The Great Terror

Industrialization and collectivization brought with them increased centralization of power in Moscow. In Ukraine this meant that the dreams, illusions, and actual strides toward self-government that characterized the promising 1920s were doomed.

In the first phase of Stalin’s attack on potential opposition in Ukraine (there was very little actual resistance), the main target was the old Ukrainian intelligentsia, especially those who had been associated with the national governments and non-Bolshevik parties of 1917–20 and who were prominent in areas of culture and scholarship. After fabricating “secret anti-Soviet organizations,” the OGPU forced its victims, by means of physical and/or psychological torture, to admit membership in them at highly publicized show trials. In this manner the political police justified the punishment of the accused, discredited all who shared their views, and prepared the way for more arrests.

In Ukraine this tactic was first applied in 1929–30 when forty-five leading scholars, writers, and other intellectuals, including Serhii Efremov, Volodymyr Chekhivsky, Andrii Nikovsky, Osyp Hermaize, Mykhailo Slabchenko, Hryhorii Holoskevych, and Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska, were accused of belonging to a secret nationalist organization called the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Spilka Vyzvolennia Ukrainy – SVU). The goals of the alleged organization were supposedly the separation of Ukraine from the USSR with the aid of foreign powers and emigres, the organization of peasant resistance to collectivization, and the assassination of Stalin and his associates. Having used the trial to create an atmosphere of suspicion and insecurity, Soviet authorities now launched a broadly based offensive against the intellectual elite.

As might be expected, the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was one of the first institutions to bear the brunt of the attack. After the SVU trial, in which many members of the academy were implicated, the government began to censor the academy’s publications, close down its most active sections, and expel “bourgeois nationalists.” In 1931 Hrushevsky’s history sections were abolished, and he was implicated in yet another secret organization and exiled to Russia, where he died in 1934. Many of his colleagues and almost all of his students were treated much more harshly.

The SVU trial also signaled the destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox church. Accused of collaborating with that secret organization, the church leadership was forced to call a sobor (church council) in January 1930 and to dissolve itself. Soon afterward, the metropolitan (Mykola Boretsky), dozens of bishops, and hundreds of priests were sent to labor camps.

Even before the first wave of repression had run its course, Stalin launched another in 1933. This time it was directed primarily against party members. Purges or “cleansings” were not a new occurrence; in the 1920s they were initiated periodically to “purify” the party by expelling inactive, opportunistic, lax, or otherwise unfit members. But in the 1930s they took on an ominous, terrifying aspect. Party members were purged mostly because of “ideological mistakes and failings,” that is, because they disagreed or were perceived to disagree with Stalin. Expulsion from the party usually entailed execution or exile. Consequently, terror became a part of life not only for the masses but even for the Communist elite.

In the Soviet Union as a whole, the high point of the Stalinist purges came in 1937–38, but as Lev Kopelev noted, “In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933.”²⁵ It was probably the threat of national communism on the one hand, and the demoralization of the Ukrainian Communists by the horrors of collectivization and the famine on the other, that singled out the Ukrainians for special attention.

Stalin’s dissatisfaction with Ukrainization was not surprising. The Ukrainian countryside had never supported the Bolsheviks and as masses of peasants poured into the cities – traditionally the bases of Communist support – the possibility that these centers would become breeding grounds for Ukrainian nationalism and separatism became real. A more immediate reason for Stalin’s intention to “cleanse” the CP(b)U was its supposedly poor performance during collectivization. Having decided to make Ukraine’s Communists the scapegoats for the disasters of 1932–33, Stalin sanctioned the open criticism of Ukrainian Communists. As a result, editorials in Pravda and resolutions of the All-Union Central Committee condemned the Ukrainian Communists for “lack of vigilance” and softness in dealing with kulaks and grain procurements.

The Ukrainian Communists’ dilemma was tragic. Confronted by Stalin’s demands on the one hand, and the terrible plight of Ukraine’s populace on the other, they could neither satisfy the former nor help the latter. Deprived of Moscow’s good graces and lacking popular support, the CP(b)U was helpless. The most painful blow came in January 1933 when Stalin appointed Pavel Postyshev to act as his personal representative and, in effect, viceroy of Ukraine. Along with Postyshev came Vsevolod Balitsky, the new head of the OGPU, and thousands of Russian functionaries. It was clear that the days when Ukrainian Communists had “run their own show” in Ukraine were over.

Postyshev’s mandate was to complete collectivization regardless of the cost, purge the Ukrainian party, and end Ukrainization. He replaced thousands of local officials in the countryside with his own men. Simultaneously, he launched an attack on the Ukrainizers. Denouncing the emphasis on “national specificity” as a “refusal to submit to all-union interests,” he described Ukrainization as a “cultural counter-revolution” whose aim was to fan “national enmity among the proletariat” and “to isolate the Ukrainian workers from the positive influence of Russian culture.”²⁶

The primary target of these attacks was Skrypnyk, the commissar of education. Rather than retract his support for Ukrainization, Skrypnyk committed suicide on 7 July 1933. Several months earlier, Khvylovy had done the same. The other ideologue of Ukrainian national communism, Shumsky, died in exile. As Postyshev’s reign of terror gained momentum, members of the new Soviet intelligentsia that had emerged in the 1920s were executed or exiled by the thousands. According to some estimates, 200 of 240 authors writing at this time in Ukraine disappeared. Of the 85 scholars in the field of linguistics, 62 were liquidated. Philosophers, artists, and editors were denounced as spies or terrorists and arrested. Matvii Iavorsky and his associates at the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism who tried to develop a Marxist history of Ukraine were sent to the Siberian camps. Kurbas’ experimental Berezil Theater was shut down and he, too, disappeared into a labor camp, as did the playwright Kulish. Dovzhenko’s world-famous films were removed from circulation and he was forced to move to Moscow. Several hundred kobzari (wandering bards) were invited to a congress, arrested, and reportedly shot. To save themselves, some writers like Bazhan and Tychyna began writing according to the dictates of Moscow.

The destruction of Ukrainian institutions, begun in 1930, now reached its high point. The commissariats of education, agriculture, justice, the Agricultural Academy, the editorial boards of newspapers, literary journals, encyclopedias, and film studios were denounced as “nests of nationalist counterrevolutionaries” and purged.

But Postyshev’s purge was aimed at Ukraine’s political elite as well as its cultural activists. Over 15,000 people holding responsible positions were purged on charges of nationalism. In addition to nationalism, party members were accused of “fascism,” “Trotskyism,” “lack of Bolshevik vigilance,” and links with emigres and foreign powers. Consequently, between January 1933 and January 1934, the CPU lost about 100,000 members. In his report, Postyshev noted that “almost all the people removed were arrested and put before the firing squad or exiled.”²⁸ Even Trotsky admitted that “nowhere do repression, purges, subjugation and all types of bureaucratic hooliganism in general assume such deadly proportions as in Ukraine in the struggle against powerful subterranean strivings among the Ukrainian masses towards greater freedom and independence.”²⁹

While the waves of repression that rolled across Ukraine in the early 1930s were mainly directed against Ukrainians, the Great Purge of 1937–38 encompassed the entire Soviet Union and all categories of people. Its goal was to sweep away all of Stalin’s real and imaginary enemies and to infuse all levels of Soviet society, especially upper echelons, with a sense of insecurity and abject dependence on and obedience to the “Great Leader.” In a series of sensational show trials, almost all the “founding fathers” of bolshevism (and the potential rivals of Stalin) were discredited and subsequently executed. The political police, now referred to as the NKVD, repeatedly fabricated plots and terrorist groups to implicate ever broadening circles of people.

Again Ukraine was among the worst-hit areas. Unlike the purges of 1933, during which opponents of collectivization and Ukrainizers had been purged, in 1937 Stalin decided to liquidate the entire leadership of the Ukrainian Soviet government and the CPU. The factors that influenced this decision were surprising. Apparently after the famine, Postyshev (the ruthless Russian implementer of the purge of 1933) began to have doubts about Stalin’s methods and to identify with Ukraine and Ukrainian interests. More important, both Postyshev and the Ukrainian Communist leadership had refused to carry the purge as far as Stalin wished. Even after the removal of Postyshev and the arrival in Ukraine of Stalin’s personal representatives – Viacheslav Molotov, Nikolai Ezhov, and Nikita Khrushchev – in Kiev in August 1937, Ukraine’s Communist leadership, consisting of Stanislav Kossior, Hryhorii Petrovsky, and Panas Liubchenko, continued to oppose the purge. As a result, by June 1938 the top seventeen ministers of the Ukrainian Soviet government were arrested and executed. The prime minister, Liubchenko, committed suicide. Almost the entire Central Committee and Politburo of Ukraine perished. An estimated 37% of the Communist party members in Ukraine – about 170,000 people – were purged. In the words of Nikita Khrushchev, Moscow’s new viceroy in Kiev, the Ukrainian party “had been purged spotless.”

The NKVD slated for extermination entire categories of people, such as kulaks, priests, former members of anti-Bolshevik armies, those who had been abroad or had relatives abroad, and immigrants from Galicia; even average citizens perished in huge numbers. An indication of the vast scope of the Great Purge was the discovery, during the Second World War, in Vinnytsia, of a mass grave containing 10,000 bodies of residents of the region who were shot between 1937 and 1938. Given the lack of complete data, it is difficult for Western scholars to establish the total loss of life brought about by the Stalinist terror. Adam Ulam and others estimate that in the Soviet Union as a whole, about 500,000 were executed in 1937–39 and somewhere between 3 and 12 million were sent to labor camps.³⁰ One can assume in light of the above-mentioned factors that Ukraine’s share of those who were victimized was disproportionately high.

By the late 1930s, the limited self-government that Ukrainians (and other non-Russians) had possessed earlier was almost totally obliterated. Control over all aspects of life was now completely centered in Moscow. Ignoring the prerogatives, wishes, and protests of Ukrainian Communists, Stalin ruled Ukraine by means of his personal emissaries, such as Postyshev and Khrushchev. Despite its economic importance, Ukraine lost all control over the allocation of its resources and investment, the development of industry, and, most important, agricultural policy. In fact, at the height of the famine, the Ukrainian Soviet government could not dispose of one pound of grain without permission from Moscow. Cultural institutions that developed Ukrainian “specificity” were abolished or emasculated. The distinctive features of the republic’s system of higher education were removed, and all-union models replaced the school textbooks Skrypnyk had introduced. Indeed, centralization and standardization had gone so far that on several occasions Stalin and his closest associates even discussed abolishing the Soviet Union’s republican structure altogether.

Stalin liked to mix crushing policies with minor, propagandistic concessions. Thus, in 1934, in the midst of the centralization drive, the capital of Ukraine was moved from Kharkiv to Kiev, the traditional center. In 1936 Stalin repeated the ploy. On the eve of the Great Purge, he presented the people of the USSR with a new constitution that assured them of all the civil rights enjoyed by citizens of “bourgeois democracies.” He declared the Supreme Soviet or parliament, which consisted of a Soviet of the Union and a Soviet of Nationalities, to be the highest organ of state power. He reiterated the right of republics to secede and expanded their number from four to eleven by subdividing the Central Asian and Caucasian regions. A famous example of Stalin’s cynicism was his statement, made in the midst of the horrors of the 1930s, that “life has become better, comrades, life has become gayer.”