National Communism

As a result of the variants of communism that have evolved in such countries as China and Yugoslavia, the idea that a nation can pursue “its own road to communism” is well established today.

Given the close ties that the Ukrainian national movement in Eastern Ukraine had long had with socialism, national communist ideas came easily to many Ukrainians in the Bolshevik camp. As early as 1918, two Communists, Vasyl Shakhrai (the first Soviet Ukrainian commissar of foreign affairs) and his colleague Serhii Mazlakh (an Old Bolshevik of Jewish origin), bitterly attacked the party for its hypocritical attitude towards nationalism in general and Ukrainians in particular. With a clear reference to the Russian nationalism that permeated the Bolshevik party, they stressed in their pamphlets, “Revolution in Ukraine” and “On the Current Situation in Ukraine,” that “so long as the nationality question is not resolved, so long as one nation rules and another is forced to be subordinate to it, what we have is not socialism.”⁶

A year later, national communist views again surfaced in the CP(b)U in the so-called federalist opposition, led by Iurii Lapchynsky.

When the Ukrainization drive began to gain momentum, national communist tendencies in Ukraine, usually identified with the names of their main proponents, again came to the fore. Khvylovyism

The most direct and emotional call for rejecting the “Russian road” was sounded by Mykola Khvylovy. This remarkable individual, whose real name was Fitilov, grew up in Eastern Ukraine as the son of a petty Russian nobleman. A committed internationalist, he joined the Bolsheviks during the Civil War in hopes of helping to create a truly universal and equitable communist society. After the Civil War, Khvylovy became one of the most popular Soviet Ukrainian writers, an organizer of the avant-garde literary organization Vaplite, and a frequent commentator on Ukrainian/Russian relations, particularly in the area of culture.

An idealistic communist, Khvylovy was bitterly disillusioned by the glaring discrepancies that existed between Bolshevik nationality theory and practice, and also by the Russian chauvinism of party bureaucrats, who, as he put it, masked their bias “behind Marx’s beard.” To save the revolution from the pernicious impact of Russian nationalism, Khvylovy resolved to expose it. Couching his message in literary terms, he claimed that “passive-pessimistic Russian literature had reached its limits and stopped at the crossroads” and he advised Ukrainians to distance themselves from it: “Insofar as our literature can at last follow its own path of development, the question before us is: toward which of the world’s literatures must it chart its course? In no case toward the Russian.

To emphasize that Ukrainians were fully capable of creating socialist art on their own, he stated that “the young Ukrainian nation – the Ukrainian proletariat and its Communist intelligentsia – are the bearers of the great revolutionary socialist ideas and they must not orient themselves on the All-Union Philistinism: on its Moscow sirens.”⁹ Khvylovy’s impassioned pleas for Ukrainians to strike out on their own gave rise to the famous slogan: “Away from Moscow!”

While Khvylovy directed his ideas primarily at young writers searching for literary models, his message clearly had political implications. It should be stressed, however, that his anti-Russianism was not so much a product of Ukrainian nationalism as of revolutionary internationalism. Khvylovy was convinced that the global revolution would never succeed if one nation, in this case the Russians, attempted to monopolize it. Shumskyism

The danger that Khvylovy’s views posed to the Soviet regime was heightened by the support that they found not only in Ukrainian literary circles, but also within the Communist party of Ukraine as well, particularly among the former Borotbisty. The leader of the latter was Oleksander Shumsky, the commissar of education, who, despite demands from Moscow loyalists that he condemn Khvylovy refused to do so and came forward with his own criticism of Moscow. The former Borotbisty had their own reasons for believing that the party’s approach to the national question was hypocritical. When they first joined the Communist party, Shumsky and his associates were given high government posts so as to provide the Soviet government with a “Ukrainian flavor.” But promptly after the Bolshevik victory, almost all of them were demoted or expelled from the party. With the advent of Ukrainization, some of the survivors – most notably Shumsky – were once again raised to high office at Moscow’s behest, in order to create the impression that Ukraine was governed by Ukrainians.

While he, too, denounced Russian chauvinism, Shumsky’s main goal was to attack the sacred Bolshevik principle of centralism. In a letter written to Stalin in early 1926, he pointed to the burgeoning Ukrainian national renaissance and argued that, for the party’s own good, such a dynamic, broadly based movement should be controlled by Ukrainian Communists and not by non-Ukrainians. Otherwise, the increasingly nationally conscious Ukrainians, who had never been particularly well disposed to the Bolsheviks, might turn against what they perceived to be a foreign regime and overthrow it. To avoid this possibility, Shumsky proposed that Ukrainian Communists such as Hryhorii Hrynko and Vlas Chubar be appointed to lead the Ukrainian Soviet government and the Communist party of Ukraine and that such non-Ukrainian appointees of Moscow as Emmanuil Kviring (a Latvian) and Lazar Kaganovich (a Russified Jew) be recalled. Presented as a means of ensuring the growth of communism, the proposal called for nothing less than the selection of Ukraine’s political leadership in Ukraine, not Moscow.

Shumsky also denounced the Ukrainians who, under the self-serving guise of loyal service to the party, made Moscow’s centralism possible. At a meeting of the Ukrainian Communist leadership in May 1927, he declared that “in the party the Russian Communist governs with suspicion and unfriendliness… He rules by receiving support from a contemptible Little Russian who, throughout all historical epochs has been basically hypocritical, servilely deceitful and treacherously underhanded. Now he sings his faulty internationalism, defies with his indifferent attitude everything that is Ukrainian and is ever ready to spit at it (sometimes in Ukrainian) if this only would give him the possibility of obtaining a better position.”¹⁰

Shumsky’s critique caused an uproar among Communists both within and outside the Soviet Union.

In early 1928, a new “deviation” appeared among the Ukrainian Communists. Its exponent was a young Ukrainian economist of Russian origin, Mykhailo Volobuev. As did Khvylovy in literature and Shumsky in politics, Volobuev sought to reveal the disparity between Bolshevik theory and practice in the field of economics. In two articles that appeared in Bilshovyk Ukrainy, the official theoretical journal of the Ukrainian party, Volobuev argued that, under Soviet rule, Ukraine continued to be an economic colony of Russia just as it had been under, the tsars. To buttress his point, he carried out a careful analysis showing how, to the detriment of the Ukrainian periphery, heavy industry continued to be built in the Russian center. In addition, Volobuev claimed that the economy of the USSR was not a uniform, single unit, but a complex of economic components of which Ukraine was but one. Not only was each of these economic components capable of surviving on its own, but each clearly had the capability of becoming a part of the world economy by itself without the intermediary of the Russian economy.

Meanwhile, the Communist party had been ready to make concessions such as Ukrainization. It had even acknowledged some of its failings, such as the prevalence of Russian chauvinism in its ranks. But it could not allow the views of Khvylovy, Shumsky, and Volobuev to spread, for in all probability, this dispersion would lead to a challenge of its control over Ukraine. Even Skrypnyk, the great proponent of Ukrainization, believed that these “nationalist deviations” were a mortal threat to the party, and he led the counterattack against their supporters. Therefore, shortly after each of these “deviations” surfaced, their exponents were put under severe pressure to retract their views and confess to a variety of errors. After expressing varying degrees of defiance, all three complied. By late 1928, Khvylovy returned to strictly literary pursuits; Shumsky was shipped off to a minor party post in Russia; and Volobuev slipped into oblivion. However, during the Stalinist purges in the 1930s, their “sins” would be remembered and would cost these national communists their lives.

Finally, to put these national communist tendencies in proper perspective, they ought to be viewed in conjunction with developments in the party itself. After the death of Lenin in 1924, an intense struggle for power and leadership developed among the Bolshevik elite in Moscow. As a result, party control and discipline loosened, allowing various factions and ideological currents to proliferate. But this period of relative liberalism and pluralism, of an open struggle between conflicting ideas, was about to come to an abrupt end.