The Nationality Card

The NKVD reports divided Soviet citizens into a number of cate­gories, most notably by class, or social status, status and national­ity. Judging by these reports, the strongest anti-Soviet statements were expressed by peasants and members of “other nationalities,” which, according to the NKVD, generally meant Poles and Ger­mans.

The sections on the intelligentsia were two to four times lon­ger than those on the working class or collective farmers. Some members of the intelligentsia quoted in the reports were under surveillance as part of ongoing investigations into the activities of illegal political organizations. Such people were already surround­ed by informants, and it was relatively easy for NKVD agents to obtain information about their attitudes. Judging by the reports, it was the intelligentsia that provided the most sophisticated ap­praisal of changes in Soviet foreign policy, and it was the same group that reacted most actively to the dramatic change in Soviet nationality discourse on the eve and in the course of the Soviet invasion of Poland.

What was the intelligentsia’s reaction to the changes in party rhetoric? If one trusts the NKVD reports, it was overwhelmingly positive. If one looks at statements and comments that did not reflect Molotov’s address and media pronouncements, it appears that the national-liberation theme did indeed strike a chord with the intelligentsia.

The sentiments of those who subscribed to the old imperial vision of the Russian state and nation but were prepared to adapt it to the new official terminology were expressed by a professor of the Kyiv medical school named Romankevych, who allegedly stated in the presence of an NKVD informer: “The Soviet Union should restore the Russian lands—the Kholm region, Western Ukraine, and Western Belarus.” A worker from Odesa named Liubchenko went even further in his claim to the lost imperial territories. “The Soviet government has acted properly,” he said to an informer. “Western Ukraine and Belarus are settled by our people and constitute our territory. We should restore Bessara- bia—it is ours too, after all.” The treatment of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus as lands settled by “our people” was quite common in statements recorded by the NKVD, as were calls for the annexation of Bessarabia, the former imperial province that was annexed by Romania in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution and allocated to the Soviet sphere of influence by the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact.

Interestingly enough, all these statements were quoted in the sections of reports devoted to positive responses. They were certainly in keeping with the notions of ethnicity held by the authors of the reports, who assigned the responses of Ukrainians and Russians to the sections on social categories but dealt with the reactions of “Galicians”—that is, Ukrainians who came from Galicia, formerly under the rule of Austria-Hungary—in the sec­tions entitled “Among other nationalities.”³⁶

The old imperial interpretation of the invasion of Poland re­corded in NKVD reports from Ukraine was apparently popular in Russia as well.

In his diary entry for 3 October, Vernadsky wrote that “The seizure of (Western) Ukraine and Belarus is approved by all. The course of history is amazingly spontaneous. The Poles are crazy. And the Czechs (incomparably milder in that regard) have also suffered because of it. But the policy of Stalin and Molotov is realistic and, it seems to me, correct—a Russian policy of state. In Poland, social revolution is a military force.” Vernadsky con­sidered the takeover of Western Ukraine and Belarus a mani­festation of Russian policy and apparently had no problem with Stalin’s export of revolution to Poland. His views were shared by other members of the all-Union Academy. On 18 October Vernadsky wrote that his colleague, the geochemist Aleksandr Fersman, was “constantly under the influence of the takeover of Ukr[aine]—a Russian policy.”³⁷

If intellectuals in Moscow saw the Soviet invasion of Poland as a manifestation of Russian policy, most of their colleagues in Ukraine interpreted it as evidence of the regime’s Ukrainian policy. On 19 October, Vernadsky recorded in his diary a summa­ry of his discussions with Leonid Iasnopolsky, a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences who had moved to Moscow in 1931. “Iasnopolsky,” wrote Vernadsky, “apparently like the over­whelming majority of those who find themselves here, sympa­thizes with Stalin’s policy.

Very few leading Ukrainian intellectuals refused to be swayed by official propaganda about benefits to the Ukrainian nation. Among the most critical was the renowned Ukrainian poet Maksym Rylsky, who was regarded by the NKVD as a Ukrainian nationalist. Rylsky argued that the invasion of Poland “runs counter to the humanity and justice about which we have always made so much noise.” He continued: “And so I write verses ev­ery day praising the valiant Soviet forces and the wisdom of our policy, but there is no enthusiasm in my heart. We attacked the weak, after all, and it is very hard for an honest poet to justify such an action.” The authorities refused to grant Rylsky permission to visit Western Ukraine in the fall of 1939. His opinion was shared by other Ukrainian writers. Semen Skliarenko told an NKVD informer: “In our time, you cannot believe anyone or anything. The strong falls upon the weak—that is an eternal law of life. Just yesterday we shouted that the Germans were barbarians, plunder­ers, and scoundrels, but now we are almost trading kisses with them. Such striking hypocrisy.”³⁹

If Ukrainian writers and poets were troubled by the injustice of the invasion and the duplicity of Soviet foreign policy and pro­paganda, academics took a much more forgiving attitude toward the regime. Some of them were genuinely excited about the new turn of events. Professor Mykola Hrinchenko of the Institute of Folklore at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences allegedly told his colleagues: “I do not know whether there is any other foreign- policy measure of the Soviet authorities capable of arousing such joy among Ukrainians as this one.

An analysis of responses to the Soviet invasion of Poland re­corded by NKVD agents in Ukraine allows one to conclude that the regime’s use of national-liberation rhetoric to justify its entry into World War II succeeded in extending its power base and co-opting dissenting views by appropriating nationalist discourse and presenting itself to society as a benefactor of the national cause. By and large, the Ukrainian intelligentsia was prepared to follow the government’s lead in regarding the Red Army’s invasion of Poland as a campaign of national liberation and uni­fication of their native land, and not as their country’s entry into global military conflict.⁴⁰

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The Soviet leadership’s decision to justify its attack on Poland by invoking the liberation of that country’s Ukrainian and Belaru­sian minorities helped mobilize support for the Soviet entry into World War II not only among those of its citizens who consid­ered the Red Army’s invasion of Poland justified in geostrategic and military terms, or were eager to promote world revolution, but also among those who considered it a just restoration of the old Russian imperial boundaries, a step toward the reunification of the Russian people and, last but not least, the unification of the Ukrainian and Belarusian nations. The broadening of popular support for Soviet foreign policy thus benefited the regime at a time when deteriorating economic conditions and a falling stan­dard of living coincided with a sharp turn of Soviet propaganda away from its established anti-fascist attitude, which increased the number of critics of the regime.

An examination of the NKVD reports makes it quite clear that the Soviet people were not limited to clear-cut compliance or resistance in their dealings with the Soviet state under Stalinism. They were not merely “objects” of state policy but “subjects” in their own right who used their “subjectivity” not only to embrace the regime or learn how to “speak Bolshevik” in order to survive but also to lend or withdraw support from the state, depending on its policies. That was certainly true in the 1920s, and it appears to have been true for the late 1930s as well. The dictatorial state remained concerned about the attitudes of the population, classi­fied along social and national lines. As the reaction of Ukrainian intellectuals to the Soviet invasion of Poland demonstrates, rep­resentatives of individual peoples were prepared to lend condi­tional support to the regime if it offered the realization of their objectives in return.

The initiative came from the state, but it was ultimately up to the particular group to accept or reject the government’s of­fer. Besides, it was members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who prepared historical, demographic, and other data on the newly acquired territories for the Soviet government and were thus in a position to influence the official position on a variety of issues. It is easy to assume that lengthy presentations to NKVD agents by the intellectuals under their surveillance were intended not only as manifestations of loyalty but also as attempts to influence party policy.

The Soviet regime had co-opted national-liberation discourse and policies in the 1920s. It embarked on a policy of co-opting Russian public opinion in the 1930s. Now it used similar tac­tics to co-opt those battered by its policies of the 1930s—the Ukrainian and Belarusian intellectual elites. Unlike in the 1920s, the government was prepared to offer them not only concessions at home but also opportunities abroad. The introduction of the ethnic theme into Soviet foreign-policy pronouncements initi­ated a change in Soviet nationality policy, documented in the Ukrainian case by the studies of Serhy Yekelchyk and Vladyslav Hrynevych. It was an obvious case in which foreign-policy con­siderations led to a shift in nationality policy at home.

If the “Piedmont principle,” as Terry Martin has argued, was seen by the authorities as “an exploitable benefit of a domestical­ly driven policy,” and the “besieged fortress” mentality arguably reflected the regime’s domestic and foreign-policy concerns alike, the “national-liberation” paradigm was formulated and imple­mented first and foremost in response to foreign-policy consid­erations. We see no attempt on the part of Soviet officials to employ national-liberation rhetoric or implement related policies either at home or abroad before the Stalin-Dimitrov meeting of 7 September 1939.⁴¹

Adopted quite unexpectedly in a desperate attempt to find jus­tification for the coming aggression, the new national-liberation paradigm turned out to be a useful tool for the Soviet government in the course of World War II. It helped mobilize support for So­viet entry into the war in September 1939. For the next two years, it helped promote the Sovietization of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and, in 1940-41, Bessarabia and Bukovyna. It also helped the Soviet leadership reclaim those territories in 1944-45. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, neither President Roosevelt nor Prime Minister Churchill was able to refute Stalin’s claims to Lviv and Drohobych, which were presented in ethnonational terms.

It was only with the start of the Cold War that the Sovi­et authorities were forced to abandon the national-liberation paradigm. Once again, as in the 1930s, ethnic contacts began to be regarded not as an opportunity to export Soviet influence abroad but as a channel through which the imperialist powers could cor­rupt the Soviet nationalities. From the late 1940s on, campaigns were launched against local nationalism, and contacts with cross­border ethnic communities and diasporas were severely curtailed. Once again, as in the 1930s, diasporas and compatriots abroad were condemned as enemies of the Soviet state and people.⁴²