Ivan Kulyk versus the NKVD
In the summer of 1937, Kulyk was arrested and accused of participating in an anti-Soviet organization and spying for a foreign intelligence service. Before he was put on trial, he appeared at a banquet marking Pushkin’s death at the Central House of Writers in Moscow.
He behaved weirdly. When Paolo Iashvili from Georgia pronounced a toast saying that his republic could be proud of her sons, such as Stalin, Kulyk replied “And we do not envy you”—and fainted.126 This was the last time he was seen in public. A few months later, on October 7, 1937, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Apparently the sentence was not delayed, and Kulyk was executed immediately. Most Soviet encyclopedias and bibliographic guides, however, wrongly indicate 1941 as the year of his death. Twenty years after his execution, on December 12, 1956, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR accepted the protest of the USSR prosecutor general against the 1937 NKVD decision and revisited the case. After conducting additional research, the Supreme Court established that “Kulyk was arrested and shot on false grounds.” The court cancelled the NKVD decision of October 7, 1937, and rescinded the case against Kulyk, who was then found not guilty. The military board’s secret decision no. 173 was signed by Colonel Kopchev, Lieutenant Colonel Iarovenko, and Lieutenant Colonel Kapustin.127The nature of the NKVD interrogation proceedings makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to use them as a trustworthy evidence. They are self-incriminating texts containing information on names, dates, and conversations on recruiting and espionage activities. In most cases, it is evident that the defendants were not guilty and all the accusations were built on sand. As a rule, defendants received a prefabricated text that they were required to sign, and the interrogators spared no measure to force their victims to sign the false statement.
The most important parts of the interrogations—pauses filled with tortures and humiliation—were covered by silence. Kulyk’s case was no exception. Yet, astonishingly, a close reading reveals at least two layers in the text of Kulyk’s interrogation. The first, superficial layer depicts Kulyk as an agent of British and German intelligence who manipulated Ukrainian emigre circles to form an espionage network in Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist movement in the Diaspora emerges from the pages of Kulyk’s interrogation as nothing but aBetween Two Fires 105 by-product of the subversive plans of Western imperialist circles to separate Ukraine from the Soviet Union. This part of the NKVD file reflects the agenda of Kulyk’s accusers and scarcely deserves attention.128
The first layer articulated the NKVD’s accusations, and the second is the story that Kulyk intended to convey to his accusers. Leaving aside the obtrusive references to an alleged Kulyk-led anti-Soviet conspiracy scattered throughout the document, it is clear that Kulyk was trying to convince the prosecutors that he had never deviated one iota from official policy. As a representative of Soviet Ukraine, Kulyk had met with Ukrainian nationalists, and even ultranationalists, but his intentions were first to reassure them that Soviet Ukraine was genuinely interested in fostering a national agenda; that the Ukrainian idea, bereft of its bourgeois underpinnings, was interwoven into Ukrainian politics; and that Ukraine was ready to welcome back repentant exiles.129 Kulyk’s Notes of a Consul hinted that this was one of his primary tasks while on diplomatic service in Canada. Yet Kulyk’s multiple encounters with Ukrainian emigres were used against him, and Kulyk now had to pay for his attempts to redeem and unite the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Those who followed his advice, such as Nadia Surovtsova, his good and trustworthy friend, were arrested. Those who no longer bolstered the state’s ideology, such as Skrypnyk, were made Kulyk’s accomplices. And those with whom Kulyk secretly sympathized became the USSR’s archenemies.
One of them was Volodymyr Vynnychenko who, as a former head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the first independent Ukrainian government, fled to France. Kulyk’s relation of his encounter with Vynnychenko shows that many issues that came up in the interrogation were not inventions of the NKVD. Here is Kulyk:
A couple of days later, at Polots’kyi’s [in Paris], I met with V. Vynnychenko whom I knew due to a nodding acquaintance in 1917 and 1920. When I asked him about the prospects for his return to Ukraine and active politics, Vynnychenko replied that in principle he had answered this question in his brochure A Return to Ukraine, in which he called upon the young and nationalist-minded Ukrainian emigrants to return to the Ukrainian SSR in order to be closer to the “forthcoming events.” Yet as far as Vynnychenko’s own return was concerned, it had to be postponed until “locally acting nationalist [sir] forces” prepared sufficiently stable grounds. I listened to his reflections on that matter, and as a result we agreed that he, Vynnychenko, would promote our “common cause” in France. For that I, in turn, promised to provide him regularly with honorariums for his publications in Ukraine.130
There are reasons to believe that this meeting took place and that Kulyk was planning to help publish Vynnychenko in Ukraine. Kulyk was well aware that
among liberal and Russian-oriented circles in France, hardly anybody sympathized with Vynnychenko’s Ukrainian patriotism or was interested in his writings. Ivan Kulyk, whose appearance on the Ukrainian horizon Vynnychenko had predicted in Between Two Powers, now came to the author of Between Two Powers to enlist his support and help him return to the new Ukraine.
The innocuous character of Kulyk’s meeting with Vynnychenko is only too evident. It was an encounter of opponents, not enemies, and the “common cause” mentioned in the conversation implied nothing but their work toward the political stability of Ukraine and its cultural revival.
But the NKVD added a line referring to three important Ukrainian public figures and making the whole conversation sound particularly ominous: “Polots’kyi had to act as a liaison, while in Kharkiv the liaisons were Pylypenko and Berezins’kyi (already sentenced), directors of publishing houses and members of the counterrevolutionary nationalist organization.” This line implicated Kulyk with the alleged enemies of the people. Oleksandr Polots’kyi, the vice people’s commissar of education and one of the closest to Skrypnyk, was among the first to report to Moscow the catastrophic situation in Ukrainian villages on the eve of the 1932 famine. The second person mentioned, Serhii Pylypenko (1891-1933) was a writer, journalist, critic, editor, historian of Ukrainian culture, and the founder of the Pluh literary group. Accused of anti-Soviet plotting, he was shot in Kharkiv by the NKVD. Finally, Antin Berezyns’kyi (b. Bilen’kyi-Berezyns’kyi), a western Ukrainian writer, moved to Kharkiv in 1928 and in 1933 was arrested and sentenced along with other national-minded Ukrainian literati. Having given his consent to become an NKVD informer and provocateur, he was released and in the 1930s performed the ignominious role of assisting the NKVD in arresting and sentencing Ukrainian literary and public figures.Thus the NKVD-added line turns Kulyk and Vynnychenko’s “common cause” into a conspiracy, and Kulyk’s conversation with Vynnychenko into a secret rendezvous. But the contradiction between the NKVD’s agenda and Ku- lyk’s self-justification show that Kulyk truly believed in the need to combine Ukraine’s national revivalism with proletarian internationalism, whereas his accusers considered any attempt to do so counterrevolutionary.