The Enforced Dialogue

Materials available in the archives of the VKP(b) and KP(b)U Central Committees contain no hints regarding a possible command from the Kremlin to purge Ukrainian historians, nor do they confirm that Kaganovich arrived in the republic with any such intention.

Although the politically unreliable Krypiakevych continued working at the Institute after the resolution, the decree effectively buried the anti-Hrushevskian i ollection. While the Institute’s working plan for 1947 lists most leading research­cis as preparing related articles, the five-year report for 1946-50 does not even mention the project ⁵ Unaware of this effect of his intervention, Kaganovich meanwhile decided to look more closely into the state of Ukrainian Soviet historical scholarship On 27 April the KP(b)U Central Committee announced a forthcoming conference of leading Ukrainian historians, the aim of which was to ‘discover the causes of bourgeois-nationalist deviations’ in their recent works ⁶

The conference opened on 29 April with a two-day session and continued on 6 May On the first day, Kaganovich joined the discussions eagerly, but he and other party ideologues had neither the primary sources nor the knowledge neces­sary to analyse what they had designated ‘nationalist errors’ in historical works Knowing that the scholars could be expected to criticize themselves, they nonethe­less initiated an unequal dialogue with them Yet the Ukrainian historians present had their own interests in mind Fedir Los and Mykola Petrovsky gave speeches condemning Hrushevsky’s heresy but acknowledging only innocent shortcomings and mistakes in the Institute’s publications that they did not label nationalistic ’ The scholars were prepared to remedy the situation by relying more on the Marxist theory of socio-economic formations and emphasizing Ukraine’s historical ties with Russia At this point, Kaganovich grew tired of waiting for real confessions and interrupted the next speaker with the demand to uncover ‘invisible threads’ connecting contemporary historians to Hrushevsky and his school ⁷

The first secretary, however, did not receive a clear answer on the matter of ideological ties to the past The closest the participants came to locating these frightening ‘invisible threads’ was in tracing their biographical connections and those of their colleagues to the Hrushevsky school and to other non-party histori­ans (All this information was, of course, noted in their personal files and known to the party bureaucracy) Some speakers noted that Petrovsky’s mistakes betrayed him as a former student of Hrushevsky Kost Huslysty told the audience about his studies under non-Marxist Ukrainian professors Dmytro lavornytsky and Dmytro Bahaln during the 1920s Mykhailo Rubach confessed to having experienced the influences of the Pokrovsky school and even Trotskyism during the 1920s Instead of coming up with invisible threads to Ukrainian nationalist historiography, several historians directly traced the Institute’s ‘mistakes’ to wartime patriotism and the official elevation of national heroes, eliciting total silence from the party functionaries present ⁸

Amid all the anti-nationahst rhetoric, the Ukrainian scholars acknowledged only a few conceptual ‘errors,’ all characteristic of the patriotic version of national memory that the authorities had previously promoted Huslysty admitted to having unwittingly ‘followed bourgeois-nationalist historiography’ in his wartime pamphlet on Danylo of Halych in which the prince is described as a ‘Ukrainian monarch and head of the Ukrainian nation-state ’ This interpretation, the histo nan confessed, contradicted the official view of Kievan Rus as the common patrimony of all Eastern Slavs A professor from Kiev University, Arsen Bortnikov, acknowledged idealizing the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood as a progressive organization of Ukrainian intellectuals Now he was aware of the class struggle within this first Ukrainian political organization and of the fact that it had had a ‘bourgeois-nationalist wing ’⁹

The conference participants realized that the strategies of emphasizing the class struggle and historical ties with Russia in historical narratives were potentially contradictory The historian Huslysty indicated to Lytvyn that this was particu­larly the case with Khmelnytsky, whose social origin as a feudal lord obviously constituted a liability

huslysty The question of the class aspects of his activities has not been resolved Our previous profile of Bohdan Khmelnytsky went as follows a great son of the Ukrainian people, a person who organized the Ukrainian people in the struggle against foreign aggressors, who united Ukraine with Russia and so on When we started working to reveal the class aspect of his deeds, we encountered difficulties Mykola Neonovych [Petrovsky] wrote a section about this, and the situation only became worse When he began clarifying the class factor Bohdan Khmelnytsky appeared to have been separated from the people A number of questions became muddled I believe we will resolve all these questions First of all we ought to abandon the old theory, which was based on nationalist theories, and move on to the correct Marxist concept

lytvyn Why are we Ukrainian historians debating the question of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and trying to define his role when the government has long since defined it’ It is enough that we have the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky Our soldiers wear the order and we, the historians of Ukraine, raise the question of whether the role of Bohdan Khmelnytsky is unclear’¹⁰

I he secretary for ideology made his audience understand that, if class analysis undermined the sacred story of Ukraine’s union with Russia, it should be tacitly suppressed

On less important issues, however, the historians openly challenged the secre-

II ry, showing that clear ideological prescriptions on historical problems were not ilways possible Just before the conference, Lytvyn had published the article ‘On i he History of the Ukrainian People’ in the authoritative Moscow journal Bolshe- t ik After dwelling on the sins of Hrushevsky and his school, Lytvyn provided a biicf summary of the official model of Ukrainian history He pontificated that medieval Kievan Rus' was the common cradle of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, and that since its demise ‘the Ukrainian people have always striven to mute wtih the great Russian people But for all its apparent clarity, this scheme did not specify when the Ukrainians had emerged from the cradle as a separate people Following the critique of Bazhan’s ‘Danylo of Halych,’ the seemingly scholastic problem of the emergence of Ukrainian nationality acquired ideological importance because the date would determine how much of the glorious Eastern Slavic past Ukrainians could claim

Lytvyn’s article disposed of the problem in one ambiguous sentence ‘The Ukrainian nationality [narodnost} began to shape itself in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the main features of the Ukrainian nation [naroda} (language, culture, etc ) had developed ’ Huslysty, who had just pleaded guilty to claiming for Ukrainian history the thirteenth-century Galician-Volhynian Princi­pality, pointed out that this pronouncement only obscured the problem It also contradicted the assertion made earlier on the same page that ‘Three closely related nations [naroda}, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, began to take shape from a single root after the disintegration of Kievan Rus, meaning during the thirteenth century at the latest In addition, Lytvyn’s chronology dissented from the one in Shestakov’s Politburo-approved textbook, which had dated the emergence of the three separate peoples in the thirteenth century, while other Moscow historians had proposed, variously, the fourteenth (S lushkov), the fifteenth (A Pankratova), and the sixteenth (V Picheta) centuries When an embattled party ideologue snarled at his opponent, ‘Do you want a date’’ Hyslysty rebuffed him, ‘I thought you would provide one ’ (During this argument, the party secretary spoke Russian and the historian Ukrainian )¹² On the evening of 6 May the conference ended in an impasse No party functionary made a conclud­ing speech, and no official resolution resulted from the meetings

One possible reason for the stalemate was that Kaganovich had been contem­plating an ideological purge on a much wider scale The formerly top secret working files of the KP(b)U Politburo reveal that in May 1947 Kaganovich planned a major denunciatory session of the Ukrainian Central Committee On 28 May the Politburo approved in principle a draft resolution entitled ‘On Improving the Ideological and Political Education of the Cadres and the Struggle against Manifestations of Bourgeois-Nationalist Ideology ’ According to a hand­written note in the file, the Ukrainian leadership sent this draft to the VKP(b) Central Committee on the same day Another note in Kaganovich’s hand reads, ‘Do not send out [the draft to the members of the KP(b)U Central Committee] Include in the agenda without the title ’ Yet another note explains that on 10 June the Ukrainian Politburo decided to revise the draft, which itself had been removed from the file ¹³ In the end, the plenary session was never convened Apparently, Stalin and his advisers did not express the requisite enthusiasm for Kaganovich’s plan for a comprehensive purge of nationalists’ in Ukrainian culture and scholar­ship. According to a legendary account circulating at the time among the Ukrain- lan intelligentsia, Stalin dismissed Kaganovich’s proposal with the words ‘Com rade Kaganovich, you will not embroil me in a quarrel with the Ukrainian people ’¹⁴