The End of Ukrainization

With centralization came Russification. Initially, in 1933, it took the form of an influx into Ukraine of thousands of Russian functionaries to reinforce the collectivization drive.

Behind the personnel changes was the decisive shift in Moscow’s nationality policy that occurred in 1933 when Stalin declared local nationalism (not Russian chauvinism) the main threat to Soviet unity. This ideological reversal signaled the end of Ukrainization and ushered in a policy of systematic discrimination against Ukrainian culture. The number of Ukrainian-language schools was reduced; the percentage of Ukrainian teachers and researchers declined markedly; outstanding works of Ukrainian scholarship and literature were removed from library bookshelves; hundreds of Ukrainian plays were banned and scores of Ukrainian theaters closed; and museum staffs received orders to stop “idealizing Cossack history.” At every opportunity the authorities disparaged “the nationalist theory of the specificity of Ukraine.”

Simultaneously, there was a glorification of all aspects of Russian culture and an emphasis on Russia’s leading role in the USSR. However, all this was done under the guise of fostering internationalism, proletarian solidarity, and the “friendship of peoples.” Thus, in 1936, Stalin argued that the distinctions between Soviet nations were declining: “The characteristics of the peoples of the USSR have been changed at their very roots… the spirit of distrust among them has disappeared, the spirit of cooperative friendship has developed, and… in such a manner there has been constructed the present brotherly cooperation of peoples in a system of a single union state.”³¹

Not unexpectedly, Soviet ideologists then concluded that the Russian language and culture were best suited for fostering international friendship, cooperation, and progress.

Sullivant notes that not only was their language praised, but also the Russians themselves were idealized for their revolutionary successes and “clothed with the mystical cloak of Marxian superiority over the other peoples in the Soviet Union and throughout the world.”³³ An example of this new propaganda line was the following statement: “The Russian people are a great people. They have advanced the movement of all mankind toward the triumph of democracy and socialism. Under the leadership of their working class, the most advanced in the world, the Russian people have been the first in history to be liberated from capitalist oppression and exploitation. The Russian working class has helped to liberate from national, political and economic oppression the whole numerous family of peoples inhabiting former tsarist Russia.”³⁴

With claims such as these, Soviet ideologists could argue – and they do so to this day – that Stalin’s new policy was not a return to traditional Russian chauvinism, but a quicker way to progress, socialism, and internationalism. By implication, they also suggested that the culture of Ukrainians and other non-Russians fostered backwardness and provincialism.

Consequently, in the late 1930s the study of Russian became compulsory in Ukrainian schools; the Ukrainian alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary were drawn closer to the Russian; and the use of Russian in Ukraine generally increased. As early as 1935, Postyshev admitted that “members [of the Communist Party of Ukraine] have begun to de-Ukrainianize themselves and even to stop speaking in Ukrainian.”³⁵ In the printed media there was a similar development: whereas in 1931 about 90% of the newspapers and 85% of the journals had appeared in Ukrainian, by 1940 the respective figures had dropped to 70% and 45%.

Stalin’s “revolution from above” introduced staggering changes in the conditions under which Ukrainians and other peoples of the USSR lived. Industry became the main component of the economy. The cities began the remarkable growth that several decades later made them the main abode of the land’s inhabitants. Agriculture underwent a radical transformation, one of the key elements of which was the liquidation of private landholding. Such changes, and particularly collectivization in Ukraine, were accomplished through the unprecedented use of coercion and at the cost of tremendous loss of life. Whatever benefits Soviet modernization brought to Ukraine, they will always invite the rejoinder that the costs were needlessly high.

In addition to material changes, Stalin exerted an incalculable impact on the political and cultural life of Ukrainians. The two social bases of Ukrainian nationalism, the intelligentsia and the peasantry, were exactly the groups that bore the greatest losses in Stalin’s terror campaigns. As a result, the drive for Ukrainian self-assertion, which appeared to be gathering momentum in the 1920s, lost untold numbers of supporters. This setback was most apparent among two generations of the Ukrainian intelligentsia – those who were active before the revolution and those who came to the forefront in the 1920s. It was these two generations of intelligentsia who had a crucial role to play in nation-building and it was they who were decimated by Stalin. The draining effect of the tremendous demographic losses in the 1930s helps to explain the relative weakness of political will and cultural stagnation that Soviet Ukrainians would evince in the coming years. Finally, Stalin reversed a very important and promising trend in Ukraine. In the 1920s modernization and Ukrainization had merged to a large extent. But when Stalin destroyed the Ukrainian elite in the 1930s and renewed Russification, modernity took on a Russian guise again. Ukrainian culture, meanwhile, was manipulated into focusing once more on its traditional identification with the conservative, backward village.