In June 1951 hundreds of Ukrainian writers, actors, musicians, and artists arrived in Moscow for a dekada (ten-day festival) of Ukrainian art

This grandiose exhibition of Soviet Ukraine’s cultural achievements appeared to be a huge success and was crowned by the decoration of669 Ukrainians with various orders, medals, and honorary artistic titles Pravda provided extensive, enthusiastic coverage of the festival, expressing only minor criticism regarding the opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which, according to the newspaper, did not contain a single battle scene and did not portray the Polish gentry as the enemy¹

The ambassadors of Ukrainian culture left Moscow in high spirits, sending telegraphed expressions of gratitude to Stalin, the party, and the government On 2 July, however, Pravda unexpectedly fired a devastating ideological salvo at the Ukrainians in the form of the editorial ‘Against Ideological Distortions in Litera­ture ’ Unsigned but engineered by Stalin himself, this long article was ostensibly devoted to just one ‘distortion,’ Volodymyr Sosiura’s short poem ‘Love Ukraine’ (1944), which had appeared in Russian translation in the fifth issue of the Leningrad journal Zvezda in 1951 The poem opened thus

Love your Ukraine love as you would the sun,

The wind, the grasses and the streams together

Love her in happy hours, when joys are won,

And love her in her time of stormy weather ²

In the remaining seven stanzas, Sosiura belaboured the concept of patriotic love of Ukraine as the highest virtue Pravda accused the poem, written during the patriotic fervour of 1944, of glorifying a primordial Ukraine, Ukraine in general,’ rather than Soviet Ukraine In an aside, cryptic reference was made to other serious shortcomings in the work of the KP(b)U Central Committee ³

Within days of Pravda's publication, Ukrainian authorities launched a cam­paign of ideological purification in the republic, complete with condemnations of nationalist deviations’ in all areas and genres of creative activity⁴ Similar cam­paigns took place in other republics, and, in contrast to the nine celebrations of non-Russian art - Kazakh, Georgian, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Kirghiz, Armenian, Belarusian, Buriat, and Tajik - that had followed the 1936 Ukrainian dekada in Moscow between 1936 and 1941, no festivals ensued immediately after the ill- fated Ukrainian dekada of 1951 (They would resume only after 1953 ) In a separate, albeit closely linked, campaign, the Kremlin discovered the ‘poison of nationalism’ in Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, and Kirghiz traditional epic poems Given also the harshness of the anti-Ziomst’ purge that took place during 1952 and early 1953, scholars speak of apparent preparations for a general crackdown on nationalities during Stalin’s last years ⁵ Whether or not this was the case, the 1951 attack on Ukrainian ‘pnmordiahsm’ pushed the celebration of non-Russian patri­monies further towards the periphery of Soviet cultural life, a trend reinforced by the increasingly Russocentric character of mainstream Soviet culture

While the Pravda editorial dealt only with a single poem’s failure to stress love for Soviet Ukraine, the Ukrainian leaders discerned a larger ideological signifi­cance between the lines The republic’s ideologues interpreted the critique’s em­phasis according to what they perceived as the main threat to the Stalinist imperial project in Ukraine, a ‘harmful obsession’ with the national past and concomitant insufficiency in the portrayal of historical ties with Russia On 2 August First Secretary Melnikov reported to Stalin’s deputy for party affairs, Georgn Malenkov, that the Ukrainian intelligentsia, ‘in their creative and scholarly work, often idealize the past ’ He assured Moscow that his subordinates would instruct local intellectuals to portray Ukraine as an ‘inseparable part of our great fatherland ’ Writing to Stalin on 14 August, Melnikov expressed his regret that the Ukrainian leaders had overlooked ‘attempts to portray the historical process in Ukraine as separate from the history of the peoples of the USSR ’⁶ Generally, the ideological gatherings held in the republic concentrated more on condemning what they considered to be an inappropriate infatuation with the national past than on bemoaning insufficient celebration of the Soviet present