Yuri Shapoval. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 35, Annual 2017.
The events from late 1932 to early 1933 made it clear that under the slogan of correcting the excesses of “Ukrainization” the communist government was preparing to abandon that policy. Ukrainization was not invented by the “national communists.” The first attempts at Ukrainization began during the period of the Central Rada and the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). The introduction of the term “Ukrainization” is attributed to the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi.
Ukrainization as Prologue to Counter-Ukrainization
Bolshevik Ukrainization lasted longer than the Ukrainization that had taken place under the Ukrainian Central Rada, the Hetmanate, and the Directory of the UNR. Analyzing the catastrophe that befell the UNR, the political and civic leader Mykyta Shapoval identified the main reason for the collapse of the UNR as the lack of qualified Ukrainian cadres in all branches of state, education, and military work. For Shapoval, as the historian Myroslav Popovych correcdy noted, the word “Ukrainian” meant “ethnic Ukrainian”; not just a Ukrainian-speaking individual but also one who politically supported Ukraine’s independence. The UNR had indeed been defeated, but by the very fact of its existence it demonstrated Ukrainians’ aspirations to statehood. This fact could not be ignored by the Bolshevik leaders, who opted for the creation of a formally independent Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. They adopted the policy of “indigenization” (korenizatsiia)—that is, “Ukrainization” in Ukraine, under which the reemergence of the language question was inevitable.
The policy was launched officially at the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) (RCP[b]) in April 1923. Before long, it became apparent that, paradoxically, it was destined to act as a destabilizing factor. Thus, its principal task was to “plant the roots” of government power in local areas; to train, rear, and promote cadres of the titular nationality; and to Lake national factors into account during the formation of the party and state apparatus. The implementation of precisely this task potentially carried within itself a threat to the unitary state structure, inasmuch as it was to be implemented under the slogan of vanquishing great-state chauvinism; above all, it was supposed to lead to the formation of local ethnic elites. Over time these elites were supposed to “secure” administrative-management positions and prestigious social niches; after that, the paradigm of their relations with the center was inevitably bound to change—change not in the direction of overt conflict but, without doubt, in the direction of at least formal recognition of their status, their demands for some autonomy, and respect from the central governing structures of the hierarchy of local power relations. In a sense a paradox was observed: On the one hand, there was an ongoing process of party and bureaucratic centralization; on the other, the number of national-territorial units was increasing, and up to a certain period of time, their formal status rose.
Even more dangerous for the regime was the fact that for the non-Russian nations of the USSR “indigenization” meant in practice de-Russification and rising prospects (including for language) within the Soviet Union. The creation of a network of schools of all levels, cultural institutions, newspapers and magazines, and book publishing in the languages of titular nationalities were just some of the key problems that had to be resolved locally now with official state support. The Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP[b]U) implemented this policy along two lines, upholding Ukrainization and, at the same time, providing maximum assistance to the development of national minorities. Practically speaking, this policy was implemented first and foremost by the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR. By 1931, twenty-five national districts (raiony) and over a thousand national rural soviets were formed in places with significant numbers of Russians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks, Czechs, Albanians, Moldovans, Belarusians, and Swedes. In these national districts the national language was permitted in courts and clerical work. Thus, indigenization was not limited only to Ukrainization, which nevertheless became dominant in Ukraine.
Despite the fact that Ukrainization was both a complex and rather specific phenomenon, it was accepted by members of the intelligentsia; first and foremost, of course, by people with a procommunist orientation but also by those who sought to promote national traditions within the framework of the then existing state. It is no accident that, thanks to the efforts of such figures as Academician Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi and others, historical and cultural developments in Ukraine began to be viewed as processes evolving alongside the history of Russia, not as a regional variant of the latter. Panas Fedenko, in his book Ukrains’kyi rukh u 20-mu stolitti (The Ukrainian Movement in the Twentieth Century), wrote: “The policy of Ukrainization … brought some beneficial results for Ukrainian culture. The Ukrainian language became dominant in primary schools in Ukraine. After Hrushevs’kyi’s return to Ukraine from exile in 1924, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences launched a wide range of activities. Within several years of intensive cultural work, new cadres of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were created.”
Assessing this era, George Grabowicz commented: “It is obvious from many sources that in the eyes of the general public such institutions as the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences gained extraordinarily high prestige. This attitude to the humanities was able, in principle, to become the paradigm of a national renaissance in general because the humanistic discourse at the time, overladen as it was by authoritarian and voluntaristic rhetoric, was able to be (at least in its outward form) a discourse of a non-totalitarian society, if not an open one. Despite all the difficulties of this era, in it we see a civic society (which, of course, had no chance of surviving in the Soviet state); a society founded on truly patriotic, Ukrainocentric consensus, in which formal ideology was subordinated to the broader awareness of national tasks.”
There is no point in overestimating the consequences of the staged, controlled, and generally superficial “Ukrainization.” However, one should not ignore its achievements: among them is the fact that the Ukrainian language became established as the language that was taught to people learning to read and write, regardless of nationality. Much has been written on the development of the arts, especially literature, theater, music, and cinematography, as well as on the founding of specialized institutions for the study of the humanities and natural and technical sciences.
Among other efforts to “revive” the Ukrainian language and introduce it into the broadest circles and branches of society, the work of compiling terminological dictionaries stands out. In late 1921 the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language (IUNM), created through the merger of the Orthographic-Terminological Commission of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences with the Terminological Commission of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv, began its work. In the 1920s the institute’s associates compiled several terminological dictionaries (in geology, chemistry, mathematics, pedagogy, psychology, and other fields); a total of fifteen dictionaries featuring the terminology of various scientific disciplines were published. On 5 November 1928 the director of the IUNM, Hryhorii Kholodnyi, in his speech to the Council of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN), emphasized that the institute’s mission could not be limited to dictionary work alone: “If the formula whereby good scholarly terminology is a mark of a nation’s cultural maturity is becoming an indisputable axiom, then the reverse of this formula is becoming no less obvious to us: the development of science and its mastery should be fostered in great measure by good scientific language and scientific terminology. This is indeed what has been set forth in a number of future tasks of the Institute of Scientific Language.”
In addition, work was launched by the Commission for Drafting the History of the Ukrainian Language, the Commission for the Etymological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language, the Commission for the Normative Grammar of the Ukrainian Language, and the Dialectal Commission of the VUAN (headed by Oleksa Syniavs’kyi, the leading specialist in the standardization of the Ukrainian literary language).
Noteworthy among the important lexicographic works published during this period is the academic Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, four volumes of which were issued (up to the letter “P”). This dictionary was compiled and published by the Commission for the Compilation of a Dictionary of the Ukrainian Living Language at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (UAN) under the direction of Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi and Serhii Iefremov. According to specialists, the quality of the lexical material contained in the Ukrainian part of this dictionary is unparalleled. In the introduction to this publication the dictionary’s compilers (Vsevolod Hantsov, Hryhorii Holoskevych, Mariia Hrinchenkova, Mykhailo Kalynovych, Andrii Nikovs kyi, and Volodymyr Iaroshenko) noted that “in its Ukrainian translations [it] reflects firsthand the great progress made by the Ukrainian language in the last decades, especially in recent years, when the language became the medium of wide cultural and state use. In this the editorial board sees the greatest value of this dictionary, compared to earlier ones that were practically limited to ethnographic material and words from earlier folk (also mainly popular-ethnographic) literature.” These words alone allow scholars to assess the large scale and importance of the positive shifts in the language policy that began during this period.
In 1925, on Stalin’s recommendation, Lazar Kaganovich was appointed to head the Central Committee of the CP(b)U. Using the pressure characteristic of his administrative style, he set about “Ukrainianizing” the party and state cadres in so far as this was Moscow’s policy. Between 1925 and 1928 important progress was achieved with respect to the implementation of the Ukrainization policy. On 23 July 1925 the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR decided to set up a state commission to systematize Ukrainian orthography (State Orthographic Commission). Its membership was comprised of twenty individuals from the Ukrainian SSR, as well as three scholars from Western Ukraine who were invited to participate in its work: Stepan Smal’-Stots’kyi, Volodymyr Hnatiuk, and Vasyl’Simovych. After nearly a year’s worth of work, the “Draft of the Ukrainian Orthography” was published for public consideration in April 1926.
The Tenth Congress of the CP(b)U took place in November 1927. The materials appended to the verbatim report of the congress include a document entitled “Natsional’na polityka ta ukrainizatsiia: Postanovka national’noho pytannia partiieiu ta dosiahnennia v tsii haluzi” (The Nationality Policy and Ukrainization: The Party’s Statement on the National Question and Achievements in This Pield). The document mentions that in 1924 the circulation of all Ukrainian newspapers stood at 90,000, but by 1927 it had reached 500,000.8 The proportion of Ukrainians in the CP(b)U in 1924 was 33 percent; in 1925,38 percent, and in 1926, 49 percent. It is worth recalling here that a Ukrainian-language Bolshevik press did not exist until 1918; in 1920 and 1921 there were only around 7 to 10 Ukrainian-language newspapers for all of Soviet Ukraine, and even then half the number of pages in most of them were in Russian. In 1929, 54 Ukrainian newspapers were published in the Ukrainian SSR (including 20 in Russian and 11 in national minority languages). Ukrainian newspapers comprised 65 percent of the total output.
Kaganovich’s statement in defense of Ukrainization and even his Ukrainian language, broken as it was—a language in which he tried to make speeches and communicate—had a “symbolic” character. At the same time, the situation was not so straightforward. Of course, Kaganovich was not sent to the Ukrainian SSR in order to stimulate the comprehensive development of Ukrainian self-awareness, language, and culture. He was there above all to carry out the mission of ensuring Ukraine’s support for Stalin in his struggle against his rivals, and in this he succeeded.
In 1924-27 the People’s Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian SSR was Oleksander Shums’kyi, a consistent adherent of Ukrainization and former member of the Borot’bist faction. Before his appointment as People’s Commissar of Education in 1924, Shums’kyi had already acquired significant experience in this post, having served as education commissar back in 1919. Even in August 1919 he had encountered resistance when he put forward a draft of a decree on the need to assist the development of Ukrainian culture.
The proposals contained in this draft amounted to the introduction of Ukrainian-language instruction in areas settled predominantly by Ukrainians. In areas settled compactly by members of other nationalities, the language of the given nationality was to be introduced along with the establishment of a school. The designation of the language of instruction was to Lake place through the agencies of the People’s Commissariat of Education. Attention was also focused on the necessity to train cadres capable of implementing this educational policy, as well as the crucial need for instructional literature and teaching aids. As emphasized in the draft document, “Organization and systematization must be introduced into the unsystematic and chaotic growth of the Ukrainian book market, which will lead to the broad development and dissemination of both original productions of Ukrainian folk creativity and translated literature on all questions and branches of knowledge.”
The draft was published on 2 August 1919 in the Kyivan newspaper Borot’ba (The Struggle), and the following week the newspaper published an editorial explaining the urgent need for such a decree. It mentioned the “previous era of forcible Russification,” which had turned cities into centers of Russian national forms of culture. After the Bolsheviks seized power, this situation remained essentially unchanged, and the political leadership was concentrated in the hands of “representatives of the Russian or Russianized proletariat, unfamiliar with the psychology and living conditions of the main masses of the rural, proletarianized population and agricultural] proletariat. This created an actual privileged status for Russian national forms of culture, despite declared equality, and could not fail to be reflected in a feeling of uprootedness, a feeling that the ground [was] shifting beneath the feet of certain central organs of Soviet power.”
In the author’s opinion, all this was exacerbated by the tactless speeches of representatives of Bolshevik power in Ukraine, who “were further fanning national antagonisms” and giving their adversaries grounds for making the accusation that the Bolsheviks in Ukraine were a “katsap” (Russian) government. A solution, as noted in the editorial, could be found either by formulating a program for the country that was the subject of national enslavement (and the Borot’bist party had such a program) or “if local proletarian communist forces could be drawn into the leadership of the revolutionary cause in Ukraine, in such numbers that would secure the actual influence of the rural and agricultural proletariat of Ukraine for the work of building.”
Thus, the approval of the decree to assist the development of Ukrainian culture may well have been the first step toward establishing actual equality of nations, and could have served “to eliminate elements splitting the proletariat of Ukraine in keeping with the national principle, wrest the slogan of ‘national liberation’ from the hands of the reaction.” The Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Education did not adopt the draft decree. The issue was not that the Bolsheviks had underestimated the national question. In the decree they instantly saw a political approach by Shums’kyi and his associates; namely, that the Bolsheviks would not be able to, and should not, govern Ukraine without enlisting the ethnic elite and without instituting genuine de-Russification, including in the sphere of language. However, this was not expressed overtly during the meeting of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of Education. Instead, an argument was put forward, one that Shums’kyi would be forced to deal with on many subsequent occasions: “The publication of a decree about the safeguarding of a national culture is superfluous, inasmuch as the question of the cultures of other nationalities is not being raised.”
In 1925-26, Shums’kyi became embroiled in a conflict with Kaganovich. According to the official interpretation of this clash, they locked horns over “Shumskyism,” which was supposedly leading to Ukraine’s separation from the USSR and was thus an incarnation of “national deviationism.” The second accusation that Shums’kyi was forced to confront in the mid-1920S, and which would work implacably against him in the end, was the thesis of the “forcible” nature of Ukrainization.
The launching of a campaign targeting national deviationism was spurred by a letter that Stalin wrote on 26 April 1926. This document, entitled “To Com[rade] Kaganovich and Other Members of the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U,” gave Kaganovich carte blanche to hound not just Shums’kyi but also the writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi and the economist Mykhailo Volobuiev, who had been proclaimed “national deviationists.” Stalin’s letter provided the impetus to launch an offensive against Ukrainization and its related language policy by the mostiy Russified party and members of the state nomenklatura; but not the nomenklatura alone.
In early September 1926 an official circular, stamped with the seal “Top Secret. Not to be reproduced. To be kept together with the cipher under the charge of the head of the GPU organ,” was printed in 75 copies. The main message of this ultra-secret and important document lay in its call for the collection of comprehensive data on supporters of Ukrainization, first and foremost members of the “right” Ukrainian intelligentsia—that is, the milieu of Ukrainian intellectuals, particularly those individuals who, swayed by the alluring announcement of Ukrainization, had returned (or still wished to return) to Ukraine.
The letter named the most dangerous—from the GPU’s standpoint—Ukrainian centers that were supposedly exploiting the conditions of Ukrainization for their own designs. Foremost among them were the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAPTs), called a “mighty bastion of nationalism and an excellent tool of agitation,” and the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which had “gathered around itself a compact mass of former notable figures of the UNR.”
Thus, in contrast with official declarations, long before the open offensive against Ukrainization, the GPU launched a process of counter-Ukrainization (naturally, with the full knowledge of the party leadership), collecting compromising evidence against all those whom the Chekists considered “dangerous” to the communist regime. Knowing this, we can now understand why later, in the late 1920s, the GPU-NKVD crushed the Ukrainian intelligentsia with such deadly precision.
The campaign of persecution developed steadily into a wave of terror that targeted members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia (the case of the “Kharkiv branch” of the Shakhty affair, the Union for the Tiberation of Ukraine [SVU], the arrests of the leaders of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, who had supported Shums’kyi, etc.). As of 1930, by the springtime of which the SVU trial had already taken place (among the defendants were associates of the VUAN, the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language, and the Commission for the Compilation of the Dictionary of the hiving Language), it was possible to speak about the still officially undeclared but entirely conceivable change in the Ukrainization policy, in whose adherents the Soviet authorities were beginning to perceive a “fifth column.”
However, the dismissal of Oleksander Shums’kyi from his post as People’s Commissar of Education (who, in fact, oversaw the spheres of culture, ideology, and national relations) did not lead to all-out Russification, inasmuch as Ukrainization had undermined the balance of forces that had formed in the early 1920s between the communist regime and the Ukrainian national movement: “The switch of some communists to national positions, the formation of a Ukrainian proletariat, the increase in the share of the urban population, and the dynamic educational, cultural, and scholarly activities of the old and young Ukrainian elite were creating a serious threat to Moscow’s control over the Ukrainian SSR.”
An important phase of the language policy is connected with the activities of Mykola Skrypnyk, who was the People’s Commissar of Education from 1927 to 1933- One of the most distinguished leaders of Ukrainian “national Bolshevism,” Skrypnyk was a passionate defender of Ukrainian culture, who believed in the possibility of a synthesis of communist ideas, permeated with internationalism, and national renaissance.
His position is clearly asserted in the following passage: “If the issue concerns the paths for the development of language, when people talk, particularly now, at this particular juncture, about the opposition between the Ukrainian language and the Russian, then to this we reply: one cannot drag old memories of the ‘Little Russian dialect of the Russian language’ into the Soviet arena. We have no doubt about the independence of the Ukrainian language.”
Skrypnyk was extraordinarily vigorous in his efforts to continue systematizing the Ukrainian orthography, and discussions around this issue and the drafy project lasted for several months prior to Shums’kyi’s dismissal. Skrypnyk’s criticism of “Shumskyism” was quite harsh and trenchant, but he did not suspend the process of preparing the orthography. This question was discussed comprehensively at the All-Ukrainian Orthographic Conference that was held between 25 May and 6 June 1927. The new orthography, approved by a resolution handed down by the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR on 4 September 1928, was henceforth called the “Kharkiv” or “Skrypnyk” orthography. The authors of the orthography, which came into force on 1 January 1929, were the linguists Ahatanhel Kryms’kyi, Oleksa Syniavs’kyi, Olena Kurylo, Ievhen Tymchenlco, Hryhorii Holoskevych, Vsevolod Hantsov, Stepan Smal’-Stots’kyi, Vasyl’ Simovych, Volodymyr Hnatiulc, Leonid Bulakhovs ‘kyi, and others. Mykola Skrypnyk authorized the publication of the orthography.
In particular, the new orthography introduced the western Ukrainian tradition of reproducing words borrowed either directly from German and other European languages or through the mediation of the Polish language in phonetic and grammatical forms that differed from the forms of corresponding words in the eastern Ukrainian variant of the literary language whose spelling was reproduced in keeping with the Russian tradition. A soft “l” was introduced into words of foreign origin (e.g., aeroplian, baliada, liaboratoriia, pliatforma versus Russian-based aeroplan, balada, laboratoriia, platforma), as well as the hard “g” to distinguish borrowings in g from borrowings in h (e.g., heometriia, Hermaniia, Hertsegovina, Grenlandiia, grenadir, grunt versus Russian-based geometriia, Germaniia, Gertsegovina, Grenlandiia, grenadir, grunt), the latter forms rendering the Ukrainian alphabetic distinction between r (h) and r (g) superfluous. In 1929 Hryhorii Holoskevych published the Ukrainian Orthographic Dictionary (nearly 40,000 words), observing the norms of the new orthography.
The orthography was in effect until 1933, the year of Skrypnyk’s tragic demise. His attention to Ukrainians living outside Ukraine constantly exasperated the Moscow center. His efforts undertaken on the territory of the Russian Federation led to the founding of nearly 500 Ukrainian schools and 2 technical colleges (there was both considerable formalism behind this success and latent or overt resistance). Skrypnyk reacted sharply to the collection Vlast’ sovetov za 10 let: 1917-1927 (Ten Years of Soviet Power: 1917-1927), a collection of articles published in Leningrad in 1927 that celebrated the achievements of the previous ten years, without, in his opinion, taking into proper account the Ukrainian ones. Skrypnyk insisted that Ukrainian literature and art had been as successful as their Russian counterparts. One can cite several more examples that confirm that Skrypnyk had no doubt that Ukraine was capable of having and should have its own language, literature, and art.
The accelerated pace of forcible collectivization, the crushing of critical thought among communists, and the crystallization of the power and punitive structures all taking place against the background of the worsening socioeconomic situation and the start of famine, was part and parcel of the Stalinist leadership’s next offensive against “nationalism.” A radical change in the party line of indigenization took place between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Party Congresses of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) (AUCP[b]), held in 1930 and 1934, respectively. During those four years a purge of local communists and the non-party intelligentsia took place in all the non-Russian republics, and a significant proportion of the cadres that had been raised during the indigenization period was destroyed. A struggle was proclaimed against various kinds of “national deviations” and manifestations of “bourgeois nationalism,” accusations that could easily be directed against even orthodox Bolsheviks who professed “national communism.”
The era of Mylcola Skrypnyk as the next Commissar of Education was marked by “counter-Ukrainization” accusations different from those used to attack Shums’kyi. This time Ukrainization was presented as the efforts of “wreckers,” “Petliurites,” and other “Ukrainian nationalists,” who were supposedly channeling the implementation of Ukrainization and deliberately aiding the separation of the Ukrainian language from Russian, particularly by “sullying” it with foreign or artificially coined words, especially polonisms.
Among other things, the latter accusation had an exceptionally political meaning because it served to confirm Stalin’s anti-Polish paranoia and his dread fear of losing Ukraine. This was fully reflected in the Soviet leader’s letter to Kaganovich dated n August 1932. Not only did Stalin not trust individual leaders (for example, he criticized Stanislav Kosior, who became the head of the CC CP[b]U in 1928), he viewed the entire party organization in the Ukrainian SSR with suspicion. In Stalin’s view, there were quite a few “direct agents of Pilsudski” and “conscious or unwitting Petliurites” in the republican party.”
Counter-Ukrainization and the Change in the Language Policy
The Ukrainization process lacked specialists; these were found among the members of the old, non-Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia. By a special decision passed by the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U on 6 August 1925, specialists from Eastern Galicia were permitted to enter the Ukrainian SSR. In 1932 these same specialists were turned into “enemies,” “spies,” and “wreckers,” especially on the “language front.” It is worth recalling that the introduction of Ukrainization had angered those who had no desire to change their linguistic inclinations, and the official behavior of lecturers promoting Ukrainization gave rise to linguistic sabotage, above all on the part of representatives of the nomenklatura. In 1926, out of 1,898 high-ranking party officials in the Ukrainian SSR, only 345 were fluent in Ukrainian. Another manifestation of this political hypocrisy was the introduction of several levels of language fluency. In 1927, 39-8 percent of state bureaucrats knew the Ukrainian language “well,” and 31.7 percent had a “satisfactory” knowledge; a total of 71.5 percent. In practice, however, “satisfactory” fluency meant that a person knew only a handful of Ukrainian words.
Between late 1932 and early 1933 the achievements of “Ukrainization” began to be abolished. Owing to the growing socioeconomic and political crisis in Ukraine in the final months of 1932, the Stalinist leadership began claiming that the resistance to the genocidal state grain deliveries and resistance to the communist regime in general were linked above all to Pilsudski’s secret agent network and domestic Ukrainian “counterrevolution.”
Thus, it was no accident that in Ukraine the famine was transformed not only into an instrument of terror but also an instrument of national policy. This radically distinguished the situation in Ukraine from what was taking place in, say, Russia or Kazakhstan. On 14 December 1932 Stalin and Molotov signed into law a resolution of the CC AUCP(b) and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR in connection with the implementation of the state grain deliveries. Among other things, this document ordered the “correct implementation of Ukrainization” in Ukraine and beyond its borders, that is, in regions where large numbers of Ukrainians resided. It also included a categorical demand to wage a struggle against Petliurites and other “counterrevolutionary” elements.
This was the decisive phase of curbing the “Ukrainization” of Ukraine by the Bolsheviks, the liquidation of “nationalist” potential, which they intended to prevent from ever reviving again. That is precisely why the famine and the false stories about its perpetrators became a desirable and concrete pretext for the Stalinist regime to change its policy on the national question and to launch the massive campaigns of repression that soon after were blended organically into Yezhov’s “Great Terror” of 1936-38. All these factors had an impact on the language policy and led, in particular, to the “Stabilization” of the Ukrainian language.
The Plenum of the CC and CCC (Central Control Commission) of the AUCP(b), which took place in Moscow from 7 to 12 January 1933, was supposed to confirm the Stalinists’ achievements and justify the new round of repressions launched by the Kremlin leadership, particularly in Ukraine. One participant who stood out at this meeting was Pavel Postyshev, who delivered a harsh and brutal speech. Stalin’s remarks expressed approval of Postyshev’s stance. Soon after, on 24 January 1933, Postyshev arrived in Ukraine. In keeping with the CC AUCP(b)’s resolution “On Strengthening the Party Organizations of the CC CP(b)U,” he came to Lake up the post of second secretary of the Central Committee and head of the Kharkiv oblast party committee. Among his other activities, he launched a strict anti-Ukrainian line.
The dismissal of Mykola Skrypnyk as People’s Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian SSR marked an important stage in implementing the new policy. On 23 February 1933 the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U approved a decision to appoint Skrypnyk as the head of Derzhplan (Rus. Gosplan) of the Ukrainian SSR and deputy head of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR. Volodymyr Zatons’kyi, the newly appointed Commissar of Education, was soon appointed to the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U. On 23 February 1933 Andrii Khvylia (Olinter), who had gained renown during the struggle against “national deviationists” in the mid-1920s, was appointed first deputy Commissar of Education. Zatons’kyi and Khvylia were the ones who formulated the thesis about the isolation of the Ukrainian language from Russian, and accordingly called for urgent and fundamental changes that would extend to publishing, education, and other spheres.
On 6 April 1933 a committee to examine the situation on the “language front,” headed by Khvylia, began its work. On 24 April Khvylia sent a report on language-related questions to the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U. In it he accused Skrypnyk “not only of not waging a struggle against … the bourgeois-nationalist line pertaining to the questions of creating Ukrainian scientific terminology, but also of supporting this distortion of the party line on the linguistics front.”
That month Khvylia delivered a speech at a meeting of the CC CP(b)U that was convened to discuss the national policy and which became a general rehearsal for the impending offensive against Skrypnyk and “Skrypnykism.” At the meeting Zatons’kyi declared that the “drop in the number of schools for the Russian national minority” was the result of a “distortion of the party line.” However, it was clear that the party itself was now reversing its previous stance on Ukrainization.
Beginning in early 1933 a criminal angle was added to the political-ideological policy of exposing Skrypnyk’s linguistic “sins.” It was then that the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR (headed in 1933 by Vsevolod Balyts’kyi again), reported that it had uncovered the “Ukrainian Military Organization.” Among the members of this group were people working in science and education, as well as representatives of the creative and scholarly intelligentsia, which included people from Skrypnyk’s immediate circle. The fabricated materials became powerful “compromising evidence” in Postyshev’s hands. With the aid of these materials he launched a decisive attack on Skrypnyk at the Plenum of the CC CP(b)U held on 8-11 June 1933.
In an effort to acknowledge his “errors” Skrypnyk explained why, during the party congress in 1927, he had described the Soviet Ukraine as a “Piedmont for the entire Ukrainian people situated on the entire territory of ethnographic Ukraine.” What he meant, of course, was that the Ukrainian SSR was a model for the “oppressed masses of Western Ukraine.” As Skrypnyk maintained, the new Ukrainian orthography offered a possibility to influence those masses. He was forced to “repent his sins” by ritualistically condemning those enemies who were coming “to our country” from the western Ukrainian territory and exploiting the idea of a united Ukraine as a “slogan of a fascist union in order to struggle against the Soviet government.”
Postyshev spoke immediately after Skrypnyk. Ignoring Skrypnyk’s statements, Stalin’s emissary asserted that the People’s Commissariat of Education and the entire system of Ukrainian education had proved to be completely cluttered up with “wrecking, counterrevolutionary, [and] nationalistic elements.” Sneering at Skrypnyk’s explanations, Postyshev declared: “Surely it’s not a matter of those facts that you cite from Ukrainian grammar and orthography?… After all, before arranging the letters ‘h’ and [hard] ‘g,’ these wreckers planted their people throughout the entire educational system. That is what you should have talked about, com[rade] Skrypnyk; about the way the issue of Ukrainization in a number of cases ended up in the hands of numerous Petliurite scum.”
Postyshev’s criticism was seized upon by the main party ideologist Mykola Popov: “Com[rade] Skrypnyk’s mistake was not that he wanted to introduce a single orthography for Soviet Ukraine and Western Ukraine, for there is nothing terrible in this, but that in the orthography question he was led by the nose by bourgeois-nationalist elements of Western Ukraine, for whom the orthography, grammar, [and] terminology were tools of a nationalistic policy, of a riff between the laboring masses of Ukraine and other Soviet republics; a tool of a policy to sever Ukraine from the Soviet Union and subordinate it to international imperialism.”
On 27 June 1933 a meeting attended by Andrii Khvylia took place in the educational workers’ building in Kharkiv. In his speech entitled “The Situation on the Language Front,” the party loyalist stated: “In the last few years the Institute of Scientific Language at the VUAN carried out its counterrevolutionary work, which was helpful to the Pediurites and harmful to Ukrainian workers and peasants. But our Commissar of Education not only did not expose the wrecking; on the contrary, with his speeches on linguistic questions he helped the wrecking elements to conceal themselves.”
The double issue (nos. 7-8) of the journal Bil’shovyk Ukminy (Bolshevik of Ukraine) for 1933 featured Khvylia’s rabid, programmatic article entitled “Eradicate, Destroy the Nationalistic Roots on the Language Front.” Its main thrust was the accusation that the Ukrainian language was deliberately being opposed to the Russian language, and Mykola Skrypnyk was proclaimed the main culprit. At this point Skrypnyk was no longer alive: he committed suicide on 7 July 1933. His obituary appeared in the same issue of Bil’shovyk Ukminy as Khvylia’s article.
It goes without saying that Khvylia’s article, reflected Moscow’s official position, and it demanded a immediate halt to the publication of all dictionaries, a review of existing dictionaries and all terminology, unification of technical terminology with the terminology that was in force in the Soviet Union and which was also used in Ukraine, an evaluation of cadres on the “language front,” the expulsion from this front of bourgeois-nationalist elements, a review of the Ukrainian orthography, and a change in the directive on the linguistic design of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia (the chief editor of this publication, launched in 1927, was Skrypnyk).
Khvylia’s article already contained information about the work that was underway to eradicate the “cluttering up of the language front” with regard to Ukrainian terminology, grammar, and orthography. It announced that correctives to the orthography had been introduced “in relation to the elimination of all artificial rules that were aimed at turning the development of the Ukrainian language in the direction of Polish bourgeois culture.”
Special groups were formed to reevaluate the banned terminological dictionaries and to replace “nationalistic” terms with “international” ones. The result of these linguistic revisions was the publication in 1934-35 of a number of terminological bulletins setting forth the new principles of Ukrainian term formation for the entire subsequent Soviet period. According to one researcher, the 1933 reform “affected not only spelling but age-old traditions of orthography, and chiefly—the originality of the Ukrainian language system.” Also set in motion was strict censorship not only of the content of printed matter but of the language itself. The communist authorities went on to proclaim the Ukrainian language as such as ideologically dangerous, and claimed the role of overseer of the state of this language. An all-out purge of cadres was launched in the spheres of education, science, and culture.
The Joint Plenum of the CC and CCC of the CP(b)U held on 18-22 November 1933 was not simply the apotheosis of the political campaign against “Skrypnykism.” In its resolution the plenum stated that “at the given moment the main threat is local Ukrainian nationalism, which is bonding with imperialistic interventionists.” In his speech to the plenum Khvylia emphasized: “If we draw attention to the characteristic of those basic lines along which the Ukrainian nationalist deviation, spearheaded by Skrypnyk, advanced with regard to questions of Ukrainian culture [and] literature, then we must say that Skrypnyk’s nationalist deviation lay in the fact that he was erecting a barrier between Russian and Ukrainian culture, and he patterned the development of the Ukrainian language on bourgeois Poland and Czechoslovakia. In literature, he essentially supported the nationalistic organizations VAPLITE, Berezil’, Avanhard. He directed [and] justified the forcible Ukrainization of national minorities.”
The issue was not limited to the sphere of education. As noted earlier, the new “Ukrainian orthography” was adopted in 1933. Its approval was accompanied by a witch hunt to root out nationalists in the Institute of Linguistics at the VUAN (founded in 1930 on the basis of the IUNM and other linguistics-related institutions of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences). The findings of terminological commissions and corresponding resolutions issued by the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR in 1933-34 banned the introduction into the Ukrainian lexicon of any new terms falling outside the linguistic mediation of the Russian language. In 1934 the journal Movoznavstvo (Linguistics) emphasized: “In general, both the theory and practice that has been emanating in recent times from the IUNM and NDIM [Scientific-Research Institute of Language—Iu. Sh.] [were] nothing more than a militant program of Ukrainian fascism in linguistics, designed to halt the large-scale development of the Ukrainian language, cram this development into the framework of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shunt it onto the path of the bourgeois West, [and] tear it away from the cultural and linguistic development of our fraternal republics, especially the RSFSR.”
The commission that was charged with evaluating the work on the “language front” approved a special resolution on the question of terminology. This document identified the “correct methodological principles of compiling Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries.” These principles required lexicographers “under no circumstances to ignore in an artificial and tendentious manner elements (words) that are common to both languages, particularly words of international derivation.” The resolution declared that henceforth observance of the “correct methodological principles” in the activities of linguistics institutes would be controlled by the party leadership, under whose direction research work plans would be reviewed and reconstructed “on the basis of a broad elaboration and perception of them in the light of Marxist-Leninist methodology”; the array of research institutions and courses run by Ukrainianizers, translators, literary editors, and other linguistic and literary personnel of publishing houses would be evaluated and “purged of nationalistic class-hostile elements”; and “political training of language workers” would be intensified.
It is now useful for us to turn back to the school system. The role of the school as a factor in the transmission of national values that differed from authorized Soviet Russian patriotism was in fact destroyed, and schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction were turned into schools only for Ukrainians.
Nevertheless, one must not overlook the fact that as of 1937, the network of schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction encompassed 83 percent of the entire student population. Writing about the linguist Oleksa Syniavs’kyi, George Shevelov concurs that for an extended period of time all linguistic production of the 1920s was regarded as “nationalistic and subversive.” However, the essential features of the work done by Syniavs’kyi have been preserved to this day. “For the most part, the rules introduced by Syniavs’kyi, albeit without the name of its creator, have remained. This may be the best proof of their clearheadedness, vitality, and scholarly content. They were not based on the mechanical rejection of something unpleasant…but on an independent, sovereign, native tradition and the developmental trend of the Ukrainian language, particularly the literary language.”
The Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, compiled at the newly created Institute of Linguistics at the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, was published in Kyiv in 1937 in a print run of 30,000 copies. In their introduction the dictionary’s compilers, Stepan Vasylevs’kyi and Ievhen Rudnyts’kyi (both of whom were arrested and executed that same year), made a special point of noting that one of their tasks was to “cleanse the Ukrainian literary language of nationalistic distortions and inventions.” In Shevelov’s opinion, this dictionary did not meet the usual requirements of academic dictionaries—not by a long shot—and paled in comparison to its predecessor, the academic dictionary of 1924-33.
In January 1938 a new leader of the CP(b)U appeared in Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev replaced Stanislav Kosior, who was recalled to Moscow and later repressed. Upon Khrushchev’s arrival, the policy of indigenization gradually disappeared. On 10 April 1938 the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U approved a resolution entitled “On the Reorganization of National Schools in Ukraine.” The authors of this document describe the creation of educational institutions with instruction offered in national minority languages as the “propagation of special national schools,” which are beacons of “bourgeois-nationalistic, anti-Soviet influence on children,” and their functioning is called “pointless and harmful.” Such schools and other educational institutions were liquidated, and their pupils were transferred to schools with Ukrainian or Russian as the language of instruction.
Blame for “wrecking” in the sphere of public education was placed first and foremost on Volodymyr Zatons’kyi, the former Commissar of Education (he had replaced Mykola Skrypnyk in 1933 and was arrested in November 1937), and the entire apparatus of the People’s Commissariat of Education of the Ukrainian SSR. In his speech to the Fourteenth Congress of the CP(b)U, Khrushchev noted: “In his testimony Zatons’kyi, an enemy of the people, talks about how they muddled teaching plans…. Zatons’kyi says that the recertification of teachers, which is carried out by government order, was conducted in such a way as to compromise honest teachers and push [them] out of schools with the aim of keeping the Petliurite, Trotskyite-Bulcharinite, and bourgeois-nationalist espionage gangs.” Mentioning the former head of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR Panas Liubchenko (who committed suicide in August 1937), Khrushchev declared: “Liubchenko and other scum did everything to banish the Russian language from Ukrainian schools.”
The immense scale of the anti-Ukrainian terror demonstrates irrefutably that by the second half of the 1930s the young generation of Ukrainians was almost wholly deprived of Ukrainian-language teaching materials. Also outlawed were school textbooks, especially the popular Pochatkova hramatyka ukrains’koimovy (Beginners’ Grammar of the Ukrainian Language) authored by Olena Kurylo, and textbooks for higher schools, such as Petro Buzuk’s Narysy istorii ukrains ‘koimovy (Oudines of the History of the Ukrainian Language), Ievhen Tymchenlco’s Kurs istorii ukrains’koi movy: Vstup i fonetyka (A Course in the History of the Ukrainian Language: Introduction and Phonetics), the collective work Pidvyshchenyi kurs ukrains ‘koi movy (Advanced Course of the Ukrainian Language), under the editorship of Leonid Bulakhovs’kyi, and Oleksa Syniavs’kyi’s Normy ukrains ‘koi literaturnoi movy (Norms of the Ukrainian Literary Language). As a result, students at departments of philology had no textbooks on the history of the Ukrainian language or the contemporary literary language.
On 20 April 1938 the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and the CC CP(b)U issued a joint resolution “On the Mandatory Study of the Russian Language in Non-Russian Schools of Ukraine.” This resolution stemmed from a decision handed down by the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the CC AUCP(b) entitled “On the Mandatory Study of the Russian Language in Schools of the National Republics and Oblasts.” On 8 May 1938 the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U approved a decision “On the Compilation of the New Ukrainian Orthography.” In October 1938 the work of the reorganized national schools was examined. It was noted that “many schools are not supplied with teachers, they have significantly fewer textbooks than Russian and Ukrainian schools, they do not have methodological direction, and therefore they work unsatisfactorily.” A special resolution issued in April 1940 regulated the teaching of Russian in the national schools of the Ukrainian SSR. It is significant that at the Fifteenth Congress of the CP(b)U held in 1940 the very terms “indigenization” and “Ukrainization” did not figure in any speeches delivered by Khrushchev or delegates to the congress.
Thus, following the destruction of linguistic institutions that had worked fruitfully in the 1920s, the physical liquidation or long-term imprisonment of linguists, and the ban that was placed on lexicographical, terminological, and other works published in those years because they were deemed “hostile” and “nationalistic,” the party-state leadership introduced a language policy in Soviet Ukraine that was formulated in Moscow. Even with some temporary relaxation, this policy remained in force until the late 1980s.
The direction of future linguistic research was to reflect the following main principles: the thesis of the “beneficent nature” of the Russian language’s influence on Ukrainian, the need to draw the two “fraternal” languages closer and stress the “harmoniousness” of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism, and the need for the broad introduction of internationalisms. At the same time, these three principles were subordinated to the task of unifying the national languages according to the Russian model, because the Russian language was assigned the role of intermediary language in the processes of forming a joint lexical fund of languages of the various Soviet peoples.
The situation also changed in the book-publishing sphere. In 1930, 6,394 tides were published in the Ukrainian language; in 1933, 3,472; in 1937, 2,566; in 1938, 2,159; and in 1939, 1,895. There is no doubt whatsoever that the primary role in this situation was played by a policy aimed at undermining the role of the Ukrainian language in the life of society. However, as George Shevelov has noted, this also reflected certain moods among the Ukrainian-speaking segment of the population: Ukrainians concluded that was it impractical to cling to a language whose communicative functions were steadily narrowing and whose social prestige was plummeting inexorably.
War, Peace, and the Postwar Language War
The policy of the internal Russification of the Ukrainian language abated somewhat with the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. At this very time, in agreement with Germany, the Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine. This was not simply a former Polish territory but also a region where the Ukrainian language functioned in all social spheres and where society mounted powerful resistance to Russification.
At a certain point the Germans began to generate the illusion that they were encouraging Ukrainian national feelings. By August 1941 this illusion had evaporated, and all Ukrainian structures on German-occupied territories were disbanded.
During World War II the Stalinist regime made certain concessions by allowing Soviet propagandists to appeal to the patriotic feelings of various nations in the Soviet Union. Above all, these appeals had a mobilizational importance. In November 1941 the first meeting of representatives of the Ukrainian people was convened in the Russian city of Saratov, where an appeal entitled “To the Ukrainian People” was adopted, which spoke about the “holy Ukrainian land.” The document, which called for Ukrainians to wage a struggle against German enslavement, was addressed to “freedom-loving Ukrainians, descendants of the glorious fighters for the native land: Danylo of Galicia and Sahaidachnyi, Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi and Bohun, Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko, Bozhenko and Mykola Shchors.” The second and third meetings (August 1942 and May 1943, respectively) of representatives of the Ukrainian people intensified the Ukrainian-Soviet patriotic discourse. Several military fronts even received the appellation “Ukrainian.” Ukrainians were called upon to fight the Nazis and defend their own values, particularly “their native culture, their native language.”
The Ukrainian intelligentsia and the party-state leadership capitalized on this by emphasizing the historical integrity of the Ukrainian people and the uniqueness of their history, culture, and language. The writer Mykola Bazhan wrote the following entry in his notebook: “Before the war the number of Ukrainian schools … was declining catastrophically. Party and state resolutions are needed…. Write a letter to Potemkin about the opening of Ukrainian schools, inform [him] about the implementation of this decision…. The Russian language in party organizations. Prevent the Russification of schools.”
While tolerating Ukrainian-related patriotic rhetoric, the Moscow leaders in fact gave preference to an entirely different set of values. Milovan Djilas, one of the leaders of Yugoslavia (later a dissident and critic of the communist regime), recalled that Stalin began using the term “Russia” instead of the USSR. In 1945 Djilas stopped in Kyiv on his way home from Moscow, where he had been part of an official Yugoslav delegation. Later he wrote about his impressions of his meeting with Khrushchev: “We heard somewhere that he was not a Ukrainian by birth but a Russian. Although nothing was said about this, he himself avoided any mention of this because it was awkward that even the prime minister of the Ukrainian government was not a Ukrainian! That it was impossible to find a single person capable of being the prime minister of the government among the Ukrainians, a nation as numerically strong as the French and in many respects more cultured than the Russians, was unusual even for us communists who could justify and explain anything able to cloud our ideal image.”
In 1942 the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, whose members were evacuated from Kyiv to Ufa (Bashkiria) during the German occupation of Ukraine, was instructed to renew work on the orthography. The Presidium of the Academy assigned this work to Academician Leonid Bulakhovs’kyi. With the assistance of scholarly associates from the Institute of Language and Literature and using work that had already been done, he prepared the draft of the new orthography. Bulakhovs’kyi presented the draft at a specially convened meeting, and on 2 October 1942 he gave a report at a session of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. The draft was approved and sent to the Soviet Ukrainian government, and then studied by a commission headed by Mykola Bazhan, deputy head of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR. Besides Leonid Bulakhovs ‘kyi, the commission included Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Ryl’s’kyi, and Iurii Ianovs’kyi. After several correctives were made, the draft was approved.
When the situation on the various fronts began to worsen, the German administration began to exploit the national feelings of the peoples of the USSR, particularly the language problem. The Nazis hatched a plan to convert all the alphabets of the non-Russian nations to the Latin alphabet. On 28 January 1943 Berlin sent an instruction to Kyiv, demanding the immediate submission of a draft of a Latinized Ukrainian alphabet. This alphabet, modeled on the Czech one, was developed by a special orthographic commission headed by the linguist and lawyer Vasyl’ Zavitnevych, the author of a Ukrainian grammar for high schools and a professor at the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute.
For its part, the Stalinist regime returned to the question of reforming the Ukrainian orthography (a party resolution about this had been issued back in May 1938). On 14 March 1943 the Politburo of the CC CP(b)U ordered Mykola Bazhan to convene (and chair) “a plenum of the State Commission for the Drafting of the Ukrainian Orthography.” A print run of the future publication was established at 10,000 copies.
A discussion of the draft of the Ukrainian orthography, chaired by Pavlo Tychyna, took place on 26 April 1943 in Ufa. Opening the meeting, Tychyna insisted that without improving the orthography, “one cannot move forward on our education front.” He identified the principles of the completed work: “(1) so that the orthography will be simple and accessible to the people; (2) so that the orthography will reflect those changes in the life of the language and the people that have taken place and are taking place right now; (3) so that for the most part the Ukrainian orthography will not stray far from the Russian orthography.”
Leonid Bulakhovs’kyi delivered a speech emphasizing that the draft regulated “not only the orthography but also certain facts of the language itself, without which it is very difficult to regulate the orthography.” He also mentioned that a new version of the Russian orthography had been adopted in 1941 and that Mykola Bazhan had personally given this version to Bulakhovs’kyi.
However, the ritual phrase about the Ukrainian language’s latest convergence with the Russian language should be approached with caution. For example, the authors of the Ukrainian draft of the new orthography proposed restoring (albeit partially) the “lost” letter “r” (hard “g”)—Bulakhovs’kyi declared bluntly that this letter had been expunged from the Ukrainian alphabet “without serious grounds”—and they reverted to the traditions of Ukrainian phonetics by proposing to write “i,” rather than “i” (as in [phrase omitted], etc.), to use the letter “i,” not “[phrase omitted]” in certain words ([phrase omitted]), to write “[phrase omitted],” not “[phrase omitted],” etc.
On 23 August 1943 a special session took place near Kharkiv, which was attended by all the members of the orthographic commission. Present at the meeting were Nikita Khrushchev; Mykhailo Hrechukha, head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR; Dem’ian Korotchenko, secretary of the CC CP(b)U; Vasyl’ Starchenko, deputy head of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR; and Kostiantyn Lytvyn, secretary of the CC CP(b)U. The draft orthography was approved, and Pavlo Tychyna, then the People’s Commissar of Education, was ordered to ratify the orthography.
The orthography was not ratified at this time, however. In November 1944 the Soviet Ukrainian leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech at the Plenum of the CC CP(b)U, in which he warned about “Ukrainian nationalists,” who were trying to creep into cultural institutions, and about those who wanted “to force everyone living in Ukraine to use only the Ukrainian language.”
The previous year, in late 1943, the Kremlin had declared war on Ukrainian patriotic propaganda by initiating criticism of Alexander Dovzhenko’s script for his film Ukraina v ohni (Ukraine in Flames). Nevertheless, the “war” for the orthography continued. For example, Ukraine’s education minister Pavlo Tychyna refused until the very last minute to ratify the orthography without the restoration of the hard “g” letter, which was never reinstated since it was “liquidated” in 1933. Tychyna signed the document only after the president of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR Oleksandr Bohomolets’ informed him that there was an instruction from Stalin concerning the letter “r.” The “improved” Ukrainian orthography was ratified by the government on 8 May 1943, and it came into force in 1946. The preamble to this document notes that its goal was “to ensure harmony with the orthographies of the fraternal nations of the Soviet Union, especially the Russian nation….” This was entirely in the spirit of the reigning policy known as “Zhdanovshchina,” which put an end in the postwar period to the liberalization that had existed during the World War II period, including linguistic liberalization.
This tendency was clearly reflected in the Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, which was compiled mostly in keeping with the principles of Russian vocabulary and published in Moscow in 1948. The introduction to the dictionary emphasized the “comprehensive, beneficent influence of the Great Russian language” on the Ukrainian literary language throughout its historical development. It also stressed that “the Ukrainian people, under the Communist Party’s leadership, had smashed the duplicitous, hostile stratagems of bourgeois nationalists, aimed at severing the friendship and brotherhood of peoples of the USSR, and had cleansed their language of nationalistic distortions.”
Between 1946 and 1951 the CC CP(b)U, following Moscow’s initiatives, adopted twelve resolutions on various ideological questions. The repercussions of these decisions, including for linguists, were not as bloody as in the 1930s. However, these decisions as well as the periodic campaigns against “Ukrainian nationalism” (such as the hounding of the poet Volodymyr Sosiura in 1951 for his poem “Liubit’ Ukrainu” [Love Ukraine] written in 1944), proved that Moscow was diligently monitoring processes unfolding in the Ukrainian SSR. During a meeting of Ukraine’s party leaders on 14 April 1952 Stalin cautioned them against complacency, and he showed an interest in the ideological situation in Ukraine, emphasizing that all was not well there.
After Stalin’s death in March 1953 the movement in defense of the Ukrainian language intensified in Ukraine. The period of “liberalization” under Khrushchev, admittedly limited, ushered in hopeful changes that also affected the language sphere. For example, the number of Ukrainian-language publications in the Ukrainian SSR increased and various periodicals began to be issued: Prapor, Mystetstvo, Ukrains’kyi fizychnyi zhurnal, Prykladna mekhanika, Fiziolohichnyi zhurnal, Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, Radians’ke pravo, Narodna tvorchist’ ta etnohrafiia, Radians’ke literaturoznavstvo, and Ekonomika radians’koi Ukrainy. According to the literary critic and dissident Ivan Dziuba, the increase in the number of Ukrainian-language periodicals in the second half of the 1950s had not been seen since the 1920s and would not be seen again until nearly the end of the twentieth century.
In the opinion of specialists, the state of Ukrainian lexicography improved somewhat in the 1950s. Compared to the 1948 Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary, the six-volume Ukrainian-Russian dictionary published in Kyiv in 1953-63 boasted a larger collection of native Ukrainian vocabulary; however, it also contained a considerable number of direct borrowings and calques from the Russian language.
In 1956 the journal Komunist Ukrainy published an article, the author of which insisted on the expansion of the rights of the Ukrainian language and the introduction of its use into all spheres of “state, party, and economic structures of the republic.” In addition, during the Khrushchev “Thaw” a strong demand regarding the status of the Ukrainian language was presented. On 10-15 February 1963 the All-Ukrainian Scholarly Conference on Questions of the Ukrainian Language was held in Kyiv, attended by many representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. That forum demanded that the Ukrainian language be granted the status of state language. The government did not accept this demand, however.
During the Khrushchev era party ideologists, while emphasizing the crucial need for a “flowering” of nations, simultaneously championed the thesis that all the Soviet nations should merge into a single nationality; this new historical community would be proclaimed the “Soviet people.” Among other things, this idea served to camouflage the fact that the real power in the USSR was concentrated above all in the Russian leadership.
Conclusion
After the destruction of the linguistic institutions that had functioned in Ukraine in the 1920s, the physical elimination or long-term imprisonment of linguists, and the various bans on lexicographical, terminological, and other works that were published in those years and were subsequently deemed “hostile” and “nationalistic,” the party-state leadership of the Ukrainian SSR introduced a language policy formulated in Moscow. Periods of temporary easing notwithstanding, it remained in force until the late 1980s, when the ideological base of the activities of institutions tasked with tracking and channeling language processes was established. Linguistic research in the Ukrainian SSR was to continue to define such key postulates as the “beneficent” influence of the Russian language on Ukrainian and the “harmoniousness” of Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism, and the need to draw the two “fraternal” languages closer, form a common lexical fund of the various peoples of the USSR, and introduce internationalisms on a wide basis. According to George Shevelov, the very structure and foundation of the defenseless Ukrainian literary language was laid open to Russian influences and borrowings, and its dialectal basis was shifted eastward.
In scholarly and semischolarly literature, the period under discussion is usually presented mostly in terms of victims: the destruction of the achievements of the indigenization and Ukrainization policies, introduced by the Bolsheviks themselves, the deaths of its spokesmen, various “antinationalistic” actions, and so on. There is no question that all this took place, and much has already been written on this topic, with varying degrees of knowledge, depth, and mastery.
The current state of research on the problem discussed here calls for a somewhat different view of the period under consideration. It would be worthwhile posing the following questions: Did the policy of Ukrainization and its linguistic aspects vanish all at once? Or did it possess a certain “inertia” that influenced (despite all the destructive realities of the 1930s, the period of World War II, and late Stalinism) the state of the Ukrainian language and the attitude toward it on the part of the governing structures?
It would also be useful to take a closer look at the work done by those whom the scholar Semen Pidhainy aptly called “people who escaped execution” (nedostriliani)—all those Ukrainian writers, philologists, and literary specialists who, under the guise of “Sovietism,” conducted a certain linguistic counter-discourse.
This is complex work, but it will foster a deeper understanding of why the powerful efforts of the Stalinist regime in the 1930s-1950s ultimately failed to establish a “common denominator” for the Ukrainian and Russian languages, and why Ukrainians in the Soviet Union managed to preserve their ethnic identity, which was formed during the period of Ukrainization, imperfect as it was.