Having completed an ideological purification campaign in late 1951, the Ukrain­ian leadership was satisfied with its efforts From November 1951 to May 1952 no ideological decrees or major public statements indicated the party’s concern with any ‘nationalist deviations’ in culture and scholarship

Soon, however, the republic’s bosses discovered that Stalin himself remained suspicious of Ukraine’s ideological situation In May 1952 First Secretary Melnikov disclosed to the members of the KP(b)U Central Committee ‘On 14 April Comrade Korotchenko and I were received by Comrade Stalin In a conversation that lasted approximately four hours, Iosif Vissarionovich showed great interest in the state of Ukrainian indus­try, agriculture, and culture ’ The Ukrainian party leader went on to report on Stalin’s approval of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, but he saved the bad news for the end ‘Comrade Stalin was keenly interested in the state of ideological work in Ukraine and expressed the opinion that things were not going particularly satisfactorily in this field \cho zdes delo u nas obstoit neblagopoluchnd\ ⁿ

Melnikov did not specify whether Stalin had elaborated on the problems motivating his concern Yet one is tempted to surmise that the omniscient ‘father of peoples’ realized that his viceroys had failed to fashion a Soviet Ukrainian historical memory completely separate from the non-Soviet Ukrainian national memory Perhaps Stalin bemoaned the limits of the state’s ideological control over the production of historical works and the influential role of local bureaucrats and intellectuals in shaping the sense of nationhood in his many nations Perhaps he was also frustrated by the Ukrainian public’s apparent ability to ‘read’ the much- edited cultural products selectively, interpreting them as heroic narratives of their national past Like Russians, who by the end of Stalin’s period, were increasingly able ‘to articulate what it meant to be members of a Russian national community,’² Soviet Ukrainians preserved their sense of ethnic identity forged during the Ukrainization drive

Although they maintained the ‘friendship of peoples’ ideology until the USSR’s very last days, Stalin’s successors never fully reconciled the Soviet peoples’ multiple national histones As argued in the preceding chapters, the Kremlin was eager to prescribe the meaning of patriotism and historical memory in Ukraine Nonethe­less, these notions were opened to interpretation by local intellectuals and the public, resulting in Moscow’s several campaigns against ‘Ukrainian nationalism ’ The Stalinist project of unified memory was also undermined by the fact that no matter how much representations of the past celebrated the historical unity of Soviet peoples, they never denied the non-Russians’ ethnic difference Ultimately, the ambiguities of the Stalinist politics of memory explain the failure to mould the multinational Soviet Union into a single, coherent community