From 1918, when the Bolsheviks created secret organs to identify and neutralize enemies, Ukraine’s intellectual elite received special attention, partly because of the country’s geopolitical and economic significance, but also because Soviet leaders viewed the independence movement, which was finally crushed only in 1920, as a dangerous threat.

The secret police, widely known as the Cheka or GPU, played a crucial role in implementing the party’s immediate goals in Ukraine, which were to stabilize the grain-producing region and remove counter-revolutionaries and oppositionists.² The Ukrainian GPU was officially taken over by Moscow on 13 August 1924, but it had never been independent.

On Moscow’s orders, in the years 1929-34, the GPU in Ukraine “uncovered” four major nationalist conspiracies and terrorist plots. First came the SVU (League for Liberation of Ukraine—Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy), which led to the arrest of writers, artists, scientists, scholars, journalists, actors, community organizers, and politicians—some 30,000 people in total—in connection with the show trial staged in Kharkiv’s Opera Theatre. Held between 19 March and 9 April 1930, it condemned forty-five individuals, most of whom were associated with the govern­ment of the Central Rada and Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917-20. Three more notorious cases followed in the years 1931-34: the UNTs (Ukrainian National Center—Ukrainskyi Natsionalnyi Tsentr), UVO (Ukrainian Military Organization—Ukrainska Viiskova Orhanizatsiia), and OUN (Association of Ukrainian Nationalists—Obiednannia Ukrain- skykh Natsionalistiv). Records of the interrogations, confessions, and sentences are now available in thousands of files kept in the Ukraine’s archives.⁵ This documentary evidence demonstrates that the plots were fabricated. Moreover, not only was repression in Ukraine conducted on an unprecedented scale, it had a national component. Individuals who promoted Ukrainization and championed Ukrainian culture were tar­geted as nationalists and a potential threat to the integrity of the Soviet state because the regime feared the crystallization of a political opposi­tion at a time of crisis brought about by collectivization and famine. The group criminal cases at this time were therefore part of a national cleans­ing operation.

A great number of collections documenting Moscow’s tactics and goals in Ukraine are now available.⁶ They indicate that in contrast to the Rus­sian intelligentsia, which was often sent abroad in the early twenties, the regime chose a more radical way of silencing Ukrainian dissent.⁷