Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933.

Abstract

From 1918 to 1933 Ukrainian national aspirations were expressed through the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine, despite the fact that the group originated as a mere geographical organization of Russian Bolsheviks. The Ukrainians, basically a peasant nation, provided a natural constituency for any doctrine which expressed both their national aspirations and social grievances. Ukrainian nationalism and socialism became so interwoven that in 1917 it was impossible to imagine a Ukrainian patriot who was not also a socialist. The Bolsheviks initially showed little underst and ing or sympathy for the desires of the Ukrainian peasantry, but by 1920 it had become apparent that no stable Soviet regime was possible in Ukraine unless it took Ukrainian aspirations into account. The first Bolsheviks to argue in favor of Ukrainian national self-determination within the Soviet framework were Serhii Mazlakh and Vasyl Shakhrai, and Georg Lapchinskii led a Federalist opposition group within the KP(b)U. The persistence of rural unrest served to convince many Bolsheviks of the need for some sort of modus vivendi with the Ukrainians, and in 1923 a program of Ukrainization of the Party and state was begun. Ukrainization served to give Soviet Ukraine a measure of national legitimacy, but only at the cost of legitimizing Ukrainian national aspirations within the Party. Oleks and er Shumskyi, Ukrainian Commissar of Education and former leader of the Borotbisty, an indigenous Ukrainian radical group admitted to the KP(b)U en masse in 1920, argued in 1925 that the Party and state should be led by Ukrainians, and the campaign against Shumskyism led to a split in the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and created an embarrassing sc and al within the world communist movement. Mykola Khvylovyi, the most popular Soviet Ukrainian writer, created a systematic theory of national cultural liberation, which called for rejection of Russian cultural influence, an orientation toward European culture, and Ukrainian leadership of an Asiatic Renaissance of peoples liberating themselves from colonialism. Mykhailo Volobuev argued that Soviet Ukraine was being exploited by the Soviet Union no less than it had been under the tsars. Ukrainization and the expression of Ukrainian national aspirations through the Communist Party reached their height in 1927-33, when Mykola Skrypnyk served as Ukrainian Commissar of Education and de facto strongman of Soviet Ukraine. Skrypnyk succeeded in establishing himself as a theoretician of the nationality question while working for the political and cultural consolidation of the Ukrainian nation. Under his sponsorship, Matvyi Iavorskyi founded a school of communist historians who treated Ukrainian history as a distinct national process which could be explained by historical materialism. The attack on Iavorskyi in 1929, gradual encroachments of Skrypnyk's authority in education and culture, and a virtual program of the national intelligentsia beginning with the show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in 1930, all presaged Skrypnyk's demise. In the midst of a man-made famine costing the lives of not less than 9.9% of the Ukrainian people, Skrypnyk was removed from his posts and driven to suicide. His death marks the end of the search for national roads to socialism in the USSR.