The Great Terror

This Congress passed resolutions condemning errors in all ideological fields—the press, the Marx-Lenin Institute, the Institute of Red Professors, and elsewhere—and made strong attacks on Postyshev and the old Kiev leadership. Kossior, who had been comparatively mild at the time of Postyshev’s demotion, now spoke of lack of vigilance at the top which had allowed Trotskyites to penetrate the Kiev Provincial Committee.⁶⁶ A day or two later, he denounced Postyshev by name for “co-opting numerous enemies” into the provincial apparatus.⁶⁷ It was presumably the unfortunate Karpov who was meanwhile referred to by a Moscow Party periodical in a denunciation of “a former secretary of the Central Committee” of the Ukraine, who had refused to believe accusations that one of his staff was a Trotskyite and had left him in a post in which, until his arrest, he had access to secret documents.

⁶⁸

The Ukrainian Party had a special history. Lenin had underestimated Ukrainian national feeling. The 1917 vote in the Ukraine for the Constituent Assembly was 77 percent to the Social Revolutionary parties, 10 percent to the Bolsheviks. The local Soviets were usually under anti-Bolshevik control. From 1917 to 1920, Ukrainian nationalist regimes of various types were in existence, and Bolshevik rule was imposed and reimposed vary largely from outside.

Unlike the situation in Russia proper, an important section of the Ukrainian Communist Party itself had originally come from the Left Social Revolutionaries. Their main body in the Ukraine had turned nationalist, under the name Borotbist. This party was dissolved early in 1920, and several thousand of its members, including Lyubchenko and Grinko, entered the Communist Party.

Time and time again, Bolshevik leaders sent to the Ukraine with strong centralizing views modified them over the years. The attempt to rule solely as agents of a foreign power, through a handful of Quislings, was seen as in the long run nonviable. It was a problem of the type which repeated itself in Hungary and elsewhere after the Second World War.

Chubar, who was to be moderate on this issue, became Premier of the Ukraine in July 1923. But in 1925, Kaganovich was sent to Kiev as First Secretary. His centralizing policy was unpopular in the local Party, which otherwise had no quarrel with Stalin. Stalin himself writes of a demand from the Ukraine in 1926 that Kaganovich be replaced by Grinko and Chubar.⁶⁹ Stalin, involved in his great struggle at the center, did not wish for a quarrel with the more moderate faction in the Ukraine simply on this local issue. When, in July 1928, Kaganovich was removed from the Republic, Stalin, as Bukharin put it, “bought the Ukrainians by withdrawing Kaganovich from the Ukraine.”

⁷⁰ He was replaced by Stanislav Kossior, a short, bald, bullet-headed Pole who backed Stalin unreservedly right up to the Yezhov period.

In the years of dispute with the Left and Right oppositions, Stalin’s calculations proved correct. The Ukrainian Party gave no trouble. There seems to have been very little Trotskyism in it. And in fact, the national minorities in general disliked Trotsky more than Stalin. Even after experience of Stalin’s rule, an Ossetian Communist believed that while Trotsky’s intended method of rule was in general identical with Stalin’s, on the nationality question Trotsky was “even more reactionary.”⁷¹

And the Ukrainian experience with the oppositionists had not been reassuring. Pyatakov, who had briefly ruled in Kiev during the Civil War, had put the view that the Ukraine must submit to Russia very bluntly: “Can we declare that the form of existence of proletarian-peasant Ukraine can be determined solely and absolutely by the working masses of the Ukraine? Of course not!”⁷²

In the early 1930s, the collectivization campaign had turned the Ukraine, more than anywhere else, into a battlefield between the Party and the population, and Party solidarity was the decisive criterion. Non-Communist nationalism remained powerful. The trial of forty-five leading cultural figures as a “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” in March and April 1930, and the similar trials which followed it, were directed against a real resistance.

This extreme and rigorous purge erased the old Ukrainian intellectuals and left the Old Bolshevik Skrypnik, in the Commissariat of Education, as the protector of only a residue of Ukrainian culture. This, however, he determined to defend.