Kulyk’s National-Communist Utopia

With the demise of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) in the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks had wiped out all traces of the previous Ukrainian regimes— which they conveniently associated with horrible atrocities against civilians, above all Jews, and for which Simon Petliura was held personally responsible.

The Kremlin leadership realized that to win over Ukrainians psychologi­cally, they had to endorse a controlled Ukrainian national revival but, indeed, under socialist banners. Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich (1893 -1991)—whom many Ukrainian historians often saw as personally responsible for the genocide of Ukrainians during the famine of 1932- 33 and who in the mid-1920s was the head of the Ukrainian Soviet government—launched the so-called ukrainiza- tsiia campaign, known as indigenization. The campaign’s lofty goal was to teach Ukrainian to those inhabiting and ruling Ukraine, but its real agenda was to bol­ster Ukrainian socialism.³⁷

The indigenous population of the country was to take a leading role in the state-building process. For the Ukrainian intelligentsia, indigenization also im­plied de-Russification. The 1925 meeting of the Central Committee of the Com­munist Party of Ukraine approved a resolution on Ukrainization, according to which all party meetings, court hearings, cadre education, and publication activ­ities were to be conducted in Ukrainian. The proportion of Ukrainian periodi­cals grew from to percent in 1928 to 94 percent in 1929.

Ukrainian was made obligatory for all state institutions in Ukraine. Quality control of language use was delegated to the newly established Kharkiv Central Ukrainian Courses (Tsentral’ni kursy ukrainoznavstva). The Ukrainization of the army officer corps followed suit. The success of the language campaign is dif­ficult to overestimate. The number of Ukrainian elementary schools grew from 6,105 in 1922 to ιo,τi4 in 1925. By the end of 1921, 11 percent of all students in Ukraine attended Ukrainian-language schools. By 1929, 65.8 percent of the pro­fessional schools were Ukrainian-language, while 16 percent were bilingual, and 5.3 percent Russian-language. Given that there were no Ukrainian-language in­stitutions of higher education before 1911, it is particularly remarkable that by the late 1920s, there were fourteen Ukrainian-language, two Russian-language, and twenty-three bilingual institutions of higher education. By 1932, 81.5 per­cent of all periodicals were issued in Ukrainian. By 1930, Komunist had reached a circulation of 122,000, Proletar of 19,000, Visty of 90,000, Radians’ke selo of 600,000. Book production in Ukrainian, among all works published in Ukraine, increased from 46 percent in 1925-26 to 54 percent in 1921-28 and 11 percent in 1931. The All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences issued scholarly publications in Ukrainian, some of which continue to be important for scholars of East Eu­rope. Leaflets encouraging party bureaucrats to learn Ukrainian—and rebuking those who procrastinated—were promptly dispatched to the most distant re­gions of the republic. Ukraine was rapidly emerging on the European map as a postcolonial Soviet republic with a unique cultural and political profile.

The cultural revival was even more astounding. The Ukrainian literary and artistic accomplishments of the 1920s were orchestrated by Lenin’s good friend Mykola Skrypnyk, who endorsed Ukrainian revivalism and tirelessly empha­sized the necessity to cast it in the mold of proletarian internationalism.³⁹ For him and his colleagues it was far from evident that Bolshevism and Ukrainian re­vivalism were incompatible. Dubbed by one of the keen scholars of this period “a national utopian thinker” and a commissar of “national communism,” Skrypnyk created the Department on National Problems at the Institute of Marxism, headed it himself, and elaborated a new vision of the Ukrainian-Russian di­chotomy that emphasized the aggressive and destructive impact of metropolitan all-Russian culture in Ukraine. As the people’s commissar of education between 1927 and 1933, he supported such harbingers of the Ukrainian cultural orienta­tion to Europe as Mykola Khvyl’ovyi (1893 -1933; whose radicalism Kulyk, not yet a party big shot, admired in the early 1920s) and endorsed the spread of a va­riety of literary groups, clubs, journals, and trends. Kharkiv, the new proletarian Ukrainian capital in eastern Ukraine, boasted a dozen bourgeoning literary groups. Ukrainian writers residing in the Diaspora were invited to resettle in Ukraine and partake in the cultural revival. The authorities pursued the same policies toward Yiddish writers.⁴⁰

Kulyk was a genuine and sincere believer in the harmonious fusion of com­munism and Ukrainian revivalism. For Kulyk, “Ukrainian” implied “univer­sal,” “revolutionary” stood for “Ukrainian,” and both signified “anti-imperial.” To accord international meaning to events or images, Kulyk made them Ukrai­nian. His Bolshevik Revolution was an international phenomenon as long as it spoke Ukrainian. He viewed Ukrainian as the language of anticolonialist strug­gle and Marxism. His Ukrainian helped him identify his life experience as the manifestation of class struggle.

Hey, my fertile Alberta,

Makhno will come for you!

Whatever you do

But you will rise renewed!

Hey, my British Columbia,

Your forests and marshes

Will soon learn the jokes

Of theVolhynia guerilla!

Hey, my pedantic Halifax,

(The port of the future. Glory and progress).

You think it is simple?

Wouldn’t you like it as it was in Odessa?

Hey, my Ontarian lakes,

Your rage will be justified

And the red smog of the battleships

Will reign over you!

And even you, my Yukon,

Will never hide under the snows,

For in the nearest days,

You will redden as a New Donbass.

And you, Ottawa the capital,

With your proud House of Commons,

Will be ardently ruled

By the All-Canadian Soviet Commissariat!⁴¹

Kulyk perceived the Ukrainian revolutionary events as those that would spark world revolution. Ukraine comes to redeem the world, sending forth its emis­saries, such as the anarchist Makhno or the red partisans of Volhynia.

Sometimes it is almost impossible to separate Kulyk’s Ukrainian from his in­ternational revolutionary references. In Canada he approaches Indians and tries to talk them into a rebellion against ethnic discrimination, presenting himself as their “white-skinned secret accomplice.”⁴² The North American prairies and the Black Sea steppes come together in his poetry to serve as a backdrop for In­dians riding their sweating mustangs across the Kawanaga valley, shouting out their bellicose war cries and led by the mounted red-spirited Indian Ivan Kulyk. Kulyk’s revolutionary anthems were imbued with Ukrainian historical refer­ences and were articulated in Ukrainian. Given Kulyk’s multiple writings in Russian, this linguistic aspect of his career should not be taken for granted.

Like many Jews in Ukraine before and after him, Kulyk encountered a lin­guistic dilemma. The fourteen-year-old Kulyk was reported to have published his first Russian poem between 1909 and 1911 in the Uman local newspaper Prov- intsial’nyigolos (The Provintial Voice), or in Umans’kyi lystok (Uman Paper), or in

an unknown Odessa periodical. While in America between 1914 and 1917, he penned hundreds of Russian poems, journalistic essays, and reports. He addressed not only a Russian-speaking but also a Ukrainian audience, publishing essays in such periodicals as the Cleveland Robitnyk (The Worker), the Winnipeg Robochyi narod (The Working People), and the New York Haidamaky (Haidamaks). But once back in Ukraine, Kulyk switched to Ukrainian poetry, prose, journalism, and historiography. His written and spoken Ukrainian impressed his Ukrainian party colleagues. One of them was particularly fascinated to hear an Uman-born red- bearded Jew correcting his report dedicated to Shevchenko and quoting dozens of Shevchenko’s lines from memory in the process.⁴³ In 1924-26, when Kulyk worked in the Soviet Trade Mission in Montreal, he taught Ukrainian language, an introduction into Ukrainian studies course, and performance arts to local Ukrai­nian emigres and helped them stage classical and folklore plays from the Ukrainian repertoire. He also helped Mykola Tarnovs’kyi (1895 -1984), a key American- Ukrainian socialist poet, to polish his verse.⁴⁴

Because of his philo-Ukrainian stance, among Ukrainians overseas Kulyk became a legendary figure. A major Canadian workers’ newspaper opened up its premises for him, interviewed him on every possible occasion, sought his opin­ion on a variety of contemporary political issues, commissioned him to write articles on the changes in Ukrainian society, agreed to publish him as Ivan Ku- lyk, Vasyl’ Rolenko, I. Viktor (the unnamed yet authoritative expert on things Ukrainian), and even as Luciana Piontek (his wife), so that by the end of 1925 Kulyk found himself transformed into the leading Ukrainian and Bolshevik whose reputation and renown in Canada were unchallenged and whose expertise on an ample array of issues was unquestioned.

Kulyk’s overwhelming support of Ukrainization was part and parcel of his identity. One of the prominent nationalist Ukrainian poets recalled a conversa­tion during which Kulyk argued against the viewpoint of a chauvinistic-minded Trotskyite, claiming that a communist who lives and works in Ukraine ought to know Ukrainian.⁴⁶ Kulyk dedicated the lion’s share of his first extensive inter­view in Canada’s Ukrains’ki robitnychi visti to Ukraine and emphatically praised the success of the postcolonial nation-building effort:

Ukrainization is moving very fast. Most institutions have been conducting their activities in Ukrainian. The volume of Ukrainian publications is enormous. The number of Ukrainian schools has been increased. There is an apparent shift in the attitudes of Ukrainian intellectuals, who have gladly joined the work of So­viet institutions. Suffice it to mention almost all former members of the Central Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party work for Ukrainian cooperative organizations. Many Ukrainian political figures from abroad who treated us as enemies have now offered us their assistance. Professor Hrushevs’kyi arrived in Ukraine and began giving lectures in institutions of higher education in Kyiv. Recently M. Lutskevych, the former [Ukrainian] ambassador to the Polish Sejm, was granted Ukrainian Soviet citizenship and came back from Czechoslo­vakia. I guess everybody has heard about the warlord [otaman] Iu. Tiutiunnyk, Palii, and other less prominent Petliura-followers, who have changed sides and joined the Soviets.⁴⁷

Kulyk was among the earliest advocates of the Ukrainization campaign. Ukrainization had not yet been officially adopted by party officials in Moscow when Kulyk wrote for a socialist Ukrainian newspaper in Canada a passionate and well-argued article “A Mighty Cultural Weapon,” providing an all-encom­passing vision of the anti-Russification trend based on the Ukrainian govern­ment’s attitude to Ukrainian school-book production, new policies toward bol­stering Ukrainian periodicals, a boom of translations of the classics of Marxism in Ukrainian, and the increasing circulation of Ukrainian literature published by Chervonyi shliakh (Red Path) Press.⁴⁸

However much Kulyk may have been engaged in commercial, diplomatic, and economic activities, he is most closely identified with shifts in Ukrainian cultural life. Given the long-standing ban on Ukrainian culture in Ukraine, it comes as no surprise that Kulyk spoke of the Ukrainian economic boom only af­ter he had recounted in detail the activities of the Derzhvydav (Ukrainian State Press). Kulyk seems to have been profoundly moved by the dry data he listed while explaining that in 1923 the major state-sponsored press had issued in the Ukrainian language some 2.2 million books and 1.5 million school primers, as well as a series of popular theatrical books, literary almanacs such as Pluh and Hart, a new edition of Kotsiubyns’kyi’s writings, a translation into Ukrainian of Korolenko’s works, two dictionaries, and even a wall calendar for peasants.⁴⁹

Kulyk articulated his own cultural priorities in the programmatic article “Modern Ukrainian Culture,” published in three consecutive issues of the Ukrains’ki robitnychi visti under the name Vasyl' Rolenko, and in his more mod­erate “The Holiday of Ukrainian Culture,” published under the name Ivan Ku­lyk. He argued that Ukraine had been a country of peasants, with 21 million liv­ing in rural areas and only 4 million in cities, and only the peasants representing Ukraine. The tsarist Russian administration had treated the Ukrainian language badly and took pains to artificially Russify semi-urbanized towns. Hence the aversion of urbanites toward things Ukrainian. National oppression, argued Ku- lyk, and the nonurban origins of the national agenda shaped the late nineteenth­century political message of Ukrainian culture. It was by and large rural-cen­tered, conservative, and provincial. It was not interested in European spiritual endeavors and on its own was of no interest to Europe. Even a giant like Shev­chenko was reconsidered as a poet who merely romanticized the great Ukrainian past and celebrated Ukrainian peasant imagery. Focused on national food, na­tional dance, and folklore songs, the Ukrainians in the tsarist Russia misread Shevchenko, presenting him as a conservative romantic and neglecting his revo­lutionary strivings.

New literary figures emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, maintained Kulyk, were more urban, intellectually open, and modernist. How­ever petty-bourgeois their appeal, they targeted a larger audience. The best writ­ers among them dramatically changed the perception of what Ukrainian culture could and should be. This was particularly true of Ivan Franko and his focus on the rise of the industrial proletariat in Galicia, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns'kyi and his portrayal of the class stratification of the Ukrainian village, and Lesia Ukrainka and her revolutionary symbolism. After 1917 nobody argued that the fin de sie- cle petty-bourgeois intellectuals—with the exception of progressive-minded ones who prefigured the new era—belonged to the day before yesterday. Yet the bourgeois intellectuals did not want to yield any literary terrain to the advancing culture of the proletarian and peasant masses.⁵⁰

The next period, argued Kulyk, featured a class struggle between the old culture and the new one forged by the proletarians and peasants. The latter dreamed not about dancing the hopak, but about hut-libraries, communist read­ing circles, the Young Communist League, cooperation, new machinery, and the branches of the Pluh (Plough) literary groups that sought new ways to articulate the experiences of the Ukrainian peasantry.⁵¹ In other words, Ukrainian peas­ants turned to urbanized forms of labor and leisure, if not to urban proletarian culture. Simultaneously there was another shift taking place: under the impact of the successful Ukrainization campaign, the previously Russified urban prole­tarians began recognizing the value of and appropriating Ukrainian culture. In Kulyk's understanding of national communism, nothing was more important than the postcolonial encounter between the workers in Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. It would be naive to criticize Kulyk for his inability to predict the failure of this encounter: his utopia was his credo, and he could hardly have treated his beliefs critically. Kulyk outlined the magnitude of the Communist Party’s cam­paign quite accurately, but he somewhat overestimated its immediate results. He wrote, “when the Soviet authorities launched the so-called Ukrainization (that is to say, the creation of conditions that favor the development of Ukrainian prole­tarian culture), not by refurbishing street posters but by creating a gigantic in­frastructure of Ukrainian high schools, workers’ university departments, cul­tural institutions—at that point the proletarians threw away their mistrust of Ukrainian culture and together with the destitute peasantry began working on its development.”⁵²

According to Kulyk, the Soviet period ushered in a brand new era of Ukrai­nian culture. For the first time in history, Ukrainians managed to overcome their provincialism and open a window onto Europe. For the first time in history, the Ukrainian masses became full-fledged consumers of their own literature eager to make sense of with their colonial past and anticolonialist present. The Pluh liter­ary group united peasant-writers who addressed the villagers, while the Hart group was comprised of proletarian literati whose audience worked in industry. The theater buttressed new cultural shifts and abandoned once and forever its melodramatic, pseudo-romantic repertoire. Ukrainian scholarship, epitomized by the state-sponsored All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, incorporated some thirty-two newly established local and national museums, libraries, observato­ries, botanical labs, and so forth. And the development of high culture did not obstruct progress below: the number of children exposed to elementary educa­tion doubled (from 43 to 78 percent), as did the number of newly created centers for the liquidation of illiteracy (from 9,000 to 16,000). The Ukrainian language grew to become the language of education, art, and science. Kulyk gladly agreed with the sympathetic French literary figures from the Clarte group who had vis­ited Ukraine and who considered recent Ukrainian cultural achievements to be more profound than those in Russia and Belorussia.⁵³

Yet for Kulyk Ukrainization was a means, not an end. He saw new Ukraini­ans as paradigmatic internationalists. He argued that neither proletarians nor peasants should seclude themsleves in their own huts. Ukrainians must become as all-embracing as Walt Whitman, one of Kulyk’s favorites. Ukrainian culture, he argued, could not afford national self-isolation. On the contrary: “The mod­ern culture of Soviet Ukraine is internationalist in content and ideology, it does not isolate itself in national boundaries, it absorbs the best of the Western, alien peoples’ cultures, and exerts influence on them, too.”⁵⁴ What Kulyk was articu­lating was the idiosyncratic leftist utopianism that was also manifested in Ku- lyk’s historiography, for example in the Essays on the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (1923) that he wrote with the historian M. Ia- vorskii. Reviewing their book, one Ukrainian historian observed that Kulyk es­tablished 1917 as the starting point, the ab ovo of the Ukrainian left. The re­viewer’s irony, by no means misleading, disclosed Kulyk’s utopian vision of Ukrainian history.⁵⁵ Before that time, maintained Kulyk, Ukraine was just an­other borderland in the Russian Empire, a colonial entity bereft of its own his­tory and, consequently, of its own historical narrative.

That Kulyk ignored pre-1917 developments in Ukrainian sociopolitical thought attests not only to his aversion to the colonial historiography that stifled the voice of Ukraine but also to his ahistorical utopianism. Kulyk’s understand­ing of “new” Ukrainian history sheds light on his own cultural origins: he em­phasized how 1917 was the genesis of a new Ukraine and also indicated that his personal story as an artist and politician began exactly when he came back from the United States to Ukraine and made his final choices: Ukraine as a reimag­ined motherland, Ukrainian literature as the medium, and Bolshevism as the so­ciopolitical program.