Sites of Remembrance

The Soviet authorities’ management of historical monuments and memorials during the post-war decade reveals both a desire for total ideological control over historical sites and a lack of financial and administrative means for such supervi­sion.

Unfortunately, the preservation of monuments did not move far beyond the creation of a database for them. The Zbarazh fortress (1631), a relic of the Cossack wars and a registered historical site, illustrates well the plight of historical monu­ments located far from the capital. Soldiers from a Soviet Army unit that was stationed in the fortress were dismantling it and using the bricks for their con­struction needs. Acting on a message from local intellectuals, the deputy premier in charge of culture, the poet Mykola Bazhan, was able to put a halt to the destruction but not to restore the damage or relocate the military detachment.⁵⁴

The Ukrainian authorities struggled to maintain at least the most famous historical monuments in the largest cities. Even minor maintenance work on historical sites in Kiev forced Bazhan to search for unorthodox financing solutions. In 1947 he was able to allocate modest funds for strengthening the walls of St Cyril’s Church and financing excavations on the territory of the eleventh-century St Sophia Cathedral, but he failed to persuade the city council to finance maintenance work in the tenth-century Zvirynets caves. The city provided 47,000 rubles to strengthen the ruins of the eleventh-century Golden Gate ‘with the aim of preventing their further deterioration,’ but this sum covered only the purchase of the bricks, cement, and sheet iron, while the actual work had to be postponed until 1949.

Defining the National Heritage 121 to the Russian Orthodox Church because the lessee had promised to undertake much-needed renovations.⁵⁵

By 1951 another Kievan symbol, the monument to Prince Volodymyr the Saint (1853), also needed urgent renovations. The bronze statue standing with a cross high on the Dnieper hills was covered with rust, the bas-relief carvings on its pedestal were damaged, and the monument itself was leaning forward after a landslide. The city authorities fully cooperated with Bazhan’s Commission, but the Kiev Administration of Architecture declined to finance renovations because the statue was not listed in any catalogue of architectural monuments. Instead, it was found on a list of historical monuments, which typically included authentic old buildings and a handful of later monuments commemorating momentous historical events.⁵⁶ Since the statues point of reference was the baptism of Kievan Rus', its place on the Ukrainian Soviet register of historical monuments was significant in itself.

For the moment, it created only more bureaucratic confusion. Fortunately, the list of all-Union architectural treasures included a statue of St Volodymyr by the famous sculptor Petr Klodt, and in 1953 the Ukrainian functionaries cleared the question of renovations with the USSR Ministry of Culture. The Kiev provincial Soviet, which technically had no authority over the capital city and no responsibil­ity for its architecture but happened to have some spare money in its budget, was to finance the work. As an amusing sidelight, in his letter to Moscow V latsenko of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture confused Prince Volodymyr I the Saint (‘Vladimir’ in Russian; also known as the Great or the Baptiser, ca. 956—1015) with Volodymyr II Monomakh (1053-1125).

The incident of the monument to St Volodymyr raises the question of whether ideological control over the registering of memorial sites even existed. After all, the 1953 inventory of Kiev’s historical monuments and memorials included entry no. 21, ‘a memorial building at 22 Zhadanivsky St, where the historian Antonovych lived and died in 1908,’ although the official press had long denounced Antonovych as a ‘staunch bourgeois nationalist,’ racist, and teacher of Hrushevsky. The register also included Antonovych’s tomb, as well as those of other outcast Ukrainian nation-builders such as Pavlo Zhytetsky, Oleksandr Konysky, Borys Hrinchenko, and the millionaire art collector Mykola Khanenko.⁵⁸

Several surviving documents suggest that the public petitioned the authorities to care for historical monuments. Scholars have identified public concern for the preservation of Russian historical monuments as an early manifestation of popular Russian nationalism in the Soviet Union during the 1960s ⁵⁹ Similar Ukrainian evidence dating from the late 1940s and early 1950s is too scarce to permit this kind of conclusion, but it is interesting to note which past the population ‘remem­bered’ and wanted commemorated

On 31 August 1950 a group of farmers from the state farm ‘Red Miner’ in the Dnipropetrovsk province, S Shevchenko, V Stepanenko, H Kohsnychenko, I Shulha, and I Bondar, sent a letter to the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers, Demian Korotchenko The villagers were concerned about a ne­glected tomb on the steppe that they attributed to the eighteenth-century Cossack rebel Sava Chaly, the main character of Taras Shevchenko’s popular historical drama Sava Chaly They wrote ‘We love our glorious ancestors, we love our history and our people, and we are asking you, Demian Sergeevich, to share our anger at the destruction of monuments of our historical past and listen to us ’ The five farmers asked the government to restore the tomb and the cross, as well as to erect a monument to Khmelnytsky in their district ⁶⁰ While the subsequent investiga­tion revealed that the cross could not have marked Sava Chaly’s tomb (the Cossack chieftain died in 1741 and the year carved on the cross was 1783), the provincial authorities nevertheless reported their intention to unveil a memorial stone with a dedication to the Ukrainian Cossacks by the time of the tercentenary celebrations ⁶¹

Ukrainian intellectuals sometimes created ad hoc voluntary committees to examine the state of specific historical monuments as well In May 1948 the actor Amvrosn Buchma, the writer Petro Panch, and the historian Olena Apanovych designated themselves a ‘public commission’ (hromadska komisna) and prepared a report on the decay of the eleventh-century Vydubychi Monastery in Kiev Bazhan was sympathetic to their cause but was unable to arrange for any immediate restoration work ⁶²

In 1952 the KP(b)U Central Committee’s inspector V Stetsenko reported to First Secretary Melnikov that the construction of a hydroelectric dam near Niko­pol would submerge an eighteenth-century Cossack hut and the tomb of the seventeenth-century Zaporozhian chieftain Ivan Sirko Sirko, the inspector wisely argued, was a ‘progressive person who continued Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s policy on reunion with the great Russian people ’ More important, Sirko wrote a famous mocking reply to the sultan that provided the subject matter for the most popular historical painting portraying the Cossacks, Ilia Repin’s The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Sultan (1880-91) Stetsenko did not indicate who had alerted him, but it is probable that local Ukrainian intellectuals had brought the endan­gered historical sites to his attention As a result, the province’s authorities assured Kiev that they would move both the tomb and the hut to another location nearby.

As these examples illustrate, neither the general public, nor the party bureau­crats understood concern about Ukrainian historical monuments as nationalist deviation ’ Rather, historic preservation became an aspect of the official policy of memory that Ukrainian intellectuals and common people could exploit to express their identities

During the post-war decade, even the authorities distanced themselves from their pre-war predecessors, who had unceremoniously destroyed ancient churches to create space for new squares suitable for parades In 1952 the Ukrainian Academy of Architecture transferred the surviving mosaics and frescoes from St Michael’s Golden-Domed Church (1113) to St Sophia Cathedral Historical Pre­serve for public exhibition St Michael’s Church was destroyed during Kiev’s ‘reconstruction’ in the mid-1930s, and the authorities expected some visitors to ask difficult questions about this event The apparatus of the KP(b)U Central Committee provided the following standard explanation that museum guides were to repeat ‘In 1935 the monument was barbarously demolished by the enemies of the people, the monsters of the Bukharin-Trotsky gang, and the lackeys of the foreign bourgeois intelligence services, who intended to destroy the party and the Soviet state, as well as to annihilate our people’s achievements ’⁶⁴

Worth noting is that Ukrainian functionaries also did not press for a purge of pre Soviet monuments and memorials in Western Ukraine The KP(b)U Central Committee first raised this question in 1947 by way of a request for the opinion of the republic’s Committee on Cultural and Educational Institutions The latter dispatched the historian Mykola Petrovsky to Lviv for research and, based on his report, submitted the following cautious suggestion ‘to remove monuments built to commemorate reactionary Austrian and Polish political, military, and civic figures in Lviv and Lviv province, as well as memorial plaques honouring certain events and the activities of some persons who played a mostly reactionary role in the history of Poland and [whose actions] were directed against the interests of the Ukrainian people Petrovsky proposed that ‘the people of the Polish Democratic Republic’ would consider only the following monuments interesting and valuable the statues of King Jan III Sobieski and the seventeenth-century military leader Stanislaw Jablonowski, both of whom represented Polish military glory, and the statues of the prominent writers Kornel Ujejski and Aleksander Fredro (In 1946 Khrushchev had already expressed his desire to retain in Lviv a monument to the greatest Polish national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, ‘a writer popular among the Ukrainian people and loved by them ’)⁶⁶ The Ukrainian leaders resolved to shelve the question until a later date

Returning to the issue only in 1949, the KP(b)U Central Committee finally approved a detailed list of undesirable monuments Statues of Jan Sobieski, Stanislaw Jablonowski, Kornel Ujejski, Aleksander Fredro, and nineteenth­century Polish politicians in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, Agenor Goluchowski and Franciszek Smolka, disappeared from the streets The authorities also removed memorial plaques honouring Polish kings and politicians, the Polish constitution of 3 May 1791, and the Poles who had defended Lviv against the Red Army (1920), as well as a plaque commemorating ‘the Ukrainian bourgeois-nationalist historian Hrushevsky’ The Polish government subsequently reclaimed the statues of Sobieski, Ujejski, and Fredro Khrushchev favoured the transfer but deemed it necessary to receive Stalin’s personal approval in this matter ⁶⁷

The list of proposed new memorial plaques demonstrates a mix of Ukrain­ian, Russian, and Soviet historical mythologies characteristic of High Stalinism Ukrainian ideologues intended to honour Khmelnytsky, the Cossack colonel Maksym Kryvoms, the haidamaka.

Ideological bureaucrats characteristically limited their immediate plans for implanting Ukrainian Soviet historical memory in Lviv to mounting cheap me­morial plaques rather than expensive statues The republic’s share of the all-Umon culture budget could support the building of approximately two major monu­ments annually As late as 1953, the KP(b)U Central Committee apparatus made the following calculation ‘The Ukrainian SSR has been allotted 2,350,000 rubles for the construction of monuments during 1953 Of these, 1,111,000 rubles have been earmarked for a monument to Shchors in Kiev and 1,239,000 for a monu­ment to Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Pereiaslav-Khmelnytsky, financing a monument to Shevchenko in Stahno [Donetsk] is thus not possible ’®

Operating under such financial constraints, the Ukrainian leadership carefully considered the ideological implications of every new monument In 1950, after consulting with local intellectuals and architects, Lviv party authorities finally selected the best place for an envisaged monument to Ivan Franko a square in front of the mam building of the Franko Lviv State University (formerly the seat of the Galician legislature) However, a note in the file reads ‘Reported to the Secretariat [of the KP(b)U Central Committee] Received the directive to post pone the final decision until the completion of the monument to Lenin [in Lviv] ’⁷⁰ The story of Lenin’s monument in Lviv is a testimony to Soviet bureau­cratic inefficiency even in matters of ideological priority The all-Umon govern­ment originally decreed its construction in 1941 On 20 March 1945 the Ukrai­nian government ruled that the construction should be completed by 1948 The official commission approved the design of the modest half-length bronze statue in 1947, but the monument was not unveiled until 20 January 1952 ⁷¹ In 1956 a mass rally marked the unveiling of a much more imposing monument to Franko

The ‘Lenin in Lviv’ decision became a policy-setting precedent In the following years, the Central Committee apparatus would routinely turn down local propos­als to erect monuments to Ukrainian classical writers if the city in question did not have a monument to Lenin In 1951 party authorities in Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk petitioned Kiev for permission to construct monuments to Shevchenko Although the bronze statues of the poet were ready, the Central Committee postponed the decision on the same grounds ⁷² This practice highlights a curious symbolic hierarchy of monuments in Soviet Ukraine Lenin came first, followed closely by Shevchenko in the East and Franko in the West Stalin and the Unknown Soldier were losing the race to the Ukrainian fathers of the nation ⁷³

Bureaucrats in the provinces apparently felt that having a monument to Shevchenko, as Kiev and Kharkiv had, would raise the prestige of their capital cities Also, it would provide a site for the annual Shevchenko celebrations and other Ukrainian holidays during which officialdom could brief the population on its ever-changing understanding of ‘Ukrainianness ’ Thus, although the republic’s budget had no money to build a Shevchenko monument in Stahno, local authori­ties came up with the financing for a pedestal Then they petitioned the Ministry of Culture for a spare statue of the poet that had been created as a gift to Ukrainian Canadians but for some reason remained in Kiev As a result, in 1954 Stahno bureaucrats were able to unveil their own Shevchenko monument ⁷⁴

The tombs of national classical writers, except Shevchenko, were located in places not suitable for mass rallies During the early 1950s some of them were in great need of renovations, and functionaries felt public pressure to take care of certain grave sites Kotsiubynsky’s neglected tomb in Chernihiv became a public issue in 1950, when Radianska Ukraina received several letters demanding imme­diate action, from the Kievan historian Professor Holobutsky, VI Murashko (the chief curator of the Chernihiv Historical Museum), and numerous tourists Nazarenko was prompted to report the matter to the Central Committee Secre­tariat However, no renovations were made at the time In August 1951 Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, the writer’s granddaughter and a student at Kiev University, sub­mitted a poem to Literaturna hazeta bemoaning the decay of the tomb Nazarenko again requested that the Council of Ministers take the appropriate measures ⁷⁵ As well as providing a new tombstone, the Ministry of Culture subsequently ap­proved renovations for the Kotsiubynsky memorial museum and the construction of a small monument on the writer’s grave ⁷⁶

The drive to honour the Ukrainian classical writers coincided with the begin­ning of another commemorative campaign to mark the upcoming tercentenary As early as 1952 the Committee on Cultural and Educational Institutions proposed to ‘survey and restore the monuments of the War of Liberation, as well as to place memorial plaques and monuments on the sites of victories ’⁷⁷ In 1953 the KP(b)U Central Committee came up with two additional and much more monumental projects while drafting a letter to Moscow a statue of Khmelnytsky in Pereialslav- Khmelnytsky and a Triumphal Arch in Kiev Having second thoughts, the Ukrainian ideologues substituted a monument to the reunification for the envis­aged statue of the hetman,⁷⁸ lest anyone in Moscow doubt what was being commemorated Ukraine’s nationhood as such or nationhood together with Ukraine’s incorporation into the empire

Local authorities, intellectuals, and even individual enthusiasts from among the general public zealously responded to Kiev’s call for proposals In April 1953 Volhyn province sent the first local feedback, requesting the construction of a monument to Khmelnytsky and an obelisk to fallen Cossacks at the site of the Battle at Berestechko The Institute of Architecture proposed the restoration of the church in Subotiv, where Khmelnytsky was buried, and the installation of a luxurious symbolic sarcophagus ⁷⁹ Other provinces and institutions followed suit In November 1953 the Institute of History submitted a list of twenty-five sites of battles and other important events during the War of Liberation where obelisks could be constructed or memorial plaques placed Later the same month, the writer Ivan Le supported this idea at a writers’ conference in Kiev Zaponzhzhia province wanted to build an obelisk to the Zaporozhian Host on its famous seat, the Dnieper island of Khortytsia Dnipropetrovsk province requested four obelisks and a monument for Ivan Sirko’s grave Lviv authorities planned to install four memorial plaques in the city and enlisted Krypiakevych to prepare their texts A certain Hrushchynsky, a railway employee from Zhmerynka, proposed that Vinnytsia erect a monument to Colonel Bohun ‘for his services to the Ukrain­ian people’ and provided a sketch of the statue he himself had drawn More­over, as head of the material management section of the Zhmerynka station, he was able to assure the party ideologues that a proper pedestal was already available ⁸⁰

Some local functionaries did not wait for authorization from Kiev The Ktrovohrad provincial Soviet financed the production of a pedestal for a Khmelnytsky statue, which the Ministry of Culture did not approve Consequently, Kiev refused to reimburse Kirovohrad the 40,000 rubles it had spent on the pedestal Citing a lack of finances, republic-level bureaucrats denied requests for a Khmelnytsky monument in Korsun-Shevchenkivsky and Krolevets Uman authorities had supported their plea for a similar monument by referring to materials from their local museum, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and even Rybak’s novel The Pereiaslav Council They correctly pointed out that Khmelnytsky had visited their city, but the Central Committee denied their request nevertheless ⁸¹

The number of petitions and the ideologues’ reactions to them suggest that local functionaries were eager to distinguish themselves as promoters of the newly rehabilitated cult of the Cossacks, whereas Kiev, being wary of potential accusa­tions of abetting nationalism, attempted to check their enthusiasm The local requests usually concerned the commemoration of the War of Liberation, the great national hero Khmelnytsky, and his colonels The republic’s leaders were appar­ently apprehensive of these proposals, since they did not focus on historic reunifi­cation as such In at least two cases, the KP(b)U Central Committee turned down proposals for Khmelnytsky monuments when sculptures were already available in Stanyslaviv (since 1956 Ivano-Frankivsk) and Cherkasy ⁸² In one exceptional case, however, workers at the Konotip branch of the Moscow-Kiev railway volunteered - and gained permission - to build a monument to Khmelnytsky at the Khutir Mykhaihvsky station at the Russian-Ukrainian border, thus marking the first mile of Ukrainian territory with a statue of the nation’s founding father ⁸³

In April 1954, with just a month remaining until the celebrations, the Ukrain­ian government finally produced a list of approved memorials The authorities decided to erect a majestic monument to the Reunification in Pereiaslav, while they also planned a modest monument to Khmelnytsky for Zamkova Hill in Chyhyryn (The former was not unveiled until 1961, and the latter was never built) The Kiev functionaries accepted the plan to renovate St Elias’s Church in Subotiv and to install a labradorite tombstone dedicated to the ‘great son of the Ukrainian people,’ Hetman Khmelnytsky They also approved six obelisks for the battlefields of the War of Liberation and a number of memorial plaques for historical buildings ⁸⁴ But as soon as the celebrations were over, the republic’s authorities quietly abandoned one of the principal memorial projects, the Trium­phal Arch in Kiev Although the party bosses had duly dedicated a spot for it in May 1954, after considering 257 drafts and 61 proposals, the competition jury eventually decided not to award a first prize or recommend any project for implementation ⁸⁵

Before the budget for the restoration of historical monuments could be final­ized, the Ukrainian party leadership had to investigate the question of where Khmelnytsky was born V Horbenko, an attentive district-level functionary in Kirovohrad province, noticed that the Central Committee resolution of 6 Novem­ber 1943 spoke of Chyhyryn as the hetman’s bithplace, while the 1943 decree on renaming Pereiaslav as Pereiaslav Khmelnytsky held that the hetman had been born in that city, as did The Great Soviet Encyclopedia The Institute of History reported that dissenting sources did not allow for a definite conclusion, but Chyhyryn or a nearby village, Subotiv, seemed a likely place The secretaries of the KP(b)U Central Committee considered the matter twice on 1 December 1953, when the party leadership requested scholarly expertise, and in early 1954, when the party bosses, according to the minutes, ‘concluded that the most probable birthplace of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was Chyhyryn or Subotiv ’⁸⁶

Aside from ‘establishing’ the birthplace of the nations founder, the resolution had immediate practical significance Together with Kiev and Pereiaslav, Chyhyryn and Subotiv received considerable sums for the restoration of historical monu­ments and street improvements ⁸⁷ In Kiev, work included the restoration of the Khmelnytsky monument (1886) and extensive renovations to the nearby St Sophia Cathedral In Pereiaslav, the whole city centre was rebuilt to create Khmelnytsky Square, the future site of the Reunification monument The authori­ties installed a bronze bas-relief, ‘The Pereiaslav Council,’ on the Kiev-Kharkiv highway near the turn-off to Pereiaslav and a bust of Khmelnytsky on the Pereiaslav pier on the Trubizh river ⁸⁸

The state also began organizing public excursions to historical sites in Kiev, Pereiaslav, and the battlefields of the Khmelnytsky War The press recommended that teachers take their classes on these trips ⁸⁹ The Central Committee proposed that excursions to Kiev start at the Lenin statue, move to the Shevchenko monu­ment, and then proceed to memorial sites such as the Golden Gate, St Sophia Cathedral, Tithe Church, the monument to St Volodymyr, the statue of Khmelnytsky, Askold’s Tomb, the Caves Monastery, the Vydubychi Monastery, the Shevchenko Museum, and finally to monuments and buildings from the Soviet era ⁹⁰ With schoolchildren throughout Ukraine going on similar tours, the government unwittingly prepared the ground for a popular movement to study and preserve historical monuments, a movement whose nationalist proclivities would begin worrying Ukrainian ideologues during the 1960s and 1970s ⁹¹

Stalinist ideologues were not able to invent a specifically Soviet Ukrainian cultural and historical tradition that was completely separate from the Ukrainian heritage treasured by nationalists As they nurtured the official cult of national patrimony, Ukrainian party bureaucrats remained ever suspicious of the danger that it would generate an exclusive national memory In this light, the intelligentsia’s lobbying to honour pre-revolutionary cultural figures, the local functionaries’ enthusiasm for glorifying Khmelnytsky, and the public’s interest in the preserva non of historical monuments could equally well be interpreted as either the success or the failure of the official politics of memory Either way, the Stalinist idea of national patrimony remained inherently ambiguous