Stalin’s Death and After

Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 shocked most Soviet citizens. After thirty years of his rule, many people closely identified him with the Soviet state and the Communist Party, not just because of his officially generated “cult of personality.” The majority throughout the USSR, including most Ukrainians, sincerely considered the passing of “our great leader and teach­er, our real father and friend” a sorrowful occasion.¹⁰⁴ Not only Stalinist zealots, but also many that he repressed, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (a political prisoner at the time), expressed great loss over his passing, if only for show.¹⁰⁵

If Stalin’s death produced uncertainty for the people, it provoked an even greater crisis for the political elite.

Of all of Stalin’s potential successors, Lavrenty Beria - the long-time head of the NKVD - understood the necessity to liberalize the relation­ship between Moscow and the non-Russian republics. Possessing fewer allies in the Central Committee than either Georgi Malenkov or Nikita Khrushchev, his primary competitors, he had to acquire more in order to protect himself and to jockey for total power. He concentrated his efforts on Ukraine, especially Western Ukraine.

At the Nineteenth CPSU Congress in early October 1952, five months before Stalin’s death, Beria emphasized the centrality of the nationalities issue and the need for the Soviet regime to recognize the equality of the non-Russians with the Russians.¹⁰⁸ He highlighted the problems in many recently acquired western borderlands, especially in Western Ukraine, where Russians and Ukrainians from Central and Eastern Ukraine admin­istered the Western Ukrainian population and alienated them.

Weeks after Stalin’s death, Beria prepared a highly critical report to the party’s Central Committee on the situation in Western Ukraine, advocat­ing an end to the post-war policies promoting Russification. He called for the promotion of self-identified Ukrainians into the political and govern­mental leadership and the increased use of Ukrainian in the public sphere. His statement helped remove L.G. Melnikov, a Russian and the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and replace him with Oleksii Kyrychenko, the CPU’s second secretary, the first Ukrainian head of this regional party in its thirty years of existence.

In the spring of 1953, Beria took an even bolder action in extending na­tional rights in Western Ukraine. He transferred the leader of the Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Joseph Slipy, who was serving an eight­year sentence in a Mordovian prison camp, to Moscow. His emissaries ini­tiated secret negotiations with Slipy concerning the possible normalization of Soviet relations with the Vatican and the legalization of the Greek Catholic Church in Western Ukraine.¹⁰⁹ Beria’s moves on this issue sought to reverse the Stalinist policy of forcibly incorporating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1946, a policy Khrushchev implemented when he headed the CPU.¹¹⁰ The power­ful interior minister understood how seriously this policy had alienated the Greek Catholic Ukrainian population of Western Ukraine from the Soviet regime.

As Beria’s moderate policies in East Germany rapidly unravelled in June 1953, Khrushchev used the East German crisis to mobilize opposition to Beria within the Presidium. Once Khrushchev rallied his colleagues against Beria and arrested him on 26 June 1953, the party’s first secretary contin­ued Beria’s policies. The three hundredth anniversary celebrations of the Treaty of Pereiaslav and the “gift” of the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR raised Ukrainians and the republic to a new, unprecedented level within the Soviet hierarchy.

At the deliberations of the emergency plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU on 2-4 July 1953, party leaders accused Beria of many far­fetched crimes, such as being a long-term foreign intelligence agent. But of all of his “counter-revolutionary activities,” Beria’s efforts “to undermine the friendship of the peoples of the USSR, the very foundation of the multi-national socialist state and the most important condition for all the successes of the fraternal Soviet republics” received constant and repeated condemnation.¹¹² Khrushchev and his colleagues in the Presidium be­smirched Beria’s initiatives towards the non-Russians because they recog­nized he could possibly win their support and outmanoeuvre Stalin’s old guard. Beria, after all, emerged as the first post-Stalinist leader to propose policies recognizing the dignity and equality of the non-Russians. After Beria’s arrest, the party’s leadership adopted most of Beria’s proposed re­forms concerning the non-Russian republics without crediting him.

At the July plenum in Moscow, Z.T. Serdiuk, the first secretary of the Lviv Oblast Committee of the CPU, first mentioned the Treaty of Pereiaslav, which Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack Host signed with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in January-April 1654.¹¹³ In the midst of a major uprising against the Poles, this treaty transferred the allegiance of the Cossacks from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Muscovy.

Reports in the Soviet Ukrainian press about this holiday appeared short­ly after Serdiuk’s speech. According to the evolving paradigm encompass­ing this anniversary, the history of Ukraine was intimately intertwined with that of Russia. “Only thanks to the help of the great Russian people the workers of Ukraine overthrew the landlords and the capitalists, and estab­lished a Soviet government. Only with the great friendship of all Soviet peoples did Soviet Ukraine blossom and reunite all Ukrainian lands in a single state.”¹¹⁵ The treaty now became a teleological model not only for the progressive and mutually enriching history of Russian and Ukrainian rela­tions from Kiev Rus to the period of acquisition and incorporation to the present, but also for the relationship between the Russians and all the non­Russians. According to organizers of this celebration, Pereiaslav represent­ed a permanent “reunion” of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, not a “union” or a temporary military alliance.

On 12 January 1954, newspapers throughout the USSR published the full joint CPSU-Soviet government decree concerning the anniversary. This decree placed the Ukrainians at centre stage within the Soviet pan­theon of nations, codifying a new hierarchy within the old paradigm of the “friendship of peoples.” It presented the history of Ukraine, from Rus to the present, in broad, sweeping strokes. Each historical event conformed to the overarching theme, the ever-evolving friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian populations, “two great kindred Slavic peoples.”¹¹⁶ These quotes highlight the idea that Ukraine possessed a long history with Russia and that these ties were, are, and will be permanent and inviolable.

Not only were celebrations scheduled throughout the USSR, but also in the new People’s Democracies established by the Soviet Union in East Central Europe after the war.¹¹⁷ Radians’ka Ukraina announced that even Poland would celebrate the Treaty of Pereiaslav, an agreement which helped undermine the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seven­teenth century and which led to Poland’s partitions in the eighteenth.¹¹⁸

To highlight the importance of the treaty, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR approved the transfer of the Crimean Oblast from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR on 19 February 1954. This peninsula, com­prising an area of 27,000 square kilometres (10,425 square miles), adjoined Ukraine, but always belonged to the RSFSR. Now, in light of its location and close economic ties with Ukraine, this oblast would come under the authority of Kiev. M.P Tarasov, the chair of the Presidium of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, claimed that on the occasion of the tricentennial celebra­tions this transfer “will help further strengthen the fraternal ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples and conforms to the over-all interests of the Soviet state.”¹¹⁹ Kyrychenko, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and Khrushchev’s protege, asserted that with the incor­poration of the Ukrainian-speaking lands of East Central Europe into the Ukrainian SSR in the first half of the twentieth century, Soviet Ukraine emerged as one of Europe’s largest states. “Territorially, Ukraine is larger than France, almost twice as large as Italy and considerably richer than ei­ther of these countries... The sovereign Ukrainian Soviet state has emerged in the international arena,” Kyrychenko reminded his audience.¹²⁰

Beyond the grandiloquent speeches, the facts remained. Moscow de­cided to transfer the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR; Kiev formally endorsed it. Khrushchev played the central role in “conceiving the idea and timing its implementation.”¹²¹ Although Khrushchev at this point in time did not completely control the CPSU, his colleagues agreed to allow him to take the lead in concentrating public attention in the direction of the Ukrainian SSR and the Ukrainians.¹²² In doing so, Khrushchev re-established his control over the Ukrainian party and provided his clients in that republic with the proper rewards.

Khrushchev, most likely, would not have initiated these pro-Ukrainian policies on his own. Beria provoked Khrushchev, who quickly came to understand the importance of the Ukrainian political elite in the context of the post-Stalinist succession struggle. Khrushchev outmanoeuvred Beria in the first half of 1953 and Malenkov by 1955. Although Beria did not initiate the process of de-Stalinization single-handedly (most of his col­leagues in the Presidium agreed that some changes were necessary after Stalin’s death, but they disagreed over which ones), he led the charge to provide the local non-Russian elites with more autonomy.

Building on Beria’s criticisms of the violations of Soviet nationalities poli­cies, the extensive anniversary celebrations represented a serious attempt to reintegrate the Ukrainians into the Soviet framework. Surpassing all other celebrations of the incorporations of non-Russian groups into the Russian Empire or into the USSR, the Ukrainians would be somewhat more equal than the other peoples of the USSR, but less equal than the Russians. The Ukrainian SSR would serve as the USSR’s “second Soviet republic.” Ukrainians - in effect - became the junior partners of the Russians in admin­istering the USSR.¹²³ To highlight this new relationship, the Communist Party leadership transferred the Russian Federation’s Crimean Oblast to the Ukrainian SSR, the largest territorial shift from one republic to another in the history of the USSR.

At this point in time, the Crimea was no prize. The peninsula still bore the scars of war with a shattered infrastructure and an unreconstructed economy. Its 1959 population was 50 per cent lower than its 1939 popula­tion. In light of the war’s casualties, war evacuations (the Germans), and Soviet deportations (the Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Armenians), Crimea lost its rich, multicultural composition and became a predominantly Russian-speaking, unicultural one.¹²⁴ If the Ukrainian SSR acquired nearly nine million Ukrainian speakers from Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia between 1939 and 1945, it also received nearly 700,000 more Russian speakers with its 1954 Crimean gift. Even Stalin might have approved.¹²⁵ Despite the absorption of large numbers of Ukrainians into the Ukrainian SSR in late 1939, the percentage of Ukrainians remained the same in both the 1939 and 1959 censuses - between 76 and 77 per cent of the total population. The war swept away most of Soviet Ukraine’s new citizens.

By early 1954, the territory of the Ukrainian SSR reached the peak of its expansion and would emerge in this form after the 1 December 1991 ref­erendum on independence. Lenin, Stalin, and Stalin’s successors built on the vision first dreamed in the nineteenth century and on the Ukrainian national movement’s achievements in 1917-20. Finally unified in 1954, this land mass possessed a population divided by regions with different cultural, linguistic, national, and religious ways of interpreting the world. The Soviet state sought to integrate these divergent orientations into a single, centralized ideology allied with Moscow, not to create nationally homogeneous non-Russian republics.