Ukrainization Reconfigured
If in 1923 party leaders in Kharkiv envisioned the Ukrainization policy as an effort to win over the peasants to the Soviet cause by moderating the national divisions between Ukraine’s rural and urban areas (a policy easier proclaimed than implemented), they launched a more ambitious phase in 1925, concentrating on the Russified cities.73 But by 1933, the Kremlin’s party leaders felt that the compromises on the national question hammered out in the early 1920s no longer addressed the new political realities.
With forced collectivization, the “small” famine of 1928-9, the removal of the kulaks in 1930-1, the “minor” famine of 1932, ignited by the heavy-handed grain collection, and the “major” famine of 1933 (the Holodomor), which killed millions, the party gained unprecedented control over the countryside and over the wayward Ukrainian peasantry. Political overtures to the peasants and to Ukrainian society were no longer necessary. The AllUnion Communist Party had finally won the civil and national wars of 1918-21.Despite this victory, Ukrainization still remained in place, although in a revised and subdued form. After denouncing “bourgeois nationalists” and their agents, headed by Skrypnyk, for perverting this policy, Stalin’s men advocated a “Bolshevik Ukrainization.” This revised version adhered to the ubiquitous slogan, “national in form, socialist in content.” Most importantly, the complete design and implementation of Soviet nationality policy in this republic came under Moscow’s watchful eyes without the regional party’s mediation. After several published discussions delineating the differences between “Ukrainization” and “Bolshevik Ukrainization,” the authorities de-emphasized this policy and rarely mentioned it in public. Although party leaders may have tried to reopen the issue of the use of Ukrainian in public in the Stalino, Dniepropetrovsk, and Odessa oblasts in 1935, very little came of it.74 Although S.V.
Kosior, the first secretary of the CP(b)U, claimed at its Thirteenth Party Congress (27 May-3 June 1937) that Ukrainization still remained a vital party policy and that governmental workers “should know the language of the Ukrainian people,” his interpretation did not represent the views of all of the delegates.75 When many members of this congress condemned the “insufficient Ukrainization” of the party, the soviets, and particularly the trade unions and Komsomol organizations, they meant the inclusion of more Ukrainians (and not necessarily Ukrainian speakers) into the leading institutions, not the need to expand the Ukrainian language or culture in the public sphere.76In order to limit the number of potential advocates of a Skrypnyk- oriented Ukrainization, Postyshev dismantled the Commissariat of Education and the Institute of Linguistics within the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and started to purge the party (by 1933-4 the majority of Ukrainization’s most prominent supporters within the creative intelligentsia had already experienced arrest). Over the long run, Postyshev did far more than just cripple the expansion of the Ukrainian language into the cities or reconfigure Ukrainization. By wielding their revolutionary swords, he and Balitsky decimated Ukrainization’s supporters within the Communist Party and among Ukrainian intellectuals and members of Ukraine’s civil society. Throughout the 1930s uncounted thousands more were arrested on false charges and forced to confess membership in various nonexistent underground subversive organizations.77 Those who did not conform to the party’s new interpretation (or were perceived to conform reluctantly) were annihilated. Decades into the future, the cultural sophistication of these purged men and women could not be easily replicated or civil society easily reconstructed, even after Ukraine’s independence in 1991.78 The famines, the Holodomor, and the purges represented, in effect, the process of a mass “negative selection” in Ukrainian society.79
By the late 1930s, Soviet authorities shifted the uneasy equilibrium between the Ukrainian and Russian languages in the Russian direction.
More than two thousand officials within the Commissariat of Education, Ukrainization’s command centre, lost their positions. Many subsequently experienced arrest and imprisonment, if not execution. The party suspended publication of Ukrainian dictionaries (new editions started to incorporate Russian terms) and abolished the 1928 standardization of Ukrainian orthography, which Skrypnyk hammered out.80 Ukrainian as the language of instruction in the primary and secondary schools, in any case, fell from 88.5 per cent in 1932-3 to 78.2 per cent in 1938-9, primarily in the cities, not the countryside, which experienced inferior Ukrainian-language schools to the end of the Soviet period. The percentage of Ukrainian students in higher educational institutions declined from 66.7 per cent in 1930-1 to 54.2 per cent in 1937-8.81 In the 1930s, the share of Ukrainian- language book titles and newspapers shrank from 79 to 42 per cent and from 89 per cent to 69 per cent, respectively.82Despite the purges of Skrypnyk’s Commissariat of Education and the decline in Ukrainian language use in schools, the media, and the public sphere, Ukrainization remained in place, even if not fully actualized. Between 1933 and September 1937, Skrypnyk’s successors amended this policy’s alleged “mechanical implementation.” The redesigned version no longer challenged the Russian language’s long-standing hegemony in Ukraine’s urban public sphere.83
With renewed attacks on “Ukrainian nationalism” and “bourgeois nationalists” in late 1937, the party watered down even this weakened adaptation.84 On 13 March 1938 the Soviet government issued a secret decree designating the Russian language and literature as required subjects of study in all non-Russian schools throughout the USSR, starting with the new school year in September.85 The Ukrainian SSR followed suit. Its Politburo formulated two important decrees concerning this matter in April 1938.
The first abolished the small number of schools with languages of instruction in German, Polish, Czech, Greek, and Swedish, integrating their pupils into Ukrainian- or Russian-language schools. The Ukrainian SSR’s multilingual educational network now became a bilingual one. The second decree reinforced the Russian language in the Ukrainian-language schools by increasing the number of hours devoted to it during the school week and by stipulating that children should start studying the language earlier (in the second grade in all elementary schools and in the third grade in all middle and incomplete middle schools).86 Although these laws did not transform Ukrainian-language schools into Russian-language schools, they helped marginalize them.87
Yes, all Russian schools in the republic were still required to teach the Ukrainian language “for a specified number of hours per week to each of their students.” Yes, a certain number of officials and governmental agencies (such as the Commissariats of Health, Social Welfare, and Education but not the military or the NKVD) employed Ukrainian in the public sphere. But these measures did not necessary “encourage” the public use of Ukrainian, as some Western analysts claim.88
In many cases, the existence of Ukrainian-language schools helped inculcate the idea that Ukrainian language and culture remained inferior to the Russian. In the 1920s the quality of Ukrainian-language schools in the cities and the countryside rarely surpassed that of the Russian-language schools. (The attraction of Russified cities, the shortage of highly trained Ukrainian-language teachers, constant educational underfunding, and bureaucratic obstruction handicapped these schools.) In the 1930s, the Soviet Ukrainian government often purged the ranks of the Ukrainian-language teachers, accusing them of “Ukrainian nationalism.” In 1938, the party increased the number of hours pupils studied the Russian language and literature, ultimately reducing the time allotted for Ukrainian language and literature.
The quality of this Ukrainian-language instruction and the extent to which it differed from Russian- language instruction in Ukrainian- and Russian-language schools must have varied enormously from area to area and from region to region, based on how local officials, teachers, parents, and communities interpreted Kiev’s orders to teach Ukrainian.89 How they identified themselves nationally as well as socially also helped determine their responses to this bilingual, dual-tiered schooling.But all in all, according to one of the studies produced by Harvard University’s Project on the Soviet Social System in the early 1950s, the Soviet leadership ruthlessly “suppress(ed) all spontaneous expressions of Ukrainian culture and national feeling.”90 As a precautionary measure, they closely monitored individuals and groups they did not trust, such the Ukrainian intelligentsia, who usually spoke Russian as fluently as Ukrainian. In practice, the Kremlin and its agents viewed the intelligentsia’s public use of Ukrainian as a defiance of the regime and as evidence of national pride.91
Between 1933 and 1941, the Soviet Union sent a mixed message to its Ukrainian population in Central, Southern, and Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian language would remain in place, but it would remain inferior to Russian, which would dominate the public sphere, the media, the military and the security services, and most of the republic’s commissariats. Only mastery of Russian (not Ukrainian) would unlock the opportunities for social mobility and career advancement. Even if an individual spoke Ukrainian, he or she would prefer not to draw attention to it, much less politicize it. Members of the better-educated younger generation, unlike the prerevolutionary Ukrainian intelligentsia or the supporters of Ukrainization, “ceased to identify themselves vigorously as Ukrainians” and became more receptive to the new Stalinist order.92 With the introduction of these policies, the Russian culture and language became even more prevalent in the urban setting in the 1930s than in the 1920s, even after the migration of millions of Ukrainians into the cities.93