“Nationalist” Plots
To better coordinate the struggle with internal political enemies, on 4 April 1931, Moscow created the SPV (Secret Political Department of the GPU in Ukraine—Sekretno-politychnyi viddil).
Its first leaders were Henrikh Liushkov, Yukhym Kryvets, Mykhailo Oleksandrovskyi (also sometimes spelled Aleksandrovskyi), and Borys Kozelskyi.16 They had earlier been involved in surveilling the intelligentsia and, in accordance with guidelines from Moscow, had begun fabricating “nationalist” cases. There were separate divisions in the SPV assigned to anti-Soviet parties, anti-Soviet Ukrainian parties, counter-revolution in the countryside, and the church. The second had subdivisions for: (a) Ukrainian parties such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Social-Democrats, the Ukrainian Communist Party (Ukrainska Komunistychna Partiia or UKP), socialists, and members of Galician political parties; (b) the counter-revolutionary community and emigrants from Galicia; (c) the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, scholarly institutes, and organizations; (d) the Ministry of Education and all its organs; (e) literary groups, publishers, and the press;(f) artistic and musical circles, cinema groups, museums, and libraries; and
(g) higher educational institutes, professors, teachers, and the Red Cross. Each subdivision had a team devoted to nationalist “conspiracies” and obtaining confessions from the arrested. After members of the team had signed off on the minutes of interrogations, the summary accusations went to the “court”—a troika consisting of a procurator, a party leader, and a member of the GPU (Zolotarov 2007, 39-40; Okipniuk 2002, 74-75). The SPV’s strategy was to compromise all critics of the regime by describing them as saboteurs and fascists, and by linking them to Western powers and the threat of foreign intervention.
The case of the Ukrainian National Center (UNTs) was the SPV’s first assignment.
Izrail Leplevskyi and Liushkov reported in February 1931 on “a large counterrevolutionary Ukrainian organization headed by a united center and containing various political parties,” which supposedly worked in “cooperatives, industry, scholarly institutes, schools, literature, and art” (Zolotarov 2007, 41). Balytskyi, who was then working for the OGPU in Moscow, gave instructions to create a list of UNTs members from individuals already arrested. However, the case stalled when Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, who had been cast as the conspiracy’s inspirational leader, stopped cooperating after being freed from prison. He 34 Myroslav Shkandrij and Olga Bertelsen informed Yakov Agranov, the deputy head of the OGPU, that as an old man suffering from the flu, he had not been able to withstand the nine- hour, all-night interrogation. He changed his testimony, saying that there had been no insurrectionary organization and there were no insurrectionary tendencies among his friends (ibid., 42). Following consulting with the center, the GPU team in Kharkiv decided that a show trial with him as leading actor would not work. It was decided that a scenario involving the UVO was more promising.All scenarios had to be confirmed in Moscow. In the UNTs case, for example, Kozelskyi and Valerii Horozhanyn developed a number of options. One of these, the “medical” one (a plot by doctors to murder political leaders), was dropped when the center decided it was unworkable (ibid., 242, 245). Although the UNTs never became a show trial, on 21 October 1931, Kozelskyi and Semen Dolynskyi signed a 300-page accusatory statement declaring the discovery and liquidation of “an allUkrainian counterrevolutionary organization called the ‘National Center,’” whose alleged goals were to prepare an armed uprising of the kurkuls (kulaks) when capitalist countries invaded the USSR, to overthrow Soviet power in Ukraine, to separate Ukraine from the Soviet Union, and to establish a capitalist order in the form of a bourgeois-democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic (ibid., 252).
The organization had supposedly first appeared in Ukraine in 1924, but became a fully formed “united front of the Ukrainian and Galician counterrevolution” in 1926. It allegedly worked “under direct instructions from Poland and France” (ibid., 256). Fifty people were sentenced to between three- and six-years imprisonment for membership. By 1941, twenty-one of them had been shot. The sentences of twelve were renewed when they expired; almost all these individuals died in the camps.In 1933, the public learned of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO). Its creation had been approved in Moscow, and Balytskyi then sent out instructions for the case to be conducted in “the most rapid military tempos” (ibid.). GPU operatives were told that a “widespread, counterrevolutionary, nationalist” organization was planning “to overthrow Soviet power through armed uprising and to establish a fascist dictatorship in Ukraine” (ibid., 201). In the spring of 1933, a group of interrogators with Oleksandrovskyi at the helm was added to the Kharkiv team, and similar teams were created in the GPU’s oblast departments throughout Ukraine. Balytskyi provided the guidelines: “Pay special attention to UVO members who have come from abroad with fictional party cards from fraternal organizations and have crept into the party. Investigators have learned that they are the most active members in spying and conducting sabotage for the underground” (ibid., 202). When Kozelskyi drew up the summary accusation on 10 October 1933, it contained seventy-six names. During 1933-34, at least 148 people were sentenced as members.
The OUN case was fabricated in Kyiv in 1934 and resulted in the execution of twenty-eight out of the thirty-seven accused (Zolotarov 2007, 256).17 The press announced that most had made their way to the USSR from Poland or Romania to conduct terrorist acts, and that revolvers and hand grenades had been taken from them. This was untrue. The arrested were well-known cultural figures and included some accomplished writers such as Kost Burevii, Oleksa Vlyzko, Hryhorii Kosynka, Ivan Krushelnytskyi, and Dmytro Falkivskyi.
After the murder of Kirov on 1 December 1934, it was decreed that investigations in terrorist cases had to be limited to ten days, that the presence of a lawyer and procurator were not required, that no appeal or reduction of a sentence could be permitted, and that the verdict had to be carried out immediately (Kokurin and Petrov 2002, 95). These changes were accepted in Ukraine on 9 December 1934, and were applied in the OUN case.Altogether, the three nationalist conspiracies—the UNTs, UVO, and OUN—were used to remove all oblast directors in the Ministry of Education and 90% of regional ones, along with 4,000 teachers (ibid., 202203, 205).
To better manipulate public opinion, the party demanded that the secret police provide party leaders in Moscow and Kharkiv with weekly reports about the cases. These contained summary accusations and typed extracts from statements by the arrested, which were used in speeches, although an unspoken taboo was maintained against revealing the sources and dubious nature of evidence obtained under torture (Rublov 2004, 402-403, 426).
Stalin started from conclusions, with a prepared plot outline, but he worked “largely through indirection, holding many moves in suspension for a time, waiting for the right moment to seize his opportunity while covering his intentions with his rhetoric” (Brent and Naumov 2003, 30-31). Secret police operatives learned to read signals provided in oracular hints, to find connections between critics of the regime, nationalists, peasant revolts, Ukrainizers, and foreign governments, and to reduce the logic of the interrogation process to a syllogism, which, paraphrasing Brent and Naumov, became: nationalistic conversations = nationalistic tendencies = hostile plans and actions = connections to foreign governments (ibid., 109-10).
Ukrainians were not the only national group attacked. Poles figured prominently in Soviet propaganda throughout the interwar period, and in the early thirties the secret police concocted a PVO (Polish Military Organization).18 Zionist groups were also arrested and there was a search for German “spies.”19 In 1937, such “national operations” would be openly directed against Poles, Germans, Romanians, Afghanis, Greeks, Iranians, Latvians, and other groups.20 In the early 1930s, however, Moscow instructed the GPU in Ukraine to concentrate on Ukrainian nationalists and rural opposition.21