Stalinist Retrenchment

Despite the great boost to Soviet morale that victory in the Second World War had brought, Stalin was convinced that the war had inflicted serious ideological damage to Soviet society.

The man to whom Stalin entrusted the task of reestablishing ideological purity was his close aide, Andrei Zhdanov. In summer 1946, Zhdanov launched his offensive against those who longed for a freer cultural climate and admired the achievements of Western civilization. Such an attitude, he claimed, implied criticism of and dissatisfaction with Soviet culture. And this view was unacceptable. “Our job,” he announced, “is to… attack bourgeois culture, which is in a state of miasma and corruption.”⁵ But if their aim was to reject Western culture, Zhdanov and his associates had to provide their people with a more impressive alternative. Hence, the other major thrust of Zhdanov’s ideological campaign was the glorification of Russian cultural and scientific achievements. For every invention of the West, Soviet propagandists came up with a Russian who had had the idea earlier; for every major Western author, there was a Russian one who was better; and for every famous Western statesman, there was a Russian counterpart whose achievements were more praiseworthy.

As so often in the past, Ukrainians found themselves especially vulnerable to Stalin’s initiatives. Exposed to Nazi occupation longer than the Russians, it was mostly they who had been taken to Germany as forced labor and it was in Western Ukraine that anti-Sovietism was most virulent. West Ukrainians had been most extensively “tainted” with Western influences. Stalin’s remark that he would have deported all Ukrainians to Siberia if there had not been so many of them certainly did not bode well. Indications of the coming crackdown in Ukraine were evident in July 1946, when the Central Committee of the party in Moscow ominously blamed the Ukrainian party for failing “to devote proper attention to the selection of cadres and their ideological-political education in the fields of scholarship, literature and arts where… hostile bourgeois-nationalist ideology” and “attempts to reinstate Ukrainian nationalist concepts” existed.⁷ This was the death knell for the modest postwar revival of Ukrainian culture.

A month later, when Ostap Vyshnia, an immensely popular humorist who had been supressed in the 1930s, dared to express the opinion that an artist, in his search for creativity and originality, had the right to make mistakes, a storm of accusations of “ideological laxity” came from Moscow. Taking this event as his cue, Ukraine’s Communist party leader Nikita Khrushchev and his deputy in charge of ideology, K.Z. Lytvyn, immediately fired several salvos against the Ukrainian intelligentsia as a whole, accusing it of “bourgeois nationalism.” Meanwhile, Lytvyn concentrated on specifics, notably the recently published “History of Ukrainian Literature.” According to him, the work had very serious “shortcomings” because it viewed the development of Ukrainian literature in isolation from the class struggle, exaggerated Western influences, and did not go far enough in emphasizing the positive influence of Russian literature.

Scathing attacks were also launched against Ukrainian composers for using traditional Ukrainian themes. The opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky was criticized for not giving the Russians a prominent-enough role, and Ukrainian literary journals and encyclopedias were denounced for concentrating on “narrow” Ukrainian topics. The witch-hunt for real or alleged Ukrainian nationalism was particularly severe during the brief stay in Ukraine in 1947 of Kaganovich, who apparently derived perverse pleasure from terrorizing the members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

A high point in this ideological tightening of the screws came in 1951 when Sosiura’s poem Liubit Ukrainu! (”Love Ukraine”), written in the midst of the patriotic fervor of 1944 and awarded the Stalin Prize, was denounced for its “nationalism” and its author was forced to publish a degrading recantation. The search for cases of ideological deviation became even more grotesque – and deadly – as Jews were singled out for persecution. Many leading Jewish authors, scholars, and artists were executed on charges of “rootless cosmopolitanism.” The secret police even fabricated a “plot” in which a group of Jewish intellectuals allegedly conspired, with the aid of “international Jewry,” to take over the Crimea and break away from the Soviet Union. It was at this time that the ludicrous claim appeared, which has since become a shibboleth of Soviet propaganda, that Ukrainian nationalists and Jewish Zionists were cooperating against Soviet interests.

As indications that Stalin was preparing another murderous purge mounted, panic gripped the intelligentsia of Ukraine. Creative activity practically ceased as intellectuals rushed to admit their mistakes and beg forgiveness. A characteristic example of the demeaning spectacle was the speech of Korniichuk, who together with his Polish wife, Wanda Wasilewska, had written the libretto for the opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky:

We must be more alert since we can never forget that the Imperialists and their agents will use every opportunity to harm us.

It was apparent that the Ukrainian intelligentsia had learned its lessons in the 1930s: namely, that it was better to give in today if one wished to live and write tomorrow. But just as many were bracing themselves for another Stalinist purge, on 5 March 1953, the “Great Leader” died. The sigh of relief in Ukraine was almost audible.

For Ukrainians who had lived under Soviet rule prior to 1939, the aftermath of the war brought a sense of dejà vu. Again they were plunged into vast, exhausting construction projects; again they experienced the depressing transition from a period of relative ideological and cultural flexibility to one of severe reaction and orthodoxy; and again they faced the very real prospect of famine and purge.

For West Ukrainians, however, the postwar years ushered in a new era, exposing them to an entirely different world, one with which they had had only a brief, traumatic encounter in 1939–41. Their incorporation into the USSR meant that they were henceforth separated from the political and cultural values of Europe. It also resulted in the loss of West Ukrainian society’s most important asset, its extensive organizational network – of which the Greek Catholic church was the oldest, most-important component and of which OUN/UPA was the most recent – that for generations had been its main defense against foreign rule and the most clear-cut expression of Ukrainian nationhood. But the consequences of Soviet annexation were not all negative: as a result of Stalin’s dictates, the Polish/Ukrainian conflict, which had long sapped the energies of both societies, had finally been resolved. Moreover, the Soviets initiated the long-overdue social and industrial modernization of the region. And, of course, it was they who, for better or worse, finally united all Ukrainians in a single state.