The Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet-German war of 1941–1945 became known in the Soviet Union, provided new legitimacy for the regime that had managed to survive and repel foreign invasion. But the war had also changed the political landscape of the Soviet Union, giving people agency to a degree unmatched since the revolution. Moscow’s efforts to reimpose ideological uniformity and the degree of central control that existed before the war were only partly successful, especially in a republic like Ukraine, where nationalist resistance to the Soviet regime lasted well into the 1950s. Western Ukraine, Galicia and Volhynia in particular, remained under de facto military occupation for years after the war and received different treatment than the rest of the republic.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army continued to challenge Soviet rule in the Galician countryside into the 1950s—significantly longer than any other armed resistance in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe. Around 1947, the commanders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army changed tactics by splitting large formations into smaller units of no more than fifty fighters, and then even into smaller groups with a maximum of ten members. They avoided large-scale military confrontations with the much more numerous Soviet troops, saving their forces for a new war between the USSR and the West that they expected to break out at any moment. Meanwhile, even the smaller insurgent units continued to create problems for the Soviet regime, attacking representatives of the party and state apparatus and undermining efforts at collectivization of agriculture and Sovietization of the region through the educational system. The regime responded with repressive measures that included forced deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians suspected of supporting the underground.
It took the Soviet security services until the spring of 1950 to track down and kill the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych. Another commander replaced him, but in the next few years organized resistance was largely crushed, and small underground units lost contact with one another. Some of the insurgent units made their way through Polish and Czechoslovak territories to the West and joined the émigré nationalists led by Stepan Bandera in West Germany. In 1951, the British and the Americans started to airdrop members of the Bandera and other nationalist organizations back into Ukraine with the goal of collecting intelligence. The Soviets responded by stepping up their attempts to assassinate Bandera and other leaders of the Ukrainian emigration in Germany. They succeeded in the fall of 1959, when a Soviet agent killed Bandera with a KGB-made spray gun loaded with cyanide. The assassin defected to the West in 1961 and confessed to killing Bandera and another Ukrainian émigré leader back in 1957. His testimony in a West German court left no doubt that the orders to kill émigré leaders had come from the top echelon of the Soviet government.
Ukrainian nationalists, whether real or perceived, were not the only target of Soviet propaganda and the secret police in the last years of Stalin’s rule. At that time a new group, Soviet Jewry, emerged at the top of the hierarchy of enemies. Jews had been among the victims of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, but not until the late 1940s were they targeted as a group. That change came with the onset of the Cold War and the founding of the State of Israel. Now Jewish citizens of the USSR came under suspicion for double loyalty and siding with the West against their Soviet motherland.
In January 1948 a leader of Soviet Jewry, renowned actor and artistic director Solomon Mikhoels, was killed on Stalin’s orders. By the end of the year, Stalin had imprisoned the Jewish wife of his right-hand man, Viacheslav Molotov—Polina Zhemchuzhina, a native of southern Ukraine and a strong supporter of Mikhoels. The Soviet media declared war on “cosmopolitans”—a euphemism for Jews—purging many Jews from the party and security apparatus. The Jews of Ukraine found themselves among the primary targets of discrimination. In 1952, the anti-Semitic campaign reached new heights with the arrest of a number of Jewish doctors, accused, along with Slavic colleagues, of killing members of the Soviet leadership, including Andrei Zhdanov, who had died of natural causes in 1948. Only Stalin’s death put an end to the anti-Semitic campaign. The Soviet leadership stopped the campaign in its tracks and released the surviving doctors from prison, but anti-Semitism remained in the corridors of power in Moscow, Kyiv, and other Soviet centers.
Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, ending the most dreadful era in Soviet history and leaving a legacy that would haunt his successors and the country they ruled for generations to come. The anti-Semitic campaign was one of many aspects of that legacy. The struggle against Stalin’s inheritance became one of the defining features of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule as Stalin’s successor. But it took time for the former Ukrainian party boss to gain full power in the party and the state and to develop his anti-Stalinist orientation.
Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to the pinnacle of Soviet power began in December 1949, when Stalin summoned him from Lviv, where he was at war with the nationalist underground, to Moscow and handed him his old position as head of the Moscow party organization. He arrived in the Soviet capital a few days before the lavish celebrations of Stalin’s seventieth birthday. During the official ceremony, the dictator seated Khrushchev next to himself, with a visiting dignitary from China, Mao Zedong, on his other side.
Immediately after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev emerged as one of the four most powerful Soviet leaders. In June 1953 he masterminded the arrest of his most dangerous competitor, security tsar Lavrentii Beria. In February 1955 he got rid of Beria’s one-time ally, the head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov. In June 1957 he crushed the opposition of Stalin’s former aides Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, and in March 1958 he became head of both the Communist Party and the Soviet government. The help of his clients in Ukraine made Khrushchev’s success possible. The republic had the largest (in terms of membership) party organization in the union, given that the Russian communists did not have their own party, and thus the largest voting bloc in the all-union Central Committee.
Khrushchev rewarded his Ukrainian clients handsomely by bringing them to Moscow. Among the first to make the move was Oleksii Kyrychenko, the first ethnic Ukrainian in the position of party boss of Ukraine since the revolution. In 1957 he became secretary of the all-union Central Committee and the second most powerful man in the country. Khrushchev’s protégés also included former party secretary from Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk Leonid Brezhnev, who became head of the Supreme Soviet and de jure head of the Soviet state under Khrushchev. Another product of the Ukrainian party machine was Nikolai Podgorny (Mykola Pidhorny), the former first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, appointed by Khrushchev to the all-union Central Committee in 1963. These and dozens of other Khrushchev protégés from Ukraine brought clients of their own to the center. Whereas Stalin had relied on cadres from the Caucasus for a good part of his career, Khrushchev relied on people from Ukraine. By promoting Ukrainian party cadres to positions of power in Moscow, Khrushchev made the Ukrainian communist elite a junior partner of the Russian party and government bosses in running the multiethnic Soviet empire. Its members gained influence on decisions made in the center, as well as more autonomy in deciding their internal Ukrainian affairs.
The rise of Ukraine to honorary second place in the hierarchy of Soviet republics and nationalities began in January 1954 with all-union celebrations of the tercentenary of the Pereiaslav Council (1654). Official party propaganda hailed the council, which approved the passing of the Cossack Hetmanate under the protection of the Muscovite tsar, as the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia.” That formula had its roots in the nineteenth-century imperial paradigm of the “reunification of Rus’” through the efforts and under the auspices of the autocratic Russian state. A special document officially approved by the Central Committee in Moscow, the “Theses on the Tercentenary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia,” explained what that formula meant under the new circumstances. The document built on the Stalinist policy of treating the Russians as the “leading forc
e of the Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country”—the formula coined by Stalin in a toast he delivered at the banquet celebrating the end of the Soviet-German war in May 1945. It also elevated the Ukrainians to the status of the second most important Soviet nationality. According to the document, Russians and Ukrainians were separate peoples, albeit closely related in history and culture.
The Soviet authorities ordered the construction of a number of monuments to mark the anniversary and gave the long, awkward name “Tercentenary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia” to a number of institutions, including a university in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. Ironically enough, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky had founded the university in 1918 at a time when Russian forces had been driven out of Ukraine and the country was under German control. But the most lavish symbolic gesture, celebrating the “eternal friendship” of the two East Slavic peoples, was the transfer of the Crimean Peninsula in February 1954 from the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation to that of Ukraine. Ten years earlier, the Crimean Tatars had been deported from the Crimea, as the entire nation was accused of collaborating with the Germans. Despite the propagandistic effort to represent the transfer of the peninsula as a manifestation of fraternal amity between the two nations, the real reasons were more prosaic. The key factor was geography. Cut off from Russia by the Kerch Strait and linked by communication lines to the Ukrainian mainland, the Crimea needed assistance from Ukraine to rebuild its economy, which not only the war and German occupation but also the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars had undermined.
In 1950, the Crimea delivered to the state five times less grain than it had in 1940, three times less tobacco, and twice fewer grapes. The settlers sent to the peninsula from the Russian Federation were unaccustomed to southern conditions and of little help in rebuilding the economy. When in the fall of 1953 Nikita Khrushchev visited the peninsula, distressed settlers besieged his car and demanded assistance. From the Crimea he went directly to Kyiv to begin negotiations on the transfer of the peninsula to Ukraine, believing that the republic was in a position to help the economically depressed region and that its agricultural experts knew how to deal with droughts and produce grain in steppe conditions. Khrushchev’s clients in Kyiv went along, as did his colleagues in Moscow. By February 1954, the Ukrainian, Russian, and all-union Supreme Soviets had signed off on the deal.
The Crimea became part of Ukraine—the first and last enlargement of the republic’s territory based not on ethnic but geographic and economic considerations. Of the 1.2 million inhabitants of the Crimea, Russians constituted 71 percent and Ukrainians 22 percent. The peninsula benefited from the new arrangement and the investments and expertise provided by the Ukrainian government. The production of Crimean wines doubled between 1953 and 1956, and production of electricity increased by almost 60 percent. But the major boost to the Crimean economy came in the following decade with the construction of the North Crimean Canal, whose first stage was completed in 1963. As construction continued in subsequent years, the canal made it possible to bring as much as 30 percent of all Dnieper water to the peninsula and irrigate more than 6,000 square kilometers of agricultural land. It also supplied water to the cities of Feodosiia, Kerch, and Sudak.
Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, held in Moscow in February 1956, opened a new era in the life of the Soviet Union and its constituent republics. The new leader attacked Joseph Stalin for violating the principles of socialist legality by instigating purges of party members. He did not mention the persecution of millions who did not belong to the party, the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933, and the deportations of entire nations. As the de-Stalinization drive launched by Khrushchev’s speech continued, many former leaders of Ukraine, including Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, and Mykola Skrypnyk, were politically rehabilitated. The Ukrainian KGB—the Committee for State Security, a new name for the secret police—and Ukraine’s general prosecutor’s office reviewed close to a million cases of victims of political terror, rehabilitating under 300,000 people. Charges and sentences remained in effect for those accused of Ukrainian nationalism, taking part in the nationalist underground, or collaborating with the Germans. Still, tens of thousands of members of the Ukrainian nationalist underground were released from the Gulag, as were surviving bishops and priests of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The KGB placed most of these people under surveillance upon their release.
Khrushchev was a believer. He had faith in communism as a superior social order. In the early 1960s, he publicly declared to his own people and the world that the basis for a communist society would be established in the next twenty years. In Marxist-Leninist parlance of the time, that meant ability to produce an abundance of consumer goods, which were in short supply in the USSR. Khrushchev also adopted a new party program of communist construction. The promotion of the new secular religion, now with a firm date for the advent of the communist paradise, went hand in hand with struggle against traditional religion. In a reversal of postwar Stalinist policy, Khrushchev unleashed new repressions against religious groups, promising the extinction of religion before the arrival of communism and pledging to show the last religious believer on television in the not too distant future. Thousands of Orthodox churches, mosques, synagogues, and prayer houses were closed as part of this revival of the antireligious campaign of the 1920s and 1930s. In Ukraine, the number of Orthodox churches fell by almost half, from 8,207 to 4,565, between 1960 and 1965. Especially hard hit were the regions of eastern and central Ukraine—in Galicia, the authorities were careful not to close too many churches in order not to drive the newly converted Orthodox believers into the ranks of the clandestine Ukrainian Catholic Church.
While it was clear to many that the advertised arrival of communism was little more than a propaganda ploy, the end of the Stalinist terror, the release of some categories of political prisoners, and the publication of works exposing the crimes of Stalin’s regime (including the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner of the Gulag between 1945 and 1953) created an atmosphere of relative freedom known as the “Khrushchev thaw.” In Ukraine it was marked by a return to public life of the generation of writers and artists whose works had been proscribed under late Stalinism. Among them was Ukraine’s best-known filmmaker, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who was able to leave his Moscow exile and resume work in his homeland. The poets Maksym Rylsky and Volodymyr Sosiura, who had been under attack in the 1940s and 1950s, were active again. They helped raise a new generation of Ukrainian poets—Ivan Drach, Vitalii Korotych, and Lina Kostenko, among others—who became leading figures of the “sixties generation,” which was pushing the limits of socialist-realist literature and culture.
The new party line was sold to worried cadres as a return to “Leninist norms,” which meant, among other things, the end of mass purges of the party apparatus and some decentralization of power. Both changes empowered the regional and republican elites, and the Ukrainian cadres were more than happy to embrace the new opportunities. With the creation of regional councils charged with economic development (another return to the policies of the 1920s), the Ukrainian authorities found themselves in control of more than 90 percent of enterprises located on their territory and all of their agricultural facilities. They were now much more independent of the center than their predecessors. From the early 1950s, local officials ran Ukraine with virtually no influx of party and government personnel from Russia or any other Soviet republic. The local cadres were organized in client networks, with the position of an individual party boss depending on his (there were very few women in the party apparatus) personal loyalty to his superior. The Ukrainian party networks extended all the way to the Kremlin, becoming more stable and independent than most other republican networks in the union.
Khrushchev’s reforms contributed to the spectacular expansion of Soviet industry and the increasing urbanization of Soviet society. His program of constructing cheap five-story apartment buildings that beca
me known as khrushchevki changed the skyline of every Soviet city and allowed hundreds of thousands of citizens to move from temporary shelters and cramped communal apartments to individual apartments with heat, running water, and indoor toilets. Although most state resources went to the development of the Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan and the natural resources of Siberia in the Khrushchev years, Ukraine became one of the main beneficiaries—and victims—of the new industrial growth.
In the 1950s and 1960s, three new hydroelectric power stations went up on the Dnieper, diverting the natural flow of the river, creating gigantic artificial lakes, flooding agricultural lands and nearby mines, and forever changing the ecology of the region. The construction of chemical complexes designed to produce pesticides for agriculture and consumer goods for the masses enhanced the economic potential of the republic but also increased pressure on its ecological system. Ukraine was also deeply involved in the Soviet atomic and space projects, both products of the arms race that accompanied most of the Cold War. In the town of Zhovti Vody, close to the site of the first battle between Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Polish royal army in 1648, uranium was discovered and mined. The largest missile-producing facility in all of Europe was built in the nearby city of Dnipropetrovsk. Ukraine’s contribution to the Soviet breakthrough into outer space was enormous. In recognition of that contribution and Ukraine’s symbolic place in the hierarchy of Soviet republics, a Ukrainian became the first non-Russian launched into space by a Soviet rocket. Pavlo Popovych, a native of the Kyiv region, made his first trip into space in 1962. His second flight would take place in 1974.
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