Surveillance and Arrest of Galicians

Initially, the “nationalist” cases focused on immigrants from Galicia, many of whom had assumed leadership positions in academic, cultural, and political life. In Moscow, the party, secret police, and Stalin were particularly wary of returning emigres and former supporters of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, who had taken advantage of amnesties declared in 1921 and 1923.¹³ Approximately 60,000 Galicians emigrated to Soviet Ukraine in the twenties.

In 1925, Balytskyi, the first head of the GPU in Ukraine, warned Kaga­novich that there were many spies among people coming from Gali­cia, even among members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU—Komunistychna Partiia Zakhidnoi Ukrainy or KPZU) (Rublov and Rublova 2012, 259). The fear of spies grew stronger in 1926, when Jozef Pilsudski came to power in Warsaw and began consolidating an anti-Soviet front by making overtures to Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other nationalities. Moscow and Kharkiv party leaders at the time linked all internal opposition to the threat of “fascist” intervention, the term they routinely applied to Pilsudski’s regime.

In fact, the arrivals from Galicia were often communists and Sovieto- philes, some of whom had to escape across the border when terrorist plans hatched by Soviet agents were discovered and Polish authorities conducted arrests. In 1925, for example, two Ukrainians working in the Soviet embassy in Warsaw, Hryhorii Besedovskyi and Karl Maksymovych, learned that the communist underground had received orders from a Soviet source to start an uprising in Volhynia and declare the territory an independent republic.

Rada in 1917-18, urged Ukrainians to move to the Soviet republic and build a better society. Many willingly joined what Hrushevskyi called the unacknowledged “grey army” of ordinary people working to improve cultural life (Rublov 2004, 9). Pleased that the communist party had finally recognized Ukraine’s right to its own cultural development, they saw Ukrainization as a way of consolidating the nation (ibid., 91).

In the mid-1920s, the arriving Galicians were not aware that they were under the GPU’s surveillance. The secret police focused on them for two reasons. First, because their connections to emigre communities in Central Europe allowed the GPU to make the desired link between local dissatisfaction, foreign intervention, and fascism. Second, because the prominence of Galicians in the Commissariat of Education, the pow­erful superministry that directed all aspects of Ukrainization, allowed the GPU to undermine those directing this policy. In the years 1927-33, the Commissariat’s head, Mykola Skrypnyk, recruited Galicians for work in the educational and cultural fields. The GPU, which had placed spies among Skrypnyk’s associates, eventually, on 19 February 1933, arrested Mykola Ersteniuk, the secretary who ran Skrypnyk’s personal office. Two days later, Ersteniuk admitted membership in the UVO. The minutes of the interrogation state that Skrypnyk “through his nationalist activity supported him [Ersteniuk] and other members of the UVO in conduct­ing counterrevolutionary activity,” and that Ersteniuk “collected secret documents” with the intention of giving them to the Polish, German, Czech, and Italian consuls (Rublov and Cherchenko 1994, 117).

Dissatisfaction with the nationalities policy was voiced in the great Literary Discussion of 1925-28 by prominent communists, among them Mykola Khvylovyi, Oleksandr Shumskyi, and leaders of the CPWU.¹⁵ At this juncture, the GPU also learned that Ukrainians in Galicia were consolidating politically around the UNDO (Ukrainian National Demo­cratic Alliance—Ukrainske Natsionalno-Democratychne Obiednannia), the parliamentary party that from 1928 contested and won seats in the Polish Sejm (parliament). It was committed to democratic procedures and consistently argued the case for the rights of Ukrainians within the Polish state. The Soviet press, however, described the UNDO as “fascist,” and the GPU saw it as the main threat from Ukrainians abroad.

Stalin was probably less alarmed by Pilsudski’s coming to power than by the strength of the Ukrainization drive and the intensity of the Literary Discussion in Soviet Ukraine, both of which captured the imaginations

Fabrication of Nationalist Plots, 1929-34 33 of nationally conscious Ukrainians. He detected in these developments a threat to Moscow’s authority. Through his plenipotentiary, Lazar Kagan­ovich, he moved in 1925-28 to muzzle criticism of nationality policy and to end the Discussion. In these circumstances, the construction of nation­alist plots presented itself as an effective tool in suppressing resistance and erasing oppositional thinking.