The Attack on Historians

Having lost his bid for a major ideological purge, Kaganovich initiated a surprise crackdown on Ukrainian historians During July and August the apparatus of the KP(b)U Central Committee engaged in its usual languid ‘political education of scholars On 16 and 18 August the Ukrainian Agitprop held a staff conference to discuss a number of pressing practical problems in their propaganda work, yet nothing in the minutes indicates serious concern with the state of history writing Participants dwelt on a glitch in the work of IMEL, whose director, Fedir lenevych, had just been fired ¹⁵

On 31 July 1947 the demoted lenevych attempted to restore himself to the Politburos favour by sending Kaganovich information compromising the poet Maksym Rylsky lenevych included a copy of Rylsky’s 1943 speech on the history of Kiev, as well as the poet’s introduction to a 1944 edition of Ukrainian historical folk songs and the 1946 autobiographical article, ‘From Years Gone By’ All these texts allegedly idealized the Ukrainian past and did not discriminate between nationalistic and ‘progressive’ trends in Ukrainian culture On 20 August, the Secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Committee adopted an unusual retroactive resolution, ‘On M T Rylsky’s Speech “Kiev in the History of Ukraine,”’ declaring that the 1943 text ‘in reality represents not a speech about Kiev but a statement on the history of Ukraine in which M Rylsky defends nationalistic mistakes that the party had condemned ’ ^lii

More important, this incident impelled Kaganovich to go ahead with strict measures against historians The first secretary enlisted Manuilsky to write an appropriate resolution, and on 29 August 1947 the Ukrainian Politburo adopted the Central Committee’s decree On Political Mistakes and the Unsatisfactory Work of the Institute of Ukrainian History of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences ’ The resolution condemned historians for failing to produce a ‘scholarly, seasoned, Marxist-Leninist history of Ukraine ’ Wartime publications of the Insti­tute were judged to have been compiled in an ‘anti-Marxist spirit’ and to ‘contain gross political mistakes and bourgeois-nationalist distortions ’ While the docu­ment condemned historical narratives emphasizing the birth, growth, struggles, and victories of the Ukrainian nation, the party directives on the writing of Ukrainian history remained confusing The resolution announced that ‘instead of considering the history of Ukraine in close connection with the history of the Russian, Belarusian, and other peoples of the Soviet Union, [the scholars] follow Ukrainian nationalists in treating the history of Ukraine in isolation from the history of other peoples ’ In line with this statement, the decree demanded that historians eliminate all traces of exclusively Ukrainian claims to Kievan Rus' and stress historical ties with Russia At the same time, the document’s statement on the Khmelnytsky War suggested a return to class analysis historians should have explained the War of Liberation as primarily the peasant masses’ struggle against Polish aggressors and feudal oppression in general ’ The resolution did not explain why, in this light, a union with the Russia of tsars and landlords was historically progressive, but requested further attention to Russian-Ukrainian fraternal co­operation in the revolutionary movement and in socialist construction ¹⁷

The decree explained Ukrainian historians’ mistakes by pointing to the vestiges of bourgeois-nationalist’ views among the Institute’s researchers and singling out its director, Petrovsky The party decision proclaimed the creation of a Marxist­Leninist ‘Short Course on the History of Ukraine’ as the scholars’ most important task By 15 October the Institute was to have delivered to the Central Committee the outline and theses of the ‘Short Course ’¹⁸

Although the decree was not published in full until 1994, the official KP(b)U journal, Bilshovyk Ukramy, carried a lengthy editorial, ‘To Carry Through the Liquidation of Bourgeois-Nationalist Distortions in the History of Ukraine,’ which closely followed the original text In addition, Radianska Ukraina published an even more verbose editorial, ‘To Create a Truly Scholarly, Marxist-Leninist History of Ukraine,’ in which the decree’s ideas were expounded on at greater length ¹⁹ That said, Kaganovich wanted to make sure the republic’s intellectuals had received his message He requested detailed reports on party group meetings in all the institutes of the Academy of Sciences as well as on a historians conference held on 16-19 September ²⁰ During this meeting, the historians of tht Institute, IMEL, Kiev University, and the Kiev Pedagogical Institute discussed the party resolution

Kaganovich apparently never read the minutes of this conference, which would have upset him greatly While all participants dutifully repeated the general ideological formulae of the decree, many questioned their practical application Petrovsky acknowledged some mistakes but rejected accusations that his views were anti-Marxist or nationalistic The Institute’s researchers Oleksandr Slutsky and Pylyp Stoian supported him, causing the Central Committee’s Secretary foi Propaganda, Ivan Nazarenko, to intervene ‘I do not agree with Comrade Slutsky, who devoted his speech to defending Comrade Petrovsky The Central Committee wrote down [its decision], pointing out serious mistakes that resulted from both a weak Marxist-Leninist education and the complacency of the Institute’s directoi Professor Petrovsky He made serious mistakes, he did not organize a struggle against the manifestations of bourgeois-nationalist trends, and h< did not direct scholarly work on the history of Ukraine sufficiently This would appear to be perfectly clear That is why I am bewildered by the speeches of comrades Slutsky and Stoian, who have attempted to underestimate and to water down the discus­sion of this historic document [of the Central Committee] ’²¹ There was, of course, a difference between the resolution, which charged Petrovsky personally with vestiges of nationalism and ‘past serious mistakes of a bourgeois-nationalist character,’ and Nazarenko’s comments, where the historian appeared guilty of mere complacency, of not organizing a struggle against nationalism The secretary himself seemed to have been captivated by the general tone of ‘watering down’ Kaganovich’s resolution However, Huslysty went further than other participants in challenging the authority of the ideologues ‘As you know, during the 1946 conference on propaganda, the work of our Institute of History received a positive appraisal It was noted that the Institute had done considerable work, that it had published the Short Course, the first volume [of the History of Ukraine}, and so on That is, in June of 1946, nobody found any fault with historical scholarship in Ukraine ’²² All of the participants knew full well that the party official who had spoken so highly of the Institute’s work in 1946 was Nazarenko himself In his concluding remarks, the embarrassed secretary of the Central Committee sounded a call for collaboration, referring to both historians and ideological functionaries as ‘we’ ‘We need to compile the outline and theses of the “Short Course” before the 15th, to develop several methodological instructions for teachers, and to publish the plans that will help our instructors teach history properly We need to roll up our sleeves and get to work ’ Neither the incident with Huslysty, nor the opposi­tion from Petrovsky, Slutsky, and Stoian was recorded in Nazarenko’s report to Kaganovich ²³

On 22 and 23 September the Institute’s party group held a special two-day meeting at which party members voted ‘to ensure that all works on the history of Ukraine are imbued with the idea of unbreakable ties with the history of the Russian, Belarusian, and the other peoples of the Soviet Union ’ Party meetings to discuss the historians’ political mistakes were held at all the institutes of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences ²⁴ In all Ukrainian provinces, authorities orga­nized conferences and lectures for the intelligentsia to spell out the Central ( omm tree resolution Radtanska osvita, the newspaper of the Ministry of Educa- uon, dutifully carried articles explaining to teachers the danger of ‘nationalist deviation’ in Ukrainian history The ministry also forwarded to all universities and < olleges a lengthy circular requesting that the course outlines on the history of I Ikraine be revised by 1 October²⁵

Aside from the obligatory theoretical condemnations of nationalism, the local (onlerences produced little of interest for the authorities Local historians and educational administrators claimed that they had not been involved in spreading

erroneous concepts At Uzhhorod University, instructors normally used the 1942 Survey of the History of the Ukrainian SSR as a text, when the resolution on the Institute of Ukrainian History appeared several days before the start of the classes, the department decided not to risk using a potentially faulty text and simply cancelled the course Both Kirovohrad and Stahno Pedagogical Institutes also chose to play it safe, reporting that, although they offered a course in Ukrainian history, they allegedly had neither the designated text nor the outline At Zaponzhzhia Pedagogical Institute, instructor Zhyvalov actually demanded more hours for his survey of Ukrainian history²⁶

Schoolteachers used the occasion to complain that a Moscow-approved stan­dard history textbook did not reflect the changing official interpretations of events from the history of Ukraine Speaking at a teachers’ seminar in Poltava, the teacher Morhulenko noted that Pankratovas textbook for grade 8 was unsatisfactory ‘One cannot give this material to students In the textbook, the description of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s personality is vague Also, it does not say that Kievan Rus' was the cradle of three fraternal peoples, the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians ’ A fellow teacher, Mehavsky, seconded her complaint, saying that ‘secondary school teachers are experiencing great difficulties in teaching’ because ‘the existing texts view many problems differently’²⁷

The School Department of the KP(b)U Central Committee inspected the teaching of history in several provinces and did not find any nationalist mistakes in the East In the West, the Soviet version of historical memory was not yet firmly established, some students there referred to Kievan Rus' as ‘Ukraine’ and spoke highly of‘petite-bourgeois nationalist’ parties in pre-1917 Ukraine, such as the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP) and the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Even the specialists at the Lviv Institute of Teachers’ Professional Development proposed erroneous examination essay topics such as ‘The Role of the Varangians in the Creation of the Kievan State’ and ‘The National Movement in Ukraine in 1905-7 and the Activities of the RUP’ Nonetheless, the School Department defended Western Ukrainians, who were ‘insufficiently familiar with the demands and principles of Marxist historical science ’ It was the Institute of Ukrainian History that was guilty of not developing model course outlines for schoolteachers ²⁸ The ideological circle was thus complete teachers blamed the textbook authors, historians insisted that ideologues share the responsibility, and local functionaries downplayed the severity of the issues at hand

Meanwhile, Kaganovich appeared frustrated with the absence of concrete de­nunciations On 3 October the Secretariat of the Central Committee adopted yet another resolution on the progress of the discussion of the previous resolution concerning the Institute of Ukrainian History The decree announced that the meetings at the republic’s universities and colleges had reviewed the resolution only superficially, without uncovering the ‘nationalist mistakes’ of their own faculties The decree demanded more denunciatory sessions in the capital and in major cities, as well as another conference at the Institute (These directives were never implemented )²⁹ Although the Institute submitted two versions of the future textbook’s outline to Kaganovich in early October, the Ukrainian leadership fired Petrovsky as the Institute’s director, replacing him with the loyal party type Oleksn Kasymenko The new director had not yet published a single book, not until in 1954 would his first monograph, The Reunification of Ukraine with Russia and Its Historical Significance, appear ³⁰ This administrative solution might have satisfied Kaganovich’s thirst for decisive measures, but the campaign never re­gained momentum

However, the August attack on historians also triggered a renewed purge of writers ³¹ The ideologues of the Zhdanovshchma we.-ic, generally suspicious of non­Russians’ identification with their own past rather than with the Soviet present and with Russian imperial history In June 1947 Aleksandr Fadeev, the head of the Soviet Writers’ Union, gave a highly publicized speech at a meeting of the union’s Presidium, hammering out the thesis that no decisive turn to Soviet subjects had yet occurred in literature Fadeev blamed the ‘vestiges of bourgeois nationalism’ as one of the causes of this problem In particular, he criticized non-Russian historical novels for excessive blackening of the Russian Empire ‘In depicting the historical past, one should not show only tsarism’s colonial deeds It is much more important now to show those individuals in the past of your people who understood that your people should follow the lead of Russian culture ’ In his speech at the same meeting, Kormichuk, the head of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, enumerated the nationalist mistakes of his fellow writers Almost all of these errors were taken from the archives of the 1946 campaign, the only noteworthy addition being Petro Panch’s novel The Zaporozhians, which had been published in late 1946 ³²

This first post-war Ukrainian historical novel, an epic narrative set in seven­teenth-century Ukraine, soon came under critical fire for ‘idealizing’ the Cossacks Panch allegedly did not stress the tension between rich and poor Cossacks suffi­ciently, instead, he portrayed the wealthy Cossack Veryha positively and had one of the characters, the noble Buzhinsky, utter the incriminating words ‘Cossacks have always fought for Ukraine, for our faith, for freedom¹’³³

From 15 to 20 September the Writers’ Union held an extended session to uncover nationalist errors among its members Most of the ‘discoveries’ repeated the accusations from 1946, Kormichuk in his speech went as far back as Dovzhenko’s Ukraine in Flames Aside from The Zaporozhians, the participants condemned only one short new historical novel, Fedir Burlaka’s Ostap Veresai (Its hero, a blind nineteenth-century peasant bard, performed before contemporary ‘bourgeois na­tionalists’ and even Tsar Alexander II) Since the much scrutinized historical genre provided no other material for critique, Ukrainian ideologues dismissed, for good measure, two novels that incorrectly interpreted contemporary topics turn lanovsky’s Living Water and Ivan Senchenko’s His Generation Rylsky publicly acknowledged his sins Mykola Bazhan, who had composed the patriotic ‘Danylo of Halych,’ gave a fierce speech against nationalism in history, denouncing Hrushevsky, the ‘fascist’ Krypiakevych, Petrovsky, and Rylsky As soon as Bazhan finished a particu­larly angry tirade against Rylsky, the latter himself shouted, ‘Right¹’³⁴

Later during the meeting, Panch took the floor to repent his errors and promise a ‘party novel about Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s time ’ The writer quoted two letters of support received from his readers after The Zaporozhians had been criticized in the press One reader from Lviv regretted that the witch-hunt would prevent Panch from writing interesting works Another, a twenty-two-year-old disabled veteran, advised the writer not to bow before the ideological pressure ‘The novels they would like you to write would be of low artistic quality and would find sympa­thetic readers only in a certain historical period and exclusively among a small group of people ’ Up to this point, Panch had seemed to be defending himself with evidence of his readers’ support, yet the embattled writer suddenly shouted ‘Together with my critics, I will slap these “sympathizers” in the face¹’³⁵

On 19 September Kaganovich and Khrushchev met with a group of 105 leading Ukrainian writers, who discussed the ‘nationalist mistakes’ of their comrades and pledged loyalty to the party cause Most speakers strongly condemned ‘harmful nostalgia for the past,’ but the well-known novelist Natan Rybak, who had just completed the first part of an ideologically sound historical novel about Ukraine’s incorporation into Russia, decided to test the waters Phrasing his defence of the historical genre to resonate with the official anti-nationahst rhetoric, he said ‘I do not know who could have a stake in the disappearance of historical novels We Soviet writers should not abandon a topic of such importance as our people’s history [i e, leave it for the emigre nationalists] ’ Rybak also mentioned that he had discussed the idea for his latest novel with Khrushchev as early as 1940 and that the then party leader had given him some helpful advice Kaganovich and Khrushchev, however, made no comments in response, leaving the writer in uncertainty ³⁶

Isolated and lacking the historical profession’s claim to special knowledge, writers had little room to defend themselves when the press resumed its persecu­tion of nationalism in literature Radtanska Ukraina soon published lenevych’s lengthy article ‘On Maksym Rylsky’s Nationalist Mistakes ’ Literaturna hazeta followed with a salvo of denunciatory articles on Panch, lanovsky, and others Rylsky was forced to publish his confession, ‘On the Nationalist Mistakes in My Literary Work ^>37 The measures taken against Western Ukrainian writers exceeded the relatively mild administrative reprimand of their Eastern counterparts In Lviv, authorities expelled the ‘nationalists’ Petro Karmansky, Mykhailo Rudnytsky, and Andrn Patrus-Karpatsky from the Writers’ Union and even arrested Patrus- Karpatsky³⁸

Novels about wartime heroism, industrial reconstruction, and the revival of agriculture came to constitute the bulk of Ukrainian literary production In 1947 the young writer Oles Honchar received the Stalin Prize, Second Class, for part 1 of his war trilogy, The Standard-Bearers The following year, the same award went to him for part 2 of the work, while Ivan Riabokliach received the Stalin Prize, Third Class, for a short novel about post-war collective farms, A Golden Thousand Rybak’s bulky historical novel, The Pereiaslav Council, was actually published, first in a literary journal and then in late 1948 separately, in due time earning the writer the Stalin Prize, Second Class ³⁹ Rybak’s case established a precedent as long as they celebrated Ukraine’s eternal friendship with Russia, historical novels were welcome, even if they were based on the slippery ground of the glorious Cossack past

Whatever the first secretary’s intentions might have been, the drive for ideologi­cal purity under Kaganovich did not develop into a blanket cleansing of Ukrainian scholarly and cultural life The republic’s bureaucrats and intellectuals alike did not want a self-destructive ideological battle, and the Kremlin did not request one In mid-December 1947 Stalin summoned Kaganovich to Moscow as suddenly as he had sent him to Ukraine earlier in the year Kaganovich became deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, while Khrushchev resumed his duties as first secretary in Ukraine ⁴⁰ The campaign against ‘nationalist errors’ in Ukrai­nian historiography and literature faded out soon after Kaganovich’s departure for the capital, although the ideological resolutions of 1947 were never formally revoked Although the purge remained unfinished, the Ukrainian intellectuals had learned their lesson For the next year or two, most writers stayed away from historical topics, while historians took extra care to highlight wherever possible both historical ties with Russia and class analysis — even if the simultaneous use of these two strategies did not add clarity to their narratives

As happened elsewhere in the Soviet Union, aftershocks of the Zhdanovshchina recurred in Ukraine long after Zhdanov’s death in August 1948 Local intellectu­als, however, soon learned how to appropriate Moscow’s ideological pronounce­ments to defend and promote their own agendas For instance, they used the crusade against the (usually Jewish) ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ to dismiss some of the literary scholars who had participated in earlier attacks on the Ukrainian historical genre and pre-revolutionary classics Liubomyr Dmyterko, the secretary of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, publicly denounced the ‘cosmopolitan’ critic Oleksandr Borshchahivsky, who had allegedly ‘slandered Bohdan Khmelnytsky and other plays by O Kornnchuk ’ He also accused lukhym Martych (Finkelstein) of ‘stigmatiz ing Kocherha’s laroslav the Wise as “cloying Bilshovyk Ukrainy condemned ‘a group of anti-patriotic theatre and literary critics’ that included ‘Borshchahivsky, Gozenpud, Stebun (Katsnelson), Adelheim, Starynkevych, Shamrai, Sanov (Smulson), and others’ for maligning the Ukrainian classical heritage - our pride [and] our national treasure (sviatyma) ’⁴¹