Stalinist Reaction: “Nationalist” Pasts Recalled

In 1930, as show trials were taking place in Ukraine and a more rigid, punitive anti-nationalist line was being enforced, many Ukrainian and Jewish party members were reminded of their former “sins” as support­ers of national-cultural rights.¹¹ The journal Litopys revoliutsii (Chroni­cle of the Revolution), which had been tasked with developing a history of the CP(B)U, attacked earlier historians for suggesting that the party had multiple roots.

The Bolshevik avantiura has to be condemned because it opens the valve for anarchy. [...] It is our good fortune that we live in Ukraine where the Ukrainian Central Rada exists, whose voice is listened to by the whole population and peasantry. [...] If the Bolsheviks behave meekly, it is only because they fear the Central Rada.

(1917 god 1919, 317; quoted in Agurskyi 1930, 83)

On 30 November 1917, Rafes urged the Central Rada to disarm the Bolsheviks and arrest its leaders (Agurskyi 1930, 82). Another Bund leader in speaking of the Bolsheviks had said: “The Jewish proletariat together with the Ukrainian people will defend Ukraine until the last drop of blood from the attacks of the rapists” (ibid., 84). A third had stated on 26 October 1917:

The Central Rada ought to strongly and decisively condemn the Bolshevik power grab and simultaneously organize all power in the land. The Rada should recognize that the Bolshevik act threatens a civil war in which all the gains of the revolution will be lost, and in particular those achieved in Ukraine.

(1917 god 321; quoted in Agurskyi 1930, 84)¹²

Agurskyi quoted Rafes as writing in the newspaper Folktsaitung on 9 February 1918: “We have to conduct a vigorous struggle against the

psychology of appeasement.

Two things changed in the late twenties and early thirties to trigger these critiques. First, the party leadership in Moscow and local Russian cadres began to view Ukraine’s cultural demands as a disguised way of conducting a political struggle for independence, and demanded stronger expressions of loyalty. Second, Stalin began to search for places to pin the blame for the economic crisis and failure of collectivization. Later, in 1932, when mass protests against collectivization posed a serious insur­rectionary danger, he sent Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine with instructions to blame “nationalists” for all failures and to reign in what was by then per­ceived in the center as an anti-Russian Ukrainization (Iefimenko 2001, 23-24). The purges that began at the end of 1932 suddenly reduced the percentage of Ukrainians in the party from 60.7% to 57% (ibid., 76).