The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  In December 1922, the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (its name would change to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1937), a communist polity that included the central and eastern lands of Ukraine, entered into a formal agreement with the Russian Federation and the republics of Belarus and Transcaucasia to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The creation of the USSR resulted from Vladimir Lenin’s intervention in the debate between Joseph Stalin, who held the newly created position of general secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, and the Bolshevik leaders of Ukraine. Stalin wanted Ukraine and other republics to join the Russian Federation with rights of autonomy within it. The Ukrainian communist leaders resisted. They included old Bolsheviks and Ukrainian socialists who embraced the idea that social revolution implied national liberation and that creating a union of sovereign Soviet republics would best achieve both. Lenin, who dreamed of world revolution and envisioned China, India, Germany, France, and the United States joining the union in the future, supported the Ukrainian position.

  The union was created with Ukraine very much in mind. Its immediate purpose was to keep the Ukrainians in, the Poles out, and the Russians down. Moscow considered the Ukrainians, whose leaders, most notably Symon Petliura, had shown themselves capable of unleashing mass peasant uprisings, the most restive and rebellious ethnic minority under its rule, while it saw Russian nationalist aspirations as a major threat to the unity of the multiethnic state. Poland was, of course, an adversary that, with Western support, might launch another offensive against the union and tear away part of Ukraine. Between the federalism of the union treaty and the centralism of the ruling Communist Party, Ukraine enjoyed de facto autonomy, arguably with broader prerogatives than those imagined by mainstream Ukrainian politicians of the decades leading up to World War I or even the leaders of the Central Rada in the first months of the 1917 revolution.

  Ukraine would realize this new stage in its nation building within the political and legal framework established by the Soviet regime, which referred to itself as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the early 1920s, as the regime tried to solidify its control of a country devastated by war, revolution, and civil strife, it allowed some elements of the market to reenter the highly centralized Soviet economy through the back door of the New Economic Policy. In the political and cultural sphere, the Soviet leaders looked for new ways to hold on to the imperial possessions of the Romanovs. They found a provisional solution to the latter problem in the policy of korenizatsiia, or indigenization, which emphasized the economic development of the non-Russian peripheries, as well as the support and development of local cultures. The Thirteenth Party Congress, which took place in Moscow in April 1923, slightly more than a year after the creation of the Soviet Union, adopted korenizatsiia as official party and government policy.

  One goal that Moscow tried to achieve through its indigenization policy was the creation of loyal local elites. The policy of the Romanovs, who had extended Russia’s territory by incorporating local elites into the imperial apparatus, was not applicable in the revolutionary era. The inclusion of local revolutionary elites took place in 1920 with the admission to the party of members of the Borot’ba group of former Socialist Revolutionaries, but that strategy undermined the ideological uniformity of the party and could go only so far. Meanwhile, Ukraine lacked an indigenous communist elite in numbers sufficient to ensure the stability of the Bolshevik regime. The population of Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1920s was less than 30 million, with Ukrainians constituting roughly 80 percent, Russians less than 10 percent, and Jews 5.5 percent. The ethnic composition of the party was very different. In 1922, out of almost 55,000 members of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Russians made up an absolute majority, with more than 53 percent, while Ukrainians accounted for barely 24 percent—the same percentage as representatives of all other nationalities, most of whom were ethnic Jews. Rural Ukrainians regarded the new administration as little more than an occupying force. The party regime in Moscow wanted to change that perception in order to establish its control over the Ukrainian peasantry.

  The national communists—a group in the Ukrainian party leadership that saw revolution as a vehicle for both social and national liberation of the Russian-ruled minorities—argued that in order to overcome differences between the proletarian city and the petty bourgeois world of the village, the party had to adopt the language and culture of the majority of the Ukrainian population, which happened to be Ukrainian. With communist ideology remaining largely an urban phenomenon, the village emerged in communist thinking about Ukrainization as a major challenge—as, of course, it had been during the revolution and civil war. The Ukrainian national communists advocated a strategy akin to that adopted by Byzantine proselytizers at the end of the first millennium—embracing the local language and culture with the goal of promoting the new religion, in this case communism. The victory of the Byzantine approach over the Roman one, which insisted on one lingua franca for all true believers, allowed the position advocated by the national communists to prevail as the official party line. But they were fighting an uphill battle at best.

  The most solid resistance came from the party itself, most of whose members were non-Ukrainian. According to one report, only 18 percent of party members in the civil service could claim a good knowledge of Ukrainian, as opposed to 44 percent of the service as a whole. The Ukrainian national communists, led by Oleksandr Shumsky, demanded a harder line on Ukrainization. Shumsky wanted to replace Stalin’s Ukrainian-born protégé Lazar Kaganovich, an ethnic Jew who found the Ukrainian language a struggle, with the ethnic Ukrainian Vlas Chubar, head of the Ukrainian government, as general secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Shumsky also demanded that Stalin promote linguistic Ukrainization of the workers. From the outset, the policy had been limited to ethnic Ukrainians, excluding the Russians of Ukraine, as well as other ethnic groups, which had their own indigenization programs. The party was highly reluctant to alienate the Russian or highly Russified working class with a language policy that it was likely to resist. Shumsky was contending against heavy odds.

  Stalin refused to remove Kaganovich, claiming that the proposal was badly timed. He remained obdurate even though the loyalty of the Ukrainian party organization, the largest in the Soviet Union, was essential to him in his ongoing struggle for control of the party after Lenin’s death in January 1924. Stalin also refused to budge on the issue of the Ukrainization of the working class. “Our party, state, and other apparatuses serving the population can and must be Ukrainized at a certain rate,” wrote Stalin in April 1926 to the Ukrainian Politburo—the top Bolshevik leaders of Ukraine. “But the proletariat cannot be Ukrainized from above. The Russian working masses cannot be forced to renounce the Russian language and Russian culture and adopt Ukrainian as their language and culture.” Stalin was especially critical of the calls for distancing Ukrainian culture from Russian culture that he associated with the writings of Mykola Khvyliovy, a Ukrainian author of Russian ethnic origin (born Nikolai Fitilev). “While West European proletarians and their communist parties are full of sympathy for ‘Moscow,’ the citadel of the international revolutionary movement and Leninism; while West European proletarians gaze with sympathy on the banner waving in Moscow, the Ukrainian communist Khvyliovy can say nothing more in favor of Moscow than exhort Ukrainian activists to flee ‘Moscow . . . as quickly as possible,’” wrote Stalin.

  Deciding to retake the initiative from the Ukrainian national communists, Stalin ordered his own man, Kaganovich, to lead the Ukrainization drive and address Shumsky’s concerns about the slow pace of Ukrainization. Kaganovich obliged, turning what had been Ukrainization “by decree” before 1926 into a much more effective and comprehensive policy. In 1927, he managed to deliver his report to the Ukrainian party congress in Ukrainian. He also took a hard line when it came to the use of Ukrainian in educational institutions and in propaganda and cultural work a
mong the working class. After Kaganovich’s recall to Moscow in 1928, his successor, Stanislav Kosior, an ethnic Pole, continued his policies. According to official figures, Ukrainian-language instruction in institutions of higher learning increased from 33 percent in the 1926–1927 academic year to 58 percent in 1928 and 1929. The percentage of Ukrainian-language newspapers grew from 30 percent of all newspapers in Ukraine in 1926 to 92 percent in 1932. In June 1932, 75 percent of all lectures given to miners in Ukraine were in Ukrainian.

  While Ukrainization was central to the indigenization policy in Ukraine, it did not involve only ethnic Ukrainians. Jewish, Polish, Greek, and Bulgarian ethnic regions were created in Ukraine with their own administrations. Publishing houses printed books in national languages, and schoolchildren were educated in the languages of their ethnic groups. But the effects of this policy remained limited mainly to the countryside. In the cities, ethnic minorities were being Russified even more quickly than Ukrainians. In 1926, 62 percent of ethnic Ukrainians in Kharkiv gave Ukrainian as their mother tongue, but only 41 percent of Jews did so. Some Jewish intellectuals, such as Grigorii Kerner (Hrytsko Kernerenko), a native of Nestor Makhno’s capital of Huliaipole, embraced Ukrainization and chose to write in Ukrainian, but most opted for Russian as a more direct route to modernity. Many left for Moscow and made prominent careers there. The writers Ilia Ilf (Fainzilberg) and Vasilii Grossman—natives of Ukraine’s two best-known Jewish centers, Odesa and Berdychiv—both took this route.

  Stalin’s support for Ukrainization was tactical and temporary. He believed that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people, and at the end of the 1920s, the party decided that the survival of the regime depended on support from the largest ethnic group—the Russians. It would have to keep Ukrainian ambitions to create a fully independent culture in check.

  In 1929, the Soviet secret police began a wave of arrests in preparation for one of the first show trials to take place in the Soviet Union. Staged in Kharkiv, the trial largely targeted the leadership of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, accused of belonging to a bogus organization called the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Prosecutors alleged that members were in touch with Ukrainian émigrés and the Polish government and planning an uprising ultimately aimed at creating an independent Ukrainian state. At the top of the list of supposed plotters were the chief academic secretary of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and former deputy head of the Central Rada, Serhii Yefremov, and the former prime minister of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Volodymyr Chekhivsky. The latter was also a leading figure in the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which was independent of Moscow and identified by the prosecutors as a branch of the plotters’ organization. The accusations were false, but the judges sentenced 15 people to death, 192 to various terms of imprisonment, and 87 to internal exile. The trial directly attacked the intellectuals at the forefront of the Ukrainization drive. The party was changing its policy, signaling by means of the trial that it was no longer targeting Russian great-power chauvinism and instead had local nationalism in its sights. The Ukrainian national communists, including the influential minister of education, Mykola Skrypnyk, lobbied Moscow to organize a similar trial against Russian “great-power chauvinism” but failed.

  Linguistic and cultural Ukrainization failed to change the culture of the industrial east and south of the republic. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the new capital of Ukraine, the city of Kharkiv. There, the percentage of those giving Ukrainian as their mother tongue only grew between 1926 and 1939 from 24 to 32 percent—an insignificant increase, given the efforts to Ukrainize the city—but even more troubling was the fact that the percentage of those giving Russian as their mother tongue remained the same, around 64 percent. That remained the case even as the city’s population doubled during the same period from 417,000 to 833,000, and the share of Ukrainians grew from 39 to 49 percent. The upswing of the Ukrainization policy stalled before it could claim the city for the Ukrainian cultural cause—a failure that had profound long-term consequences for the self-identification of the Ukrainian east. But that policy also left another mark on Ukrainian society. It created conditions in which more and more urban Ukrainians claimed Ukrainian rather than Russian as their nationality, despite their predominant use of the Russian language. As Russian-speaking Ukrainians kept growing in number, they forged an all-important cultural link between Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-speaking Russians. In fact, all three groups had a lingua franca, called surzhyk, a mixture of the two languages.

  In the 1920s, Soviet leaders were bent on world revolution and conducted an active undercover campaign among Ukrainians in neighboring states, trying to destabilize and weaken the multiethnic countries of eastern Europe. France and the other Western powers, for their part, were trying to turn the same countries into a buffer zone to prevent the spread of Bolshevism in Europe. The leaders of Soviet Ukraine portrayed their republic as a new Ukrainian Piedmont—a state that would bring national and social liberation to Ukrainians temporarily under foreign bourgeois rule. The term itself harked back to the era of Italian unification, when the Piedmont had led other Italian regions toward the formation of a nation-state. The Poles and then Ukrainians applied the Piedmont metaphor to Galicia, which both regarded as the center of their respective national movements, and then the Ukrainian Bolsheviks picked it up. With the Ukrainization drive under way, presenting Soviet Ukraine as a beacon of Ukrainian nationhood was not difficult. Many of the Ukrainian-populated regions to the west found themselves under de facto occupation and experienced oppression of almost all forms of their communal and cultural life.

  The most difficult political and cultural situation was that in Polish-ruled Galicia. Its population was about 5 million, with Ukrainians constituting close to 4.4 million. The Versailles and Riga peace treaties, as well as the Polish constitution, guaranteed the Ukrainian minority in Poland legal equality and the right to establish its own schools and use the Ukrainian language in the public sphere. But actual conditions were not in keeping with the international obligations undertaken by the young Polish state. Bitter memories of the Polish-Ukrainian war were still fresh, with the Polish authorities having interned close to 70,000 Ukrainians during and immediately after the war. Ukrainians boycotted the Polish institutions in the region: they opened and ran their own underground university and ignored the 1920 Polish census and the 1922 elections. But these tactics proved ineffective after March 1923, when the Conference of Ambassadors created by the Paris Peace Conference decided to recognize Polish rule over Galicia. That decision deprived Ukrainians in Galicia of their last hope that Western intervention could improve their situation and left them to cope with the new political circumstances as best they might.

  The Conference of Ambassadors made its decision on the understanding that the Ukrainians would get some form of autonomy. This never materialized, as the new Polish state intended its nationality policy to bring about not only the political but also the cultural assimilation of the minorities. The authorities viewed minorities—which, apart from the Ukrainians, included Belarusians, Germans, and Jews—as the main internal challenge to the stability of the regime, which in 1926 turned from a republic into a form of dictatorship. The discriminatory policies against the Ukrainian majority in Galicia manifested in the so-called Lex Grabski of 1924, a law named after the Polish minister of education, who imposed restrictions on the use of the Ukrainian language in the educational system and began the practice of turning Ukrainian schools into bilingual Polish-Ukrainian ones.

  Language became a key factor in the policy of cultural Polonization of minorities. In Eastern Galicia, where in 1910 Ukrainians had accounted for 65 percent and Poles for 21 percent of the population, by the early 1930s the percentage of Ukrainians, or, rather, those who claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, had dropped to 59 percent, while the Polish share had grown to 29 percent. These changes resulted partly from the educational policies of th
e regime, which promoted Polish-language schools and discriminated against Ukrainian ones. In 1930, there were fifty-eight state-run Polish gymnasiums (high schools) in the Ukrainian part of Galicia, as opposed to six Ukrainian gymnasiums. Although the Ukrainians established private gymnasiums, they were outnumbered there as well: in the same year, there were twenty-two private Polish gymnasiums versus fourteen Ukrainian ones. New teaching positions went almost exclusively to Poles. Out of almost 12,000 teachers in Galicia, fewer than 3,000 were ethnic Ukrainians, while the rest were Poles. Close to six hundred Ukrainian teachers who could not find employment at home were transferred to Polish-settled areas of the state.

  The increase in the number of Poles in census statistics resulted not only from official support for the Polish language but also from government policies encouraging Polish migration to Eastern Galicia, now called Eastern Little Poland. Soon after gaining independence, the Polish leadership decided to break up large landholdings and distribute the pieces among peasant farmers. In Galicia and other parts of the state settled by Ukrainians, this meant that Polish landowners, who possessed most of the land, lost as a result of the reform, while Ukrainian peasants gained. In response, the government introduced policies that privileged Polish military veterans and farmers resettling in Galicia. The same policies applied to Volhynia, a former Russian imperial possession where Poles historically constituted a lesser portion of the population than in Austrian Galicia. In Volhynia, the government allocated 40 percent of all land that became available as a result of the reform to Polish colonists. During the interwar period, close to 300,000 ethnic Poles moved to the Ukrainian lands of the Polish state—Galicia, Volhynia, and Podlachia.