Ukrainization
Despite Bolshevik promises made during the Civil War to respect the principle of national self-determination, and despite the formation of nationally based Soviet republics and the ostensibly federal structure of the Soviet Union, the Communist party still lacked meaningful support among the non-Russians during the early years of its rule.
It remained a tiny and overwhelmingly Russian, urban-based organization that perched precariously atop uncertain masses of peasants and non-Russians of dubious loyalty. Ukraine in particular, as Stalin himself openly acknowledged, was “a weak point of Soviet power.” Therefore, after appeasing the peasants with NEP, the party initiated an attempt to win acceptance and to broaden its support among the non-Russians.In 1923, at the Twelfth Party Congress, the party leadership embarked on a policy of indigenization or korenizatsia (”taking roots”). It called for a concerted effort to recruit non-Russians into the party and state apparatus, for Soviet officials to learn and use local languages, and for state support of cultural and social development among the nationalities. The Ukrainian version of this policy was called Ukrainization.
Before Ukrainization could be implemented, however, changes had to be made in the party leadership in Ukraine. As it stood, this leadership consisted mostly of Soviet officials sent in from Russia or local Jews. By and large, they showed little understanding for Ukrainization and even less inclination for putting it into effect. Indeed, many of them made a point of espousing Russian superiority over the “locals.” For example, one of the highest officials of the Ukrainian party, Dmitrii Lebed, was a Russian who made no effort to conceal his hostility to the Ukrainian language, customs, and Ukrainization in general. He enunciated the “Theory of the Struggle of Two Cultures,” which held that because Russian culture in Ukraine was associated with the progressive proletariat and the city – while Ukrainian culture was tied to the backward peasantry and the countryside – Russian culture would inevitably triumph, and it was the duty of Communists to support this “natural process.”
Although Lebed’s ideas were shared by many of his superiors in Moscow, they were considered untimely, and he and a number of other prominent non-Ukrainian party officials were recalled.
Their posts were filled by such loyal and disciplined representatives of Moscow as Lazar Kaganovich, a Ukrainian Jew who took over leadership of the party apparatus in Ukraine and was ready to follow the party’s line on Ukrainization, or else by Ukrainians who sincerely wanted Ukrainization to succeed. Among the latter were Vlas Chubar, who replaced Rakovsky as the head of the Ukrainian Soviet government; Oleksander Shumsky, a former Borotbist, who assumed responsibility for the department of agitation and propaganda; and the ubiquitous Old Bolshevik Mykola Skrypnyk, who became commissar of justice. Only after the hard-line “Russian bureaucrats and chauvinists,” as Lenin called them, were removed from their posts was the Ukrainian Soviet government ready to implement the new policy.The first measures introduced under the Ukrainization policy were aimed at expanding the use of Ukrainian, particularly in the party and government. The need for doing so was obvious: in 1922, for every one member of the Ukrainian party who regularly used Ukrainian, seven functioned only in Russian, and in the government the ratio was one to three. In order to deal with this imbalance, government and party officials were instructed in August 1923 to take specially organized Ukrainian-language courses. Those who failed to complete them successfully were threatened with dismissal. By 1925 bureaucrats received instructions to use Ukrainian in all government correspondence and publications. And in 1927 Kaganovich declared that “all party business will be conducted in Ukrainian.”3 Despite the notable lack of enthusiasm among the numerous non-Ukrainians in the government and party, the new policies produced impressive results. Whereas in 1922 only 20% of government business was conducted in Ukrainian, by 1927 the figure rose to 70%.
At the same time, the number of Ukrainians in the political establishment of the republic increased. In 1923 only 35% of government employees and 23% of party members were Ukrainian.
By 1926–27 the respective percentages rose to 54% and 52%. Yet, although they had gained a majority in both organizations, as newcomers, Ukrainians were largely concentrated in the lower levels of government and the party. In the late 1920s, their representation in the party’s Central Committee was not more than 25%.The Ukrainization drive penetrated all aspects of life in Soviet Ukraine. Its greatest impact was on education. Unlike the tsarist regime, the Soviets placed a high priority on education, and their achievements in this area were truly impressive. Several factors help to explain the Soviet emphasis on education: from the ideological point of view, Soviet society had to be well educated if it was to serve as a model of the new order; furthermore, an educated populace greatly increased the productive capacity and power of the state; and finally, education provided excellent opportunites for indoctrinating the new generation with Soviet values. Most dramatic were Soviet strides in the elimination of illiteracy. At the time of the revolution, about 40% of the urban populace was literate; ten years later the figure rose to 70%. In the countryside, the literacy rate during this period rose from 15% to over 50%. Because this massive education drive was conducted in Ukrainian, the spread of education meant the spread of Ukrainization among the country’s youth.
The driving force behind the Ukrainization of the school system was Skrypnyk, who headed the Commissariat of Education from 1927 to 1933. Working with almost obsessive zeal, he was able to announce in 1929, at the high point of Ukrainization, that over 80% of general-education schools, 55% of vocational schools, and 30% of university-level institutes offered instruction in Ukrainian only. Over 97% of Ukrainian children were taught in their native language. The Russian and Jewish minorities had the opportunity to study in Russian but were expected to take some courses in Ukrainian. Before the revolution, when Ukrainian schools were practically nonexistent, Ukrainophiles could only have dreamt of such conditions; a decade later, Skrypnyk made them a reality.
The success of these measures was all the more imposing in view of the attendant difficulties, particularly the lack of qualified teachers. The Ukrainization program called for 100,000 teachers but only 45,000 were available. In desperation, Skrypnyk attempted to import several thousand teachers from Galicia, but he failed to get Moscow’s permission, perhaps because of Soviet fear of the Galicians’ highly developed national consciousness. Also, many textbooks were still unavailable. Another problem, evident especially at the university level, was the refusal by many Russians (who constituted the majority of the faculties) to use the “peasant” language for purposes of higher education. Professor Tolstoi in Odessa expressed a typical attitude when he commented, “I consider… all comrades who have switched to lecturing in the Ukrainian language as renegades.”4 Nevertheless, even in the universities, Ukrainian students soon became the majority. This rapid Ukrainization of the schools gave rise to a general mood of national optimism, which the writer Borys Antonenko-Davydovych captured in his comment: “In the march of millions on their way to the Ukrainian school” he could see “the fire of a great revival.”5
This same sense of revival was evident in the Ukrainian-language media, which had been harshly repressed by the tsarist regime and treated poorly in the early years of Soviet rule. In 1922 only 27% of the books published in Ukraine appeared in Ukrainian and there were fewer than 10 newspapers and periodicals in that language. By 1927, well over 50% of new books appeared in Ukrainian; and by 1933, of the 426 newspapers in the republic, 373 were in the native language.
Largely as a result of Skrypnyk’s complaints that the Red Army acted as an agent of Russification, Ukrainian was introduced into officer-training schools and large reserve units in Ukraine. There were even plans to reorganize the army on a territorial basis. Surprisingly, such well-known non-Ukrainian commanders of the Red Army troops in Ukraine as Mikhail Frunze and lona lakir supported these projects.
For Ukrainization to achieve long-lasting results, it had to break the Russian cultural monopoly in the cities. The socioeconomic changes that took place in the 1920s and 1930s encouraged Ukrainizers to believe that such a result was possible. The Soviets’ vast industrialization drive, launched in 1928, created a great need for urban workers. Simultaneously, collectivization policies in the countryside forced many peasants from the land. Consequently, masses of Ukrainian peasants poured into the cities, greatly altering the ethnic composition of the proletariat and of the urban population as a whole. Thus, although in 1923 Ukrainians in such important industrial centers as Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Dniepropetrovsk had constituted 38%, 7%, and 16% of their populations, respectively, ten years later these percentages had increased to 50%, 31%, and 48%. By the mid 1930s, Ukrainians were the majority in most of the large cities. And they were encouraged by the Ukrainization programs to retain their native language rather than to adopt Russian, as had been done previously. It seemed, therefore, that in Ukraine, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the culture and language of the rural majority was going to overwhelm that of the urban minority.
The success of the policy of Ukrainization, which did not go as far as Skrypnyk and his associates would have wished, was a result, first and foremost, of the fact that it was linked to the general process of modernization. It was not primarily patriotism or traditionalism that caused Ukrainians to retain their native language; rather, it was because, better than any other language, Ukrainian allowed them to obtain an education, to obtain useful information from newspapers and books, to communicate with officials, and to perform their jobs. Because of the Ukrainization programs, Ukrainian language and culture ceased being a romantic, esoteric obsession of a tiny intelligentsia or the hallmark of a backward peasantry. Instead, Ukrainian was well on its way to becoming the primary means of communication and expression of a modernizing, industrializing society.