The Campaign’s Nationalist Echoes
When the wave of anti-nationalist articles appeared in the press in the autumn of 1947, the official Radianska Ukraina started receiving anonymous letters of protest from its readers After the August-September publication of a series of articles explaining the resolution on the Institute of History, the paper received several letters specifically on this topic By early October Radianska Ukraina found it desirable to reply to its anonymous opponents with a spiteful article by L Levchenko, ‘Into the Dustbin of History1’ The author defended the official view of the ‘nationalist traitors’ Mazepa, Hrushevsky, Dontsov, and Konovalets, who, according to the anonymous letters, actually ‘brought Ukrainians [as a modern nation] to life ’42 However, the newspaper soon received an unsigned letter from the Eastern Ukrainian industrial town of Dmprodzerzhynsk, arguing against Levchenko’s article ‘Good man, you have the right to write [this] in the newspaper, but no matter how much you swear that “Hrushevsky always held the Ukrainian people in contempt,” who will believe you? Whoever has raised a voice for our extremely oppressed people, you call this person a traitor and you would probably call me a traitor as well, although I am not one of the nobility And who are rhe “people” in whose name you speak and who “condemn” Mazepa, Hrushevsky, and other glorious but unfortunate sons of Ukraine*’’43 Not a good writer and probably not a member of the nationalist underground, the author was likely an isolated home-grown Ukrainian patriot, one of the many who had bought old history books at book bazaars during the war and who would be mobilized by the dissident movement a generation later Another anonymous tract, signed by ‘The Lviv Group of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine,’ displayed a more consistent nationalistic approach The authors explained that the history of Ukraine as a state and as a nation could not be produced by the official historians, because they wrote ‘from the colonizers’ point of view ’ Moreover, such a history was not really necessary, since ‘the truly national history of Ukraine has long been created and written down in the way it should be by a prominent representative of Ukrainian scholarship, Citizen Hrushevsky ’ In general, history writing ‘should contribute to the future development of a truly free and independent Ukrainian state, which would emerge in the near future with the help of the western democracies ’44
When on 2 October Radianska Ukraina ran a lengthy article by Fedir lenevych, ‘On Maksym Rylsky’s Nationalist Mistakes,’ the newspaper soon received two very different anonymous responses from Western Ukraine one defending wartime Soviet patriotism and another expressing outright anti-Soviet views ‘Ten students from Lviv’ asked the editor to let lenevych know that ‘he is akin to that dog who killed Pushkin, without knowing at whom he was shooting If Rylsky is a nationalist, then a non-nationahst is a person who has completely broken with his people ’ Another ‘youth circle from the Western provinces of Ukraine’ took a rather bleak view of the poet ‘Rylsky sold his soul and was made “Stalin’s laureate” for his black scribble ’ Moreover, they felt that Rylsky had publicly renounced his Ukrainianness in favour of a Soviet identity when he coined the verse line, ‘My fatherland is not the line of ancestors ’ The authors insisted that Ukrainian nationalism had been born when the warriors of Kievan Rus had raised their swords against their aggressors, that the Cossacks had fought for the nation rather than for any ‘theory of production growth,’ and that Khmelnytsky had signed the treaty with Muscovy in order to break with Poland and not ‘sink into the Muscovite mire ’45
The Soviet authorities were extremely concerned with the propaganda activities of the organized nationalist movement Although guerrilla resistance centred in the Western provinces, nationalist leaflets and pocket-sized pamphlets were regularly discovered in Eastern Ukraine, including the capital On the morning of the December 1947 all Union elections, for instance, a nationalist leaflet was found on the wall of St Volodymyr cathedral in the center of Kiev 46 In July 1948 Leonid Melnikov, the second secretary of the KP(b)U Central Committee, received an alarmed report from a local party boss in Dnipropetrovsk province by the name of Leonid Brezhnev Brezhnev reported that a railway car carrying wooden construction materials had arrived in his Eastern Ukrainian province from Western Ukraine and appeared to contain an additional cargo of nationalist literature A disturbed Brezhnev assured his superiors that his ideological staff had ‘intensified the [propaganda] work among the workers and the peasants of the province ’47
As is evident from the examples Brezhnev attached to his report and from other nationalist publications, the topics of national memory, Ukraine’s historical na tionhood, and Russian imperialism occupied a strategic place in nationalist propaganda Moreover, nationalist writers seemed to have closely monitored the developments in official historical scholarship, often offering alternative readings to recent party pronouncements on history and identity Thus, in a typewritten pamphlet from theTernopil branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) the notion of the elder brother, the great Russian people was attacked, in the process revealing a thorough knowledge of both the local Soviet press and articles in the party’s mam theoretical journal, Bolshevik According to the analysis in the pamphlet after the war ‘the Bolsheviks definitively returned to the old ways of Russian tsarist imperialism They did so because the idea of prewar Bolshevik imperialism based on the so-called international proletarian revolution had exhausted itself The Bolsheviks failed to establish [the rule of the proletariat] even in the USSR, not to mention the world The peoples of the USSR did not merge into a “Soviet people” that became a prototypical nationless society, whereas the peoples of the world preferred to create and defend their nation-states ’48 During the Second World War, the author continued, fighting had been not along class lines but along national lines, as the Bolsheviks themselves had recognized by spreading the cult of the Russian tsars and imperial generals during the war Postwar Soviet nationality policy was compared to the colonizing efforts of the ancien regime in France and the Turkey of the Sultans As well, the author appears to have followed the campaign against the Hrushevsky school closely The recent party ideological decrees imposed a Bolshevik ‘programmatic idea on Ukrainian culture, but according to the nationalist propagandist, the Mongols, Pechenegs, Cumans, Turks, Tatars, Lithuanians, and Poles had come to Ukraine over the centuries with the same ‘programmatic idea,’ to destroy the Ukrainian nation, and had failed Even today, the traditions of the Cossacks and the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917 lived on in the armed struggle of the OUN 49
In 1947 the OUN issued a leaflet commenting on the new composition of the republics Supreme Soviet The authors noted the absence of many criticized writers, most notably Panch and Rylsky, and observed, ‘Among the historians, Petrovsky is not on the list of deputies Once the Bolsheviks glorified him, but now he has fallen into disgrace for his History of Ukraine ’50 Another OUN communique, released in the spring of 1947, commemorated the battle of Hurby, a village in the Kremianets region where nationalist forces had faced Soviet security detachments in 1944 Hurby was compared to Khmelnytsky’s battles with Poles at Korsun, Zhovti Vody, Pyliavtsi, Zbarazh, and Berestechko, to Cossack action against Russians at Konotip in 1659 and Poltava in 1709, and to the twentieth-century encounter with Soviet troops at Kruty (1918) In yet another appeal to Ukrainian youth, these ‘young scions of the Cossack tribe’ were called to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Ukrainian people’s war against the Bolsheviks (a reference to the first Soviet invasion of Ukraine in 1918) Issued by the OUN Directorate for the Eastern Ukrainian Lands, this leaflet hailed the freedom-loving traditions of Shevchenko and the fighters at Kruty 51
The Ukrainian authorities treated these non-conformist anonymous letters and the nationalist ‘counter-discourse’ on the past with the utmost sobriety Copies of all captured leaflets and letters were examined by the same senior ideologues who supervised the work of the Academy of Sciences and who demanded that the official historians rebuff nationalistic interpretations. Opposition to party pro-
The Unfinished Crusade of 1947 87 nouncements on history demonstrated that the official interpretation was not the only version of national memory existing tn post-war Ukrainian society The nationalist variant was available as well, even if it existed in the shadow of the official line, which itself was shaped by a complicated interaction between the party apparatus and the intelligentsia