Political Repressions
The first two five-year plans, the Cultural Revolution, the famines and Holodomor, and the purges of the Communist Party of Ukraine seriously undermined the capacity of Soviet Ukrainian civil society - already weakened by war, revolution, and the post-revolutionary civil and national wars - to resist amalgamation into the Stalinist order.12 During the NEP era, Stalinists and the secret police carefully observed the activities of peasant and Ukrainian organizations, which often conformed to their stereotypes of “counter-revolutionary” behaviour.
In 1927, Soviet authorities began to restrict the cooperative movement in the countryside. In 1928, they arrested Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky, all of the bishops, and many of the priests of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had emerged during the revolutionary period and which served the authorities as a counterweight to the more powerful Russian Orthodox Church. By 1931, the Soviet authorities dismantled this independent church with its Ukrainian liturgy.13Between the end of de-kulakization in July 1929 and the start of the mass collectivization drive in early 1930, the authorities arrested a large number of members of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN). Before, during, and after the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU, Soiuz vyzvolennia Ukrainy) in the spring of 1930, the security services incarcerated nearly thirty thousand members of the noncommunist intelligentsia.14
In a January 1930 letter to the Ukrainian Politburo, Stalin demanded a prompt trial of the members of the SVU. He provided a script of how the proceedings should unfold. The accused would “be charged with preparing an insurrection aimed at exposing Soviet Ukraine to foreign invasion, of committing acts of terrorism, and with scheming to poison senior communist leaders, with doctors to be implicated in this supposed plot.”15 Stalin also insisted that the mass media cover this trial, and not just in Soviet Ukraine.
The Communist Party of Ukraine followed orders. Providing fabricated evidence, the security services charged these writers, scientists, scholars, journalists, actors, community activists, and Galician Ukrainian emigres with engaging in “counter-revolutionary activity” and with abetting foreign interventionists.16 Between 19 March and 9 April 1930 the prosecutors at this public trial (the first of those in the non-Russian republics modelled on the Shakhty trial of 1928) accused forty-five men and women of belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine or its youth wing, the Union of Ukrainian Youth (SUM, or Spilka ukrains’koi molodi). Most of those arrested consisted of older Ukrainian intellectuals and leaders of former anti-Soviet political parties, such as the Socialist-Federalists, the Social Democrats, and the Socialist Revolutionaries, those who played an important role during the era of the Central Rada and the Directory.
The SVU trial played a central role in determining the scope of Ukrainization’s future implementation after 1930. The Communist Party never trusted those in the dock, members of the pre-war Ukrainian intelligentsia, most of whom actively supported the post-1917 Ukrainian nationalist governments and who played a critical role in the implementation of Ukrainization.17
According to the official accusations, the SVU and SUM established branches throughout Ukraine and conspired in planning an insurrection which would restore “a bourgeois-democratic and independent Ukraine.” Most of these men and women experienced physical or psychological torture during their imprisonment and most “confessed” to their crimes.18 The authorities sentenced all of the defendants to long terms in the Solovetsky Islands and in Siberia. They also ordered Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the head of the Central Rada, who returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and who played a leading role in the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the 1920s, to move to Moscow in March 1931.19
The GPU allegedly uncovered three more major counter-revolutionary organizations between 1931 and 1934: the UNTs (Ukrains’kyi Natsional’nyi Tsentr, Ukrainian National Center), UVO (Ukrains’ka viis’kova orhani- zatsiia, the Ukrainian Military Organization), and OUN (Ob’iednannia Ukrains’kykh natsionalistiv, Association of Ukrainian Nationalists; not to be confused with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists described in chapter 4).
Thousands more were arrested, but did not receive a public trial. The Soviet government’s spotlight on these “counter-revolutionary” groups, especially the UVO and OUN, highlighted how these groups had perfidiously (in the Soviet view) allied themselves with Polish and Western interventionists.Following the direct orders of the Kremlin, the GPU organized mass arrests and trials “to prevent the crystallization of a political opposition in Ukraine” during the crisis brought about by the start of collectivization and massive peasant resistance to it. These large-scale “prophylactic measures” targeted those who had espoused Ukrainization and Ukrainian culture in the 1920s.20 The party leadership feared that the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the peasantry might unite, just as they had during the revolutionary spring of 1917.
In addition to condemnations of former anti-Bolshevik leaders, Stalinists also censured prominent Ukrainian national communists and reassigned them to other parts of the USSR in the second half of the decade. By 1929, the Communist Party had removed or marginalized Mykola Khvylovy, Mykhailo Volobuev, and Alexander Shumsky, prominent Ukrainian national communists.21 During the de-kulakization and collectivization campaigns, which coincided with the Cultural Revolution, central party leaders launched a new wave of attacks on the Communist Party of Ukraine and on Ukrainian nationalism, which they identified with the kulaks and with foreign interventionists. In 1929, the Ukrainian party organization initiated a purge of “rightists” (alleged followers of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, promoters of moderate agricultural policies within Moscow’s Politburo) and expelled twenty-four thousand members.22
As the famines swept through the countryside from late 1928 to the early 1930s, Stalin’s political machine tightened its grip. Upset by the Ukrainian party leadership’s protests against high grain quotas and by the failure to fulfil these orders, the central party accused the CP(b)U of tolerating a Ukrainian nationalist deviation in its ranks on 14 December 1932.23
Moscow’s Central Committee demanded that the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Soviet Ukrainian government “eliminate Ukrainization’s mechanical implementation” and “ensure systematic party management and supervision over Ukrainization.”24 Although Moscow’s Politburo never officially abolished Ukrainization within Ukraine, it de-emphasized this policy and rarely made public reference to it in positive terms after 1932.25
In this decree, the party’s support for the Ukrainian language outside of Ukraine also ended.
Stalin and Molotov issued another secret decree on 15 December 1932, demanding that local party organs, governmental bodies, and the press in the North Caucasus, in the Kuban, “switch” from Ukrainian to Russian and introduce Russian as the language of instruction in the schools by the start of the next academic year.26 The Russian Federation, which opened Ukrainian-language schools and developed a Ukrainian language press for its large Ukrainian minority in the 1920s, closed them down in the spring of 1933.27 Ukrainization, which operated on two tracks (publicly supported by Moscow, but privately undermined by its security organs), came to an end. Overall, this decree attacked Ukrainization and identified all who opposed the breakneck speed of collectivization and industrialization as Ukrainian “counter-revolutionary elements.”28In order to ensure the Ukrainian party’s reliability, the central party assigned Pavel Postyshev to the post of second secretary of the CP(b)U and the first secretary of the Kharkiv party provincial committee in January 1933. Vsevolod Balitsky, the new chief of the Ukraine’s OGPU and subsequent “guillotine of Ukraine,” followed him from Moscow one month later.29 Both Postyshev and Balitsky had served in Ukraine in the 1920s and had bitterly antagonized Mykola Skrypnyk, the CP(b)U’s powerful patron of Ukrainization.30 Now they returned as Stalin’s plenipotentiaries, outranking Skrypnyk, eager to vanquish him.
The two men arrived in Kharkiv just as Adolf Hitler became Germany’s new chancellor on 30 January and crushed the powerful Social Democratic and Communist parties. In light of Hitler’s rapid consolidation of power, radical territorial demands, and strident anti-communism, a new international conflict appeared on the horizon. Since Stalin understood that Ukraine would play centre stage in this war, the central party had to secure and “to purify” this critical republic as quickly as possible.
Postyshev, Stalin’s enforcer, produced results. In February 1933 he pressed the CP(b)U’s Central Committee to admit its responsibility for the chaos in the Ukrainian countryside and for the failure to meet grain targets in 1931 and 1932. He also organized a mass purge of the ranks of the CP(b)U (which possessed 520,000 members on 1 June 1932) and called upon the OGPU to strike a “merciless blow” upon all enemies. In 1933, the CP(b)U expelled 100,000 of its members; many of them were arrested shortly afterwards.31 By January 1934, Postyshev replaced 60 per cent of the district executive committee and village soviet chairs and 50 per cent of all district party secretaries.32
On 1 March 1933, Skrypnyk - the CP(b)U’s primary advocate of Ukrainization - lost his position as commissar of education and became the head of Ukraine’s State Planning Commission, a precarious position at the beginning of the second five-year plan and the Holodomor. In the spring and early summer, his colleagues in the Politburo constantly attacked him, accusing him of promoting “compulsory Ukrainization” and of misusing Marxist theory in presenting his interpretations of the national question in the USSR.33 Following the 13 May 1933 suicide of Khvylovy, a staunch defender of Ukraine’s culture independent of Russia’s, Skrypnyk killed himself on 7 July 1933. After his death, more purges took place.
On 22 November 1933, the combined plenum of the CP(b)U’s Central Committee and the Central Control Commission passed a resolution declaring that local (Ukrainian) nationalism had emerged as the most dangerous threat to the communist cause in Ukraine, the only such resolution passed in a non-Russian republic.34 This decision overturned the longstanding interpretation that of the two “national deviations,” Great Power chauvinism and local nationalism, the first represented the greatest risk to the long-term stability of the USSR. To justify this ideological U- turn, Stalin’s loyalists purposefully blurred Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainization to smear those they perceived as their political enemies, even at the height of the Kremlin’s public support for Ukrainization. Lazar Kaganovich, who headed the CP(b)U from 1925 to 1928 and who promoted Ukrainization with far less enthusiasm than Skrypnyk, often claimed that “every Ukrainian is potentially a nationalist.”35 By the late 1930s, such accusations defied any semblance of reality. A.I. Uspenskii, the chief of Ukraine’s secret police and a self-identified Russian, asserted that “75-80 percent of Ukrainians are bourgeois nationalists.”36 Even Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD’s leader before Beria, declared in March 1938 that entire anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist divisions freely operated in the underground in Ukraine!37 False accusations based on ideological predispositions intentionally ignored reality.