By January 1947 the purification campaign in Ukraine had clearly ended.
No new ideological resolutions had appeared since early October, and the wave of criticism in the media was dying out. The republic’s ideologues and intellectuals seemed to have arrived at an understanding of what the new proper version of Ukrainian historical memory was to be.
Neither the Ukrainian leadership nor its Moscow bosses spoke of further eradication of‘nationalist deviations.’ Then, an unexpected turn in Khrushchev’s political fortunes and Kaganovich’s arrival in Ukraine changed the situation dramatically.In late February 1947 Stalin’s trusted trouble-shooter Lazar Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Communist Party of Ukraine’s new first secretary. A Ukrainian-born Jew, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had headed the republic’s party organization in 1925-8; he had served in Moscow consecutively as the people’s commissar of railway transport, heavy industry, and construction materials, earning the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (iron minister). Kaganovich replaced Nikita Khrushchev as the Ukrainian party leader, the latter until then having held the positions of both first secretary and Ukrainian premier. (He retained the second office.)
Whatever the reason for Khrushchev’s sudden demotion, it had little to do with any ‘nationalist deviations’ in the republic’s intellectual life. Khrushchev himself claimed that his requests for food assistance for Ukraine during the 1946 famine had provoked Stalin’s wrath. Scholars have argued in a similar vein that Khrushchev’s powerful rival in Moscow, Georgii Malenkov, attempted to discredit the Ukrainian leader’s agricultural policies in order to remove him from the line of succession.1
The formal pretext for Khrushchev’s being removed from his party post was a simple one. The minutes of the Politburo meeting explain that the practice of combining the offices of Ukrainian first secretary and premier had been ‘dictated by the specific conditions of the war’ and no longer applied.
A similar division of positions occurred in neighbouring Belarus, although Stalin himself ‘temporarily continued holding both positions at the all-Union level.2 Whatever the reason, Khrushchev was ‘out’ and Kaganovich was ‘in.’Both Khrushchev and Kaganovich agree in their otherwise remarkably antagonistic memoirs that the latter’s main task was to revitalize Ukrainian agriculture, which had not yet recovered from wartime destruction. However, the same Politburo decree also appointed a special secretary for agriculture of the KP(b)U Central Committee, Nikolai Patolichev, while agriculture was one of Premier Khrushchev’s major areas of specialization. Lacking their expertise and eager to demonstrate to Moscow his ability to ferret out and solve problems, Kaganovich began looking for errors elsewhere, especially in ideology, where he had found them so successfully while purging the Ukrainian ‘national communists’ in the late 1920s. In Khrushchev’s words, ‘From the very beginning of his activities in Ukraine, Kaganovich looked for every opportunity to show off and to throw his weight around.’3 This search soon led the new first secretary to the promising field of Ukrainian historiography.