In March 1951 Soviet Ukraine mourned the ninetieth anniversary of Taras Shevchenkos death.

Innumerable speeches, meetings, newspaper articles, and radio broadcasts glorified the nineteenth-century Ukrainian bard as the nation’s founding father, with the expression ‘our father’ (nosh batko) often being slipped in among more official designations such as ‘revolutionary democrat’ and ‘the founder of Ukrainian literature.’ Shevchenko was the only topic to appear on the first three pages in the newspaper of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, Literaturna hazeta.

In his article in Literaturna hazeta, Stepan Kryzhanivsky proclaimed Shevchenko ‘the pride of the Ukrainian socialist nation (natsii)’ and thanked the party for teaching Ukrainians to value their sense of‘Soviet national pride.’ At a memorial meeting in Kiev, the poet Andrii Malyshko concluded his speech with three slogans: ‘Glory to the holy (svitlyi) genius, Taras Shevchenko, who lives and fights with us and who struggles with us for the happiness and peace of humankind! Glory to our noble people, who produce powerful talents such as his! Glory to our wise leader, the great friend of the Ukrainian people, our dear and beloved Comrade Stalin!²

Every year in late May party and state officials, together with prominent intellectuals, led a solemn pilgrimage to Shevchenko’s tomb on the Dnieper hills in Kaniv, a tradition established by the Ukrainian ‘nationalist’ intelligentsia in the late nineteenth century. By the early 1950s regular participants in these annual trips included professors and students at Kiev University and the Kiev Pedagogical Institute, scholars, writers, artists, composers, as well as representatives of the Kiev Opera Company and two leading professional choirs.

These annual Shevchenko celebrations highlight the ambiguity of Soviet Ukrainian historical memory. Although the official discourse stressed Shevchenko’s ties to Russian culture and his social views that allegedly anticipated socialism, the poet remained primarily a great ‘ethnic’ ancestor of all Ukrainians. Unlike the Russians or Uzbeks, Soviet Ukrainians identified themselves as his posterity, as did the emigre nationalists and the Western Ukrainian insurgents.

High Stalinism’s idea of a ‘nation’ required, among other things, the possession of a great cultural tradition.⁴ After 1945 celebration of the non-Russian cultural heritage increasingly came to include praise for Russian guidance, yet memorialization of their separate national cultures was prioritized in the republics’ elaborate rituals of remembrance. Incorporating the Russian Empire or the ‘friendship of peoples’ within this empire into the local cults of national heritage proved difficult, warranting the extraordinary attention and vigilance of Stalinist ideologues.