Rebuilding the CP(b)U
In addition to fighting the UPA, collectivizing agriculture, and dissolving the Greek Catholic Church, the communist authorities also rebuilt and reassessed the Communist Party of Ukraine.
The CP(b)U, possessing 637,000 members (63 per cent Ukrainian) in 1940, suffered enormous losses during the war.88 With military demobilizations and party cadre transfers, the party’s total membership reached nearly half of its pre-war level (320,000) by January 1946.89 That year, 90 per cent of the party’s current members entered its ranks within the last six years. Inasmuch as Soviet propagandists identified the defence of the socialist fatherland with Great Russian patriotism during the war, party recruitment in this period attracted more Russians than Ukrainians.90 Nevertheless, by 1950, 59 per cent of the Communist Party of Ukraine’s total membership identified themselves at Ukrainians.91 In the course of the war, the CP(b)U emerged as an entirely new and untested party in need of a thorough re-evaluation.In Stalin’s Kremlin toast during the 25 May 1945 official victory celebrations over Nazi Germany, he honoured the Russian people, “the outstanding nation in the USSR,” and started a post-war campaign to associate Ukrainian nationalists with the hated German occupation. As in the 1930s, the authorities employed the pejorative term “Ukrainian nationalist” very loosely, even attacking public expressions of the very Soviet Ukrainian patriotism they had promoted earlier.
In July 1946, the Soviet Central Committee blamed the CP(b)U’s Central Committee for failing “to devote the proper attention to the selection and ideological-political education of cadres in the fields of science, literature, and art.”92 Many of the men and women in these important positions expressed a “hostile bourgeois-nationalist ideology” and attempted to reintroduce Ukrainian nationalist concepts, including Hrushevsky’s interpretation of the history of the East Slavs. In response, the Ukrainian Central Committee promised to rectify all “errors and shortcomings” and condemned over one hundred Ukrainian intellectuals.93 These attacks intensified in 1951 and continued into the first half of 1953.
Unlike the 1930s, however, mass arrest and terror did not follow. Perhaps this lull represented a respite before Stalin unleashed a new wave of purges on the heels of a public trial exposing the “saboteurs” who were posing as doctors.The CPSU’s Central Committee directed this crusade not only against Ukrainians, but also against other national groups, especially the Jews. In September 1948, the central party unleashed a furious wave of denunciations against Zionism, the state of Israel (founded on 14 May 1948), and Soviet “unpatriotic” Jews throughout the USSR. This so-called “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign of 1948-9 promoted public expressions of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and strident Russian nationalism. Stalinist condemnations of “disloyal” Jews reached fever pitch with the so-called Doctor’s Plot in early 1953. The authorities accused nine prominent Soviet physicians (six of whom were Jews), who ministered to the Soviet elite, of “heinously” undermining the health of their patients and preparing to kill them. Pravda, the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, claimed that the “doctor-poisoners” worked for the American and British intelligence services. Luckily for them and for the entire Jewish community, which expected deportation from the Soviet Union’s largest cities, Stalin died on 5 March 1953, just before their show trial was scheduled to start.94
In contrast to the 1920s and 1930s, when Jews were over-represented in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Ukraine, in the post-war period all Soviet institutions limited their entry into the party, the universities, and specialized schools. The post-war CPU increasingly became a party containing only Russians and Ukrainians.