Stalin’s Dying Days

Blow still followed blow in Ukraine, however. Immediately after WWII, between 1946 and 1947, drought, infrastructure loss, and famine on the burnt wheatlands killed almost another million Ukrainians.

It also became a land of shadows and fear, as a relentless crackdown was set in motion by the secret police. Anyone caught expressing pro-Ukrainian sentiments was exiled. Anybody who had was adjudged to have collaborated with the Nazis, was shot, or sent off to labor camps. Any synagogues which survived the Holocaust were demolished under an anti-Jewish drive. Slave laborers repatriated from Nazi Germany were mostly sent straight off to the gulags to do further slave labor, this time for their Soviet comrades.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox Church were forced to combine and join the Russian Orthodox Church. Another clade of underground resistance groups in the form of disaffected Christians arose instantly, but Stalin seemed content that he had stamped out all Ukrainianism in the Church.

Stalin decreed that poets, playwrights, and authors should stop harping on about the past glories of Ukrainians, and instead produce works admiring the Russians, and celebrating the USSR. It’s hard to see how this would go over with a deeply partisan Ukrainian public, but I guess if Stalin told you to clap, you clapped very enthusiastically.

Stalin believed that the way to get Ukrainians to forget their Ukrainian roots and merge seamlessly into the USSR was to force everyone to speak Russian. Administration was conducted in Russian. High schools and universities had to function in Russian. The content of all levels of education was minutely controlled, to avoid exploration of other-than-socialist ideas. Tertiary education was made deliberately difficult for Ukrainians to enter. Unless you held Communist Party membership, you could not study further.

As he grew older, Stalin grew increasingly paranoid. He accused his physicians of a plot against him. Perhaps he was right. He abruptly died on March 5th, 1953, joining the tens of millions of USSR citizens he had exterminated.