Tychyna

Tychyna’s Partiia vede (The Party Leads, 1934) is the classic, most noto­rious example of this rhetoric. The poems in this collection use popular songs, doggerel-like verse, and rhymed couplets.

Some popular sayings and songs from the time do indeed recall the poetry in Partiia vede. They were recorded by the secret police and have now become available.¹ However, unlike Tychyna’s verse, they ridicule the government’s policies, displaying the irreverent attitudes and untram­meled energy of folklore. Tychyna’s imitation of the popular voice was a stylization that employed “futurist” crudities and uncouth buffoonery. However, the collection set a standard for Socialist Realist writings and in the following decades was republished many times.

No matter how one views the literary qualities of Partiia vede, its polit­ical message is unmistakably chilling. It is both a celebration of the First Five-Year Plan and a call for violence against the party’s opponents. The language is fanatical and apocalyptic, often a reworking of hackneyed political slogans. The poem that gave its name to the collection appeared on the front page of Moscow’s Pravda (Truth) on 21 November 1933, not in Russian translation but in the original Ukrainian:

Let them do their thing

Go insane, agonize—

We’ll do ours:

All the lords into one pit, Bourgeois after bourgeois We’ll kill, we’ll kill! We’ll kill, we’ll kill.

It’s no surprise

We rise

Firmly, against the grain.

Our march is dignified,

We reach out to all

Oppressed and poor!

We revive mountains, waters,

Raise factories,

We’re growing, hey!

Our famous five-year plans are

For deserts, canal and rivers,

As though for children,

Our children.

Our Red Army

Guards the border,

And the airforce

Kills, sows, and carries.

It’s lifting the Republic

To new heights!

To new heights!

Against the walls, against the moths

We’ve the lively Komsomol—

And reinforcements are arriving:

The Bolshevik era’s

Pioneers, Pioneers—

The Party leads,

The Party leads.

They’re not on the Rhein, or the Marne,

We’ll send printing presses to the MTSs

They’re ours, ours!

We’re disturbing the stratosphere,

The atom’s core and sphere—

What a beautiful time!

An unrepeatable time!

Unrepeatable, immortal...

Who in this world is stronger?

What country are they from?

We’re planning creative drives—

Column after column,

All identical!

All identical!

So let them do their thing,

Go insane, agonize—

We’ll do ours:

All the lords into one pit,

Bourgeois after bourgeois

We’ll kill, we’ll kill.

(author’s own translation)

The enemy “other” is associated with lords, bourgeois, walls, moths (sug­gesting the old and decrepit), and frenzied agonizing. The poem urges killing all enemies and throwing them into a common pit. It insists on mercilessness; all pleas and protests are to be ignored. In this it followed political requirements. Stalin had laid out the policy on liquidating the kulaks on 27 December 1929:

we have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tenden­cies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulak as a class. [...] An offensive requires that we smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class. Less than that would amount to mere declamation, pin­pricks, phrase-mongering, certainly not a Bolshevik offensive.

(quoted in Gellately 2007, 169-170)

A month later, on 21 January 1930, in “Concerning the Policy of Elimi­nating the Kulaks as a Class,” Stalin wrote in Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star): “In order to oust the ‘kulaks’ as a class, the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development” (quoted in ibid.).

When Stalin insisted on a decisive “strike” against enemies, it was easy to assume that this would also to be a blow against the dangers of Ukrainian assertiveness, rebellion, and secession. The word “strike” was the code word for a campaign to terrorize and subdue the Ukrainian republic. It was repeated in party directives and propaganda. Stalin sent in Vsevolod Balytskyi from Moscow to head of the Ukrainian GPU-NKVD, and dispatched Molotov and Kaganovich to force the Ukrainian party to submit to his will. Still fearful of a revolt, he then installed Postyshev as his personal satrap in the republic.² They were all instructed to be ruthless.

A similar ruthlessness was demanded of writers. Tychyna’s poem makes it clear that all opponents of the regime, whatever their political affiliation, are to be considered equally heinous (belong in the same pit). By contrast, those who are destroying this enemy are associated with firmness (they go against the current), growth, and elevation (they help revive, lift, and fly), state security and vigor (guarding of borders, strength, and youthfulness), discipline and uniformity (they march in unified columns). Theirs is a world of technology (airplanes, weap­ons) and mechanization (the MTSs, or Machine Tractor Stations). The poem’s moral nihilism would have been particularly shocking to readers because Tychyna had decried exactly this kind of ruthless attitude in his poetry of 1917-20, particularly in his Zamist sonetiv i oktav (Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, 1920), wherein he had written: “You will never institute socialism without music.” The new, “Bolshevik” attitude cel­ebrated in this poetry expresses a willing submission to the iron laws of history, which supposedly leave no room for moral scruples. According to the logic of these laws, anyone committed to the party-led revolution must engage in mass violence so that the radiant future can at last be reached. Tychyna’s poem holds out the promise of a utopia just beyond the horizon, within grasp, after the bloodshed has been accomplished.