Fashioning an Acceptable Past

On 26 August 1946 the VKP(b) Central Committee elaborated on the strategic aims of the Zhdanovshchina in a resolution ‘On the Repertoire of Drama Theaters and Measures toward Its Improvement.’ The decree called for a purge of theatre repertoire, which was ‘littered’ with apolitical plays, works idealizing the past, and western plays that ‘popularized bourgeois morals.’ The resolution, which was summarized in Pravda but not published at the time, categorically demanded the staging of more Soviet plays on contemporary subjects.

The attendant resolution of the KP(b)U Central Committee displayed a pecu­liar refraction of Moscow’s dictum. The Ukrainian ideologues did not dare to criticize the powerful Korniichuk, author of the best-known Ukrainian Soviet historical drama, Bohdan Khmelnytsky. This left only a few little-known historical plays for denouncing, such as Oleksandr Kopylenko’s Why the Stars Do Not Go Out and Mykhailo Pinchevsky’s I Live.

In this light, the Ukrainian bureaucrats adopted a strategy different from that deployed in Moscow. They broadened the scope of the critique to include opera, a genre traditionally preoccupied with the past. The KP(b)U Central Committee’s resolution ‘On the Repertoire of Drama and Opera Theatres of the Ukrainian SSR and Measures toward Its Improvement’ assailed Ukrainian opera companies for not having staged a single new opera on a Soviet topic during the preceding three years. As for drama companies, they were guilty of paying disproportionate attention to the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian classics, including numerous less valuable plays on manners. These works could ‘only educate the spectator in the spirit of ethnic narrow-mindedness and alienation from urgent contemporary questions.’⁴⁶ The Ukrainian authorities’ initiative demonstrates that local elites exercised considerable autonomy in shaping Stalinist ideological campaigns. The ‘mainstream’ Zhdanovshchina would not envelop musical life until the 1948 attack on Vano Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship and the subsequent campaign against ‘formalism’ in Soviet music.

In October 1946 the Kiev Opera Company premiered a new version of Mykola Lysenko’s classic historical opera, Taras Bulba. The result of several years of work, the ill-fated premiere came just a month after the decree on the repertoire of drama.1 nd opera theatres. The Ukrainian authorities immediately shut down the produc- tion before any criticism could sound from Moscow. Reviewers announced that laras did not create ‘an impression of Ukraine suffering under the yoke of the Polish lords,’ for in act 1, Bulba and other Cossacks were seen to be drinking too cheerfully in the orchard The colonel himself looked ‘inactive’ and the whole opera seemed ‘unfinished ^>47 Oleksandr Kopylenko’s historical play Why the Stars Do Not Go Out also suffered a harsh critique, both as a falsification presenting the heroic Cossacks as passive drunkards and as a work idealizing the national past and neglecting the class struggle within seventeenth-century Ukrainian society ⁴⁸

In late 1946, as the Ukrainian press unveiled a campaign against historical topics, Radtanske mystetstvo, the newspaper of the republic’s Committee for the Arts, focused on uncovering the ‘unhealthy glorification of the past’ in contempo­rary paintings Art critics denounced Ivan Shulha for expressing in his canvas The Zaporozhians’ Song ‘morbid nostalgia for the past ’ Hryhoru Svitlytsky’s painting Native Land, depicting a young woman in traditional peasant dress against the background of a beautiful country landscape, prompted them to ask, ‘What does it have in common with our Soviet Ukraine^?’ Mykhailo Derehus’s series The Khmelnytsky Uprising was pronounced ‘clearly unfinished,’ but not because of its morbid nostalgia the artist ‘did not pay appropriate attention’ to the Pereiaslav Council and the historic union with Russia ⁴⁹

Despite all the rhetoric, one of Ukraine’s leading theatres premiered Ivan Kocherha’s new, grand, historical drama, laroslav the Wise within weeks of the all- Umon decree At its inauguration in September 1946 the play seemed doomed As Kocherha would recall two years later at the writers’ congress, when the resolution ‘On the Repertoire of Drama Theatres’ appeared some two weeks before the premiere, the management of the Kharkiv Drama Theatre considered cancelling the performance ⁵⁰ Yet, while highly susceptible to the charge of fascination with the distant past, the play contained hardly any specifically Ukrainian historical references Nothing identified the Rus of the text as the predecessor of modern Ukraine, rather than that of Russia or even the Soviet Union Indeed, only the language betrayed the drama as a product of a Ukrainian writer Ultimately, the strong princely power and the ‘united Rus" that constituted the drama’s principal ideological message seemed to reverberate mightily with High Stalinism’s ideologi­cal convictions At the very last moment, the Ukrainian authorities reluctantly allowed the premiere to proceed, albeit suggesting some eleventh-hour insertions regarding the ‘class struggle’ in Kievan times

The play premiered in Kharkiv on 17 September 1946, reviews in Ukrainian newspapers appeared only after unprecedented delay Literaturna hazeta published a lengthy positive assessment on 12 December, while Radtanske mystetstvo hesi­tated until 12 March 1947 In the end, amid public attacks on the historical genre as such and the promotion of Soviet subjects, laroslav won full approval in Moscow In June 1947 the general public learned that the Kharkiv production of the play had earned the company the Stalin Prize, First Class Commenting on the award, a writer in Literaturna hazeta credited the drama with educating spectators ‘to be proud of the Fatherland, of the people, and of the mighty united state ’⁵¹ Kocherha’s representation of Kievan Rus resonated well with both the Stalinist image of the Soviet Union and the notion of Russian-Ukrainian historical friend­ship and unity Thus, it fit perfectly into the official version of national memory

The fate of laroslav highlights the ambiguous nature of the anti-historical campaign in Ukraine The executive ideologues targeted works identifying with a ‘separate’ Ukrainian national past, while those engaging with a past common for Ukrainians and Russians were still welcome At the same time, local functionaries had considerable authority to interpret the official policy and often did so more rigidly that their superiors A curious episode underscores the lack of a single ‘party line’ in the post-war politics of memory in Ukraine not long before laroslav, the play, received the highest Soviet accolade, the Kiev Film Studios cancelled their plans to shoot laroslav, the movie, because of its potentially problematic theme ⁵²

The Ninth Exhibition of Ukrainian Art (November 1947) demonstrated a turn towards representations of Russian-Ukrainian friendship While no picture celebrating an ‘exclusive’ Ukrainian past made it into the exhibition, Hryhorii Mehkhov presented a large painting, YoungTaras Shevchenko Visiting the Artist K P Briullov (2 89m x 2 95 m) The canvas portrayed a young peasant lad - the future Ukrainian national bard and professional artist - gazing admiringly at the great Russian painter, who would become his teacher at the Imperial Academy of Arts Artistically accomplished as it appeared at the time, the work also served as a perfect illustration of the myth of the Ukrainian ‘younger brother’ being taught and guided by the Russian ‘elder brother ’ As the head of the Union of Ukrainian Soviet Artists, Oleksandr Pashchenko, announced, ‘Mehkhov’s canvas is a serious blow to the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists, who sought to isolate Ukrainian culture from the wholesome influence of Russian culture ’ The painting won the Stalin Prize, Third Class, thus proving that not all non-Russian historical works were doomed under the Zhdanovshchina ⁵³ In fact, Mehkhov’s work was such a coup on the all-Union artistic scene that in 1950 the famous Tretiakov Gallery pressured the Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kiev to give up this painting in exchange for a less valuable canvas from the Moscow art gallery’s collection Kievans managed to defend their property rights with help from the KP(b)U Central Committee ⁵⁴

Cultural agents were beginning to sense what would be acceptable according to the new version of Ukrainian Soviet historical memory Although the /hrlanovshchina ostensibly prescribed a return to class history, the Russian neo- impcnal grand narrative remained the kernel of Stalinist historical memory, illowing (or forcing) the Ukrainian elites to retain a similar national’ approach to dteir past. Rather than abandoning the national past completely and promoting proletarian internationalism, the republic’s bureaucrats and intellectuals again attempted to ascertain that Ukrainian historical mythology was safely subordi­nated to its dominant Russian counterpart in the foundational myth of the friendship of peoples

The attack on the Ukrainian national vision of the past met with some opposition in the republic, although only scattered evidence of it is preserved in the archives Open non-conformism, as in the cases of Professor Korduba or the museum guide latskevych, was rare However, Stalinist subjects could also express their disagreement anonymously In January 1947 the Ukrainian State Committee for the Arts announced a competition for the best play on a contemporary topic The competition produced miserable results the artistic quality of most entries was apparently very low, no first prize was awarded, and only one play was subsequently staged ⁵⁵ Moreover, a certain levhen Blakytny (apparently a pen name) submitted to the jury a treatise entitled ‘Is the Ukrainian Nation Capable of Further Existence and of Actively Making Its History’ A Reference for Those Studying the History of Ukraine ’ Judging from his style and argumentation, Blakytny was an amateur non-conformist rather than a professional nationalist propagandist Far from glorifying the Soviet present, he affirmed the nation as a principal agent of history and stressed that Ukrainians were not just ‘Moscow’s eternal appendage,’ that his nation always had been and still was capable of independent existence ⁵⁶

Another anonymous writer submitted a three-act farce, Without an Idea, mock­ing the campaign for contemporary topics itself The plot depicts a theatre whose administration is preparing feverishly for the 1 May holiday The representative of the provincial party committee, with the telling Jewish name of Itsyk Pshemcher, laments the absence of Soviet subjects among ‘all those things historical or those from the decadent but not yet decaying west ’ A patently Ukrainian artistic director, Solopn Artemovych Bevz, seconds Pshemcher ‘What are the censors looking for’ How could they let in such contaminating capitalist poison as Othello, Faust, Corneville Bells, and so on’’ The nameless director goes through a pile of plays, mumbling A whole bunch of Ukrainian classics, mountains of paper but not a line anywhere about collective farms, about socialism ’ Only a bold young actor, Vladyslav Chubar, asks ironically ‘Why don’t you simply reorganize our theatre into a party school’’ Here and there, the text pointedly reminds the reader of post-war realities not reflected in the official literature arrests at the railway station, denunciations, a shortage of sugar, bread rationing, lining up at 5 a m, burglaries, and so on ⁵⁷

In the end, Pshemcher orders that the most ‘ideologically correct’ Russian Soviet play, Konstantin Trenev’s Liubov larovaia, be staged on the evening of 1 May At the very last moment, however, the party representative has second thoughts about the appropriateness of any artistic representation of the most glorious present Instead of allowing the performance of the play, he himself goes on stage to read a speech with the deliberately awkward title, ‘The Leading Role of Communist Ideas in the Laws of the Development of Contemporary Society ’ As the public is leaving and as occurs in classical farce, a secondary comic character, the maintenance manager Mykyta Dohada, appears on the vacant stage to recite the rhyming moral ‘What of the strength of Stalinist ideas’ / The theatre is empty There are no people ^>58

The Ukrainian authorities did not have enough leads to locate the anonymous author who, like ‘the young actor Vladyslav Chubar,’ apparently belonged to the new generation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia Having grown up during the late 1930s and 1940s, when local intellectuals were allowed to cultivate their national patrimony, the author (or authors) wanted to protest the recent devaluation of Ukrainian history and its cultural heritage in favour of class struggle and the Soviet present Submitting an anonymous farce to the Ukrainian Committee for the Arts represented both an original method of communicating this opposition to the authorities and an effective undermining of the official discourse through its ‘carmvahzation ’⁵⁹

Far away from the capitals, then, the Zhdanovshchma looked very different than it had appeared in its the Moscow-Leningrad version Intellectuals in the capitals understood the campaign as a crusade against liberalism and western influences in the arts, but their colleagues in Kiev and Lviv were taught to eulogize the Soviet present at the expense of the Ukrainian national past Together, these approaches picture the Zhdanovshchma as an attempt to redefine the Soviet Union as a society identifying with the history of class struggle and the Soviet present In practice, however, the campaign came down to re-educating the peoples of the USSR to identify with the Soviet present and the Russian imperial past