The Ukrainian Zhdanovshchina
Beginning in June 1946, Ukraine became a testing ground for the Zhdanovshchina, the all-Union campaign of ideological purification led by VKP(b) Central Committee Secretary Andrei Zhdanov The Zhdanovshchma was a reaction to widespread hopes for a freer and more prosperous life after the war, as well as for a more tolerant and liberal cultural climate The campaign signalled a return to the strident pre-war party line, the reassertion of ideological control over culture, and the purging of literature and the arts of real and imaginary western influences The beginning of the Zhdanovshchma is usually dated August 1946, when the Central Committee condemned two prominent Leningrad journals, Zvezda and Leningrad, for publishing ideologically harmful apolitical works and for disparaging Soviet values 28
A look at the new policy’s refraction in a non-Russian republic provides a different perspective on the post-war ideological purging Although the attack on Leningrad writers in the late summer of 1946 continues to be widely understood as the inauguration of the Zhdanovshchma, Werner G Hann has long suggested that the campaign actually began in late June in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, when, Petr Fedoseev, the deputy head of Agitprop, arrived to coordinate the first salvos of the ideological purge, which in Ukraine was aimed at nationalism’ rather than at western influences 29 No archival document directly explains this specificity of Ukraine, but its likely cause was the difficulties that the Sovietization of Western Ukraine was encountering, particularly in the form of a fierce nationalist guerilla 30 resistance
During the republican conference on propaganda of 24—6 June, Lytvyn announced that ‘softness’ on nationalism could no longer be tolerated in Ukraine, where the ideological climate had already been contaminated by German wartime propaganda, private landholding in the Western provinces, population exchanges with Poland, and the return of POWs and Ostarbeiter from Germany (He managed not to mention the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, but its activities were very much on the minds of those present) Although all of these phenomena were manifestly recent, Lytvyn and other speakers concentrated almost exclusively on ideological mistakes in artistic and scholarly representations of the Ukrainian past In contrast to the subsequent denunciations in Leningrad and Moscow, ideologues did not accuse intellectuals of succumbing to western influences or publishing ideologically harmful apolitical works Instead, they concentrated on criticizing writers, artists, and composers for ‘escaping from our socialist reality’ into subjects from the Ukrainian past This was said to reflect the lasting influence of the late patriarch of Ukrainian nationalism, Mykhailo Hrushevsky31
Lytvyn dismissed a recent textbook, A Survey of the History of Ukrainian Literature, for ignoring class divisions in pre-revolutionary Ukrainian culture and for not paying sufficient attention to its ties with progressive Russian culture Yet he saw the general state of Ukrainian historical scholarship as satisfactory The secierary cited only one example of Hrushevsky’s influence on historians, the Lviv incidc nr with Korduba32
The situation changed on 20 July, when the central Agitprop newspaper Kultura i zhizn carried the article ‘To Correct Mistakes in the Coverage of Some Questions of the History of Ukraine.’ Written by Agitprop official S.
Kovalev, this piece reiterated earlier criticisms of the Survey, the Lviv incident, and other points made during the June conference. At the same time, Kovalev noted that volume 1 of the History of Ukraine (1943) also contained serious errors: in particular, its periodization allegedly rested more on the events of political history than on socio-economic formations. He suggested that the republic’s scholars had not made satisfactory progress in preparing a ‘scholarly history’ of Ukraine.33 Ukrainian bureaucrats immediately followed Moscow’s cue. During the plenary session of the KP(b)U Central Committee on 15 August Khrushchev counted the first volume of the History of Ukraine among the faulty works imbued with nationalistic deviations.34 Elaborating on this statement, Nazarenko announced that a ‘Marxist history of Ukraine’ had yet to be written. Volume 1 was based on Hrushevsky’s theories: ‘It does not reflect the concept of class struggle. The first chapter is entitled “The History of Ukraine before the Creation of the Kievan State.” How could one speak of “Ukraine” at that time?’35Nonetheless, the attack on historians remained a sideline in the ideological purification campaign of 1946. Most speakers at the August plenary session focused their critique on the ‘nationalist deviations’ in literature and the arts. Khrushchev, Lytvyn, and Nazarenko demanded that the intellectuals revise the public discourse of self-identification by emphasizing the common socialist present at the expense of a ‘separate’ national past. Nazarenko accused the republic’s literary historians of ‘nationalistic’ exaltation of the pre-revolutionary Ukrainian classics. Lytvyn pounced upon Bazhan’s ‘Danylo of Halych’ for referring to Ukraine as already existing in the thirteenth century: ‘Historical scholarship proved that the Slavic peoples were still united at the time of Danylo of Halych and separate nationalities (narodnosti) did not yet exist.’ Bazhan had presumably borrowed his ideas from Hrushevsky.36 Lytvyn also mentioned the idealization of bourgeois Ukrainian culture in Rylsky’s 1943 speech on the history of Kiev and Oleksa Kundzich’s story ‘The Ukrainian Hut,’ which was declared guilty of celebrating the traditional peasant dwelling as the primordial cradle of the Ukrainian nation.37
While most speakers dwelt on various ‘nationalist mistakes’ in portraying the past, some, like Leonid Melnikov, the party boss in Stalino (Donetsk) province, complained that no Ukrainian writer properly celebrated the republic’s industrial growth under Soviet power. ‘I have not seen anything either,’ added Khrushchev.
When Bazhan finally took the floor to apologize for the errors of his historical poem, the first secretary interrupted him: ‘No, you tell me why writers are opposed to the Donbas and to industrialization.’ Then Khrushchev closed the proceedings with an appeal ‘to heat the ground so that our enemies will burn their feet.’38 The key to remedying all of these ideological problems appeared simple: dilute ‘nationalistic’ historical memory with a healthy dose of love for the Soviet present.Ukrainian ideologues spelled out the campaigns message at several denunciatory meetings. During the writers’ conference of 27-8 August, Lytvyn frankly defined the ideological turn in terms that did not appear in the official documents of the time:
Why did the comrades make serious mistakes? Because they proceeded from the wrong assumption that the party had changed its policy during the war. To foster popular patriotism, much has been written about Aleksandr Nevsky, Suvorov, Kutuzov, and Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Several patriotic manifestos to the Ukrainian people paid great attention to the heroic traditions of our peoples past. Shevchenko’s Kobzar was published in a pocket-size format and smuggled beyond the front line [into the occupied territories] together with many leaflets that used Shevchenkos poetry for purely propagandistic purposes. Some people wrongly interpreted this to the effect that the liberation of Ukraine was going on under the banner of Shevchenko, under the banner of Kulish. Excuse me for the sharp words, but this is what happened. These comrades decided that all previous critique [of nationalism] could be abandoned because the party’s policy had changed, because the party had conceded.39
The secretary for ideology suggested crudely that all Ukrainian intellectuals, especially writers, needed to ‘air out their brains’ (provetrivanie mozgov). ‘Instead of infatuation with the reactionary romantics of the Zaporozhian Host, which differed from our times in so many respects, the past should be interpreted through its connections with the present.’40
Significantly, the Ukrainian equivalent of the principal ideological resolution of the Zhdanovshchina, Moscow’s decree on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, also differed from its model by its unusual sensitivity to the questions of history.
The KP(b)U Central Committee resolution About the Journal Vitchyzna denounced the periodical not for ‘kowtowing to western culture’ but for publishing ‘nationalistic’ articles on Ivan Kotliarevsky, the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, and on the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, the first modern Ukrainian political organization. The decree accused the editors of neglecting Soviet subjects and encouraging their authors to elaborate on the national past.41Whereas Kievan historians survived the 1946 purge with no significant losses, their Lviv colleagues suffered somewhat more on account of their alleged Hrushevskian heresy. On 28 October 1946 Ukraine’s Council of Ministers closed down the Lviv branches of the institutes of History, Literature, and Economics, leaving local scholars to find a new means of livelihood. Korduba died the following year. The authorities transferred Krypiakevych to Kiev as a senior researcher at the Institute of Ukrainian History, but not before he publicly acknowledged his nationalistic mistakes at a meeting of the Social Sciences branch of the Academy of Sciences.42
Meanwhile, the Lviv provincial party committee began a close examination of historical research in the region. Local functionaries soon discovered the troubling fact that ‘During the last two years, not a single article was published on the history of the revolutionary movement in the Western provinces.’ To counteract the lasting influence of ‘bourgeois nationalists’ on popular historical memory in the west, the committee proposed the creation of a brigade of Marxist historians, who would specialize in denouncing the Hrushevsky school. The next necessary steps were to be writing and publishing popular pamphlets on Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Pereiaslav Treaty, the Battle at Poltava, and Mazepa’s treason. (Significantly, these directives called for emphasis more on Russian-Ukrainian historical friendship, rather than on Soviet achievements.) The authorities also discovered that the Lviv Historical Museum did not have a display on the Battle at Poltava. Moreover, the museum’s staff seemed unreliable. On 14 July 1946 a guide, latskevych, led a group of Soviet Army soldiers and students (most of them apparently Russians and Eastern Ukrainians) through the museum’s exposition. Reaching the hall displaying materials about the union with Russia, latskevych announced: ‘So that was our history, and here is where your history begins.’43
A traditional centre of Western Ukrainian political and intellectual life, Lviv was something of an extreme case, but here as elsewhere throughout the republic, even in the long-Sovietized Eastern and Southern provinces, which had no nationalist guerillas, ideologues were lecturing the intelligentsia and the media were educating the population on the new, proper version of Ukrainian Soviet historical memory.