisie [He] glosses over in silence the toiling Ukrainian masses’ struggle for their social and national liberation, which they pursued with the fraternal support of the great Russian people Rylsky hardly mentions the progressive historical importance of Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia, instead, he stresses that, as a result of this incorporation, “Ukraine became a province of the Russian Empire, which Lenin has aptly called the ‘prison of peoples ””¹²

The Rylsky affair remained, however, an instructive example of an abortive denunciation Although both the initial ‘signal from below’ and its favourable assessment by the Central Committee apparatus were in place, a campaign against Rylsky was not set in motion The Ukrainian leadership apparently did not consider the denounciation of another high-profile litterateur to be necessary at the time While the Dovzhenko affair represented a warning to the intellectuals who identified with the wartime cult of national patrimony, a further incident of similar stature could have prompted Moscow to initiate a comprehensive purge of ‘nationalists’ in the republic, with possible unpleasant consequences for the Ukrainian leadership itself¹³

Just as Ukrainian bureaucrats were able to ignore an ‘initiative from below,’ pronouncements from Moscow did not always define the politics of memory in the republic To start with, the centre often failed to issue clear directives on the proper line on history Although Agitprop’s internal correspondence criticized the 1943 History of the Kazakh SSR as ‘anti-Russian,’ as explained in chapter 2, Moscow ideologues did not sponsor the book’s public denunciation until 1945 In fact, the Central Committee’s functionaries were extremely displeased to find out that the book’s co-editor, Professor Anna Pankratova, had made the story public in letters to her students Pankratova took the issue to Zhdanov and subsequently to Stalin, protesting not only the critique of the book but also the entire ideological trend towards the rehabilitation of the Russian imperial past at the expense of class analysis ¹⁴

Combined with previous calls to clarify the party line on history, Pankratova’s protests resulted in a conference of leading Soviet historians and ideologues in Moscow During the conferences six sessions on 29 May, 1,5, 10, 22 June, and 8 July 1944 the proponents of imperial patrimony clashed with the defenders of class history However, the party leadership failed to declare a winner Zhdanov first appeared to support Pankratova’s call for a return to the class approach, using it as a tool to restore his authority in Moscow (he had just returned to the capital from Leningrad) and as a weapon against his unfaithful client Aleksandrov Zhdanov had spent several months writing and rewriting the draft decree ‘On the Shortcomings and Mistakes in Scholarly Work in the Area of the History of the USSR ’ He consulted Stalin several times but ultimately abandoned the project In the end, a minor resolution to close Istoncheskn zhurnal and start a new scholarly periodical, Voprosy istom, became the only Central Committee decision resulting from the conference ¹⁵

Likewise, in his speech before a conference of departmental chairs in the social sciences on 1 August 1945 Aleksandrov did not call for a clear policy change On the one hand, Agitprop’s head reproached those trying to revise the Marxist- Lemmst definition of tsarist Russia as the ‘gendarme of Europe’ and the ‘prison of peoples ’ On the other hand, he criticized works on the history of Kazakhs, lakuts, Tatars, and Bashkirs for ‘describing [events] that had opposed’ them to the Russians and for glorifying national heroes who had revolted against the tsars According to Aleksandrov, ‘The history of the peoples of Russia was a history of overcoming this animosity and their gradual consolidation around the Russian people ’¹⁶

Ukrainian intellectuals did not feel the need to modify their approach in the light of these recent discussions in Moscow Aleksandrov had mentioned volume 1 of the History of Ukraine (1943) approvingly, probably because of the fact that Ukrainian historians and writers were well ahead of their counterparts in the other republics in exalting the historical events that ‘united’ their people with the Russians

Despite the peaceful mood within the Ukrainian history profession, the republic’s bureaucrats resolved to follow the centre’s example in organizing a conference of historians (Unlike their Moscow superiors, Ukrainian party leaders officially recognized the importance of literary representations in the shaping of historical memory by inviting a group of local writers to the conference ) Yet by the time the first session convened on 10 March 1945 the Ukrainian functionaries themselves were disoriented by the Moscow meetings’ inconclusive outcome Lytvyn opened the proceedings with neither a call to denounce nationalist deviations, nor an appeal to return to the orthodox class approach Instead, he noted with unchar­acteristic tranquility that the conference was ‘unusual’ and invited the partici­pants to discuss ‘the differing points of view in our literature on the history of Ukraine ’¹⁷ During the five sessions that followed in late March and early April, party ideologues rarely took the floor, encouraging, instead, the participants themselves both to ask questions and to seek answers It is not surprising that the KP(b)U Central Committee would soon be disappointed with the conference’s inconclusiveness

In the words of a Central Committee internal memo, ‘Initially, the conference was spiritless and the speakers hardly mentioned troubling and disputable ques­tions of history’ Indeed, the first fifty-six pages of the minutes feature mainly banal suggestions to publish more historical documents and to research under studied problems of Ukrainian history¹⁸ Finally, Rubach accused Petrovsky of ignoring the class approach in his work on Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the 1939 reunification of Western Ukraine, but the ensuing discussion did not result in a clear victory for either side Those who, like Rubach, advocated a return to class analysis soon discovered that this approach would undermine the myth of Russian-Ukrainian friendship that emphasized state-building and ethnic affinity as well as required tsars and hetmans to be positive protagonists To resolve this difficulty, Rubach proposed the familiar ‘lesser evil’¹⁹ paradigm, but neither the ideologues nor the historians hastened to readopt this concept, which seemed to have been compromised by the canonization of Khmelnytsky

The historian Vadym Diadychenko boldly attempted to address ‘one of the most important, principal questions, that of Russian tsarist colonial policy ’ ‘It is no coincidence,’ he stated, ‘that the Moscow conference of historians discussed this question all the time ’ In essence, however, Diadychenko’s own comments reflected the trend towards balancing Russian colonial oppression with the advan­tages of being imperial subjects He suggested that, although the rule of Peter I had been a ‘burden’ for Ukrainians, the tsar’s armies had protected Ukraine from the Turko-Tatar invasions during the 1710s and 1720s Fedir Los seconded his colleague’s interpretation ‘When covering the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, we are stressing tsarism’s colonial offensive against Ukraine This is correct but we often do not point out the positive consequences of the union between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples ’²⁰

The majority of participants did not heed the party’s call for a theoretical debate Instead, they spoke of the further promotion of the ‘glorious national past’ and cultural heritage, even within the confines of the master-plot of Russian- Ukrainian friendship Both historians and writers advanced far-reaching plans for the study of national history and for the rehabilitation of more ‘great ancestors ’ 1 he historian Kost Huslysty announced, ‘I believe that studying the heroic past of the Ukrainian people remains one of the most important tasks of Soviet Ukrainian historical scholarship ’ Then he called for more works on national heroes such as Danylo of Halych, Sahaidachny, and Khmelnytsky During a later session, he icsumed the floor to criticize the central press’s portrayal of Danylo as a Russian prince ²¹ The literary scholar levhen Kyryhuk insisted on including in the national pintheon the nineteenth-century non-Marxist social thinker Mykhailo Dra- homanov and his contemporaries, ‘bourgeois’ historians and writers Kostomarov, Killish, and Oleksandr Lazarevsky The writer Ivan Senchenko supported the call to rehabilitate Drahomanov and suggested promoting more ‘national heroes’ from t he period between Khmelnytsky (d 1657) and the philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda (1722-94) The archaeologist Lazar Slavin attempted to defend Hrushevsky by lonfirming the late historian’s views on rhe origins of Ukrainians ‘I think those who discard all of Hrushevsky’s writings on this problem, the problem of ethnogenesis, are wrong Actually, he was right on many points ’²²

Moreover, at one point during the session, an unidentified voice from the audience shouted, ‘You had better introduce a separate course on Ukrainian history at school¹’ The next speaker, a schoolteacher by the name of Skrypnyk, actually supported this proposal ‘There is an enormous interest in the history of Ukraine [in schools] The students are attracted to matters relating to the history of Ukraine ’ Skrypnyk explained that of the sixty-five hours of History of the USSR in grade 8, only three or four were devoted to Ukrainian material The grade 9 curriculum gave the history teacher some two to four hours out of sixty-five to explain the major events of Ukrainian history, and the grade 10 curriculum, eight to ten out of one hundred and ten To supplement Shestakov’s (Russocentric) textbook, the teachers organized readings of Bazhan’s ‘Danylo of Halych’ and Petro Panch’s The Zaporozhians ‘Our Grade 9 and 10 students asked repeatedly why we were not studying the history of Ukraine,’ concluded the teacher ²³

At this point, the conference was clearly moving in a direction that party functionaries found undesirable to explore During the session on 14 April Lytvyn first announced ‘We will be meeting on Saturdays from 12 to 4, as usual,’ but then he disclosed that there would be no meeting on the next Saturday In fact, the conference never resumed its work Although the KP(b)U Central Committee apparatus was working to draft a resolution on the improvement of historical scholarship, the decree never moved beyond the drafting stage ²⁴ Trapped between the confusing signals from Moscow and subtle non-compliance on the part of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the republic’s bureaucracy preferred halting the discus­sion altogether to acknowledging to its superiors in the centre that there were any problems in ideological work

A February 1946 incident at Lviv University reveals just how unwilling the Ukrainian party leadership was to initiate a crackdown on the ‘nationalist’ histori­ans At the time, its faculty was a blend of politically unreliable local older professors and highly reliable party types who had recently arrived from Eastern Ukraine Like many other newcomers, Volodymyr Horbatiuk, the new dean of the Faculty of History, was eager to demonstrate his zeal in eliminating traces of nationalism within the university walls Together with the new rector, Ivan Bihakevych, he chose to target the Department of Ukrainian History, then still dominated by Hrushevsky’s students professors Ivan Krypiakevych, Myron Korduba, and Omehan Terletsky The university administration organized three departmental meetings to condemn Hrushevsky and his school Rector Bihakevych gave an introductory speech denouncing Hrushevsky’s ‘bourgeois-nationalist con­cepts,’ while the professors were expected to uncover Hrushevsky’s mistakes and falsifications in the different periods of Ukrainian history Krypiakevych obedi­ently read a paper on Ukraine’s union with Russia and its ‘misrepresentation’ in Hrushevsky’s works, Terletsky and Horbatiuk outlined Hrushevsky’s ‘distortions’ in modern Ukrainian history, and the newcomer Osechynsky elaborated on how Hrushevsky’s nationalist theories contradicted Russian historiography of the nine­teenth and twentieth centuries Osechynsky went as far as to blame Hrushevsky’s students for the continuing armed resistance of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army ²⁵

Professor Myron Korduba, the oldest member of the department and the instructor responsible for the survey of Ukrainian history, refused to comply Dean Horbatiuk ordered him to read a paper with a title crafted in inimitable Soviet ideological parlance ‘The Bourgeois-Nationalist Interpretation of Ancient Times, in Particular Kievan Rus' and the Period of Feudal Fragmentation, in Hrushevsky’s Works ’ But Korduba began by saying that his topic would be ‘Mykhailo Hrushevsky as a Student of the Princely Period of the History of Ukraine ’ He continued ‘Mykhailo Hrushevsky unquestionably occupies a place of honor in Ukrainian historiography He was the first to provide his people with a vision of their past [and] of their historical development from ancient to modern times, a vision based on critically verified facts compliant with the demands of modern scholarship [In so doing, Hrushevsky] laid the new foundations of his people’s national conscious­ness ’ Later in his speech, Korduba attempted to deconstruct the Soviet idiom with the aim of restoring Hrushevsky to the official canon of memory

Hrushevsky is being called a nationalist I have an impression that today this word has the same role that ‘heretic’ had during the Middle Ages When one is to be compro­mised and defamed in the eyes of the public, in other words, destroyed, this person is labelled as ‘nationalist’ without considering the real meaning of this word, which can be diverse If nationalism is understood as a firm consciousness of belonging to ones nation and the active struggle against national oppression, as well as against the assimilationist policies of aggressive peoples (and that is how we understood national­ism in Galicia before the First World War) then, indeed, Hrushevsky should be recognized as nationalist But then Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Vasyl Stefanyk and many other progressive patriots whose memory we revere were nationalists’ as well If ‘nationalism’ is understood in the meaning that it has acquired in recent decades, that is, as opium and as a morbid idea that ones people are superior and should dominate other peoples of the world by oppression and assimilation - this idea nurtures hatred and animosity among peoples, and Hrushevsky never was a nationalist of this kind ²⁶

Seditious as it looked to contemporaries, Korduba’s speech actually stressed the negotiable nature of Stalinist rhetorical devices such as nationalism’ and ‘patrio­tism ’ The elderly professor rightly noted the blurred line between the healthy national patriotism of ‘progressive thinkers’ and the reactionary nationalism of the ii bourgeois-nationalist’ contemporaries, who often expressed exactly the same views A clear distinction could not be established, because the party line itself kept changing the balance between the notions of class’ and ‘nation within the Soviet historical imagination The classification of specific historical actors was therefore negotiable, as demonstrated by the changing Soviet views on the hetmans Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Petro Sahaidachny, as well as the nineteenth-century thinkers Mykhailo Drahomanov and Panteleimon Kuhsh As a former political enemy of the Bolsheviks, Hrushevsky was probably beyond redemption, but the different reactions to Korduba’s speech in Lviv and Kiev demonstrated a distinct lack of coordination in the Soviet project of reforming Western Ukrainian historical memory

The Lviv party committee supported the university’s initiative to prepare a city- wide conference of scholars where the ‘Hrushevsky school’ at the Faculty of History would be publicly denounced The university also planned a separate meeting of its faculty and students under the slogan ‘Hrushevsky’s Bourgeois- Nationalist Theory Is a Weapon of Ukrainian Nationalist Counterrevolution ’ Nevertheless, in March 1946 the KP(b)U Central Committee sent to Lviv a brigade of ideological inspectors, who ordered that the campaign be terminated The brigade concluded that the departmental conferences had been ill prepared, that Rector Bihakevych’s and Dean Horbatiuk’s speeches had been weak, and that the campaign against the Hrushevsky school was generally ‘untimely and unneces­sary ’ Moreover, the powerful inspectors also reassured local scholars who thought ‘that after discussions like this one they would be sent to Siberia ’ The brigade’s report to the Central Committee recommended a degree of toleration towards the local historians, as ‘ideological reeducation is a difficult thing for people who are in their 60s and 70s and who were brought up in the spirit of bourgeois ideology’ The brigade further suggested halting the critique of Western Ukrainian scholars who, like Krypiakevych and Terletsky, were reportedly trying to master the Marxist-Leninist historical method, and it recommended that Kievan historians be sent on lecture tours to Lviv ²⁷

In the end, although the materials about the Lviv incident occupy three thick folders in the Central Committee archives, the republic’s ideologues effectively suppressed the local initiative to purge Hrushevsky’s students in Lviv Apparently, in early 1946 the Ukrainian leadership did not plan to turn the critique of the ‘Hrushevsky school’ into a major ideological campaign It had another initiative for that purpose