14
NATIONAL COMMUNISM
THE MEETING WAS ARRANGED IN A RAILWAY STATION RESTAURANT in a Polish town on the Soviet border. A middle-aged man showed an older, gray-bearded man a box of matches that fit the description. The man with the beard was Vasilii Shulgin, the Kyiv-born Russian nationalist who had participated in the dramatic abdication of Nicholas II and then served as an adviser to General Anton Denikin of the Volunteer Army. He had spent the previous few weeks at his estate in Volhynia, which was now part of Poland, getting ready for his clandestine trip to the Soviet Union. The man with the matches was a smuggler who had promised to help Shulgin cross the border.
It was December 1925, and Shulgin was traveling to the USSR to meet with the leadership of a clandestine monarchist organization that had established contacts with Russian émigré circles in Europe. Shulgin crossed the Soviet border in the middle of the night of December 23, 1925. He visited Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad, managing to meet with Russian monarchist leaders. He left the Soviet Union on February 6, 1926. Upon his return, Shulgin published a book about his trip, The Three Capitals, which created a sensation and a scandal in Russian émigré circles in the West. Shulgin’s visit to the Soviet Union allowed him to assess not only the political climate in the country but also the results of the new nationality policy, known as korenizatsiia (literally, “taking root,” or indigenization). Shulgin was critical of the Soviet regime but argued that the Bolsheviks were in retreat: the New Economic Policy, a set of measures reinstating elements of the market economy introduced by Lenin after the Civil War, was restoring the country to health and bringing hope of the revival of Russian greatness. Shulgin argued “that Russia has not died; it is not only alive but also brimming with juices.”
Although Shulgin was unaware of it, his entire trip to Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad had been sponsored and arranged by the Soviet secret police, the GPU. Those who helped him cross the border and conducted negotiations with him on behalf of the bogus monarchist organization were GPU agents. The whole business was a sham created to lure General Petr Wrangel, the last leader of the White movement, to the Soviet Union and arrest him. As Wrangel did not come, the GPU decided to use Shulgin’s visit to influence the debate among the anticommunist Russian émigrés in Europe about Soviet Russia, presenting the Bolshevik experiment in a most attractive light. As Shulgin’s GPU handlers expected, he left the Soviet Union with the conviction that Russia was in the process of revival, and that the Bolsheviks were inadvertently promoting the rebirth of the Great Russian state. He wrote as much in his book, which was in fact “proofread” by the GPU before it went to print. If Shulgin was duped by his GPU hosts, his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the indigenization campaign was accurate enough.
JOSEPH STALIN, THE PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR OF NATIONALITIES AND subsequently general secretary of the party, was the main architect and promoter of the indigenization policy. Stalin’s disagreements with Lenin on the structure of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, the two Bolshevik leaders regarded nationalism as an inevitable stage in the development of human society. The sooner one allowed nationalities to flourish, the more quickly they would complete that phase and leave it behind, opening the way to the internationalist society of the future.
The indigenization policy had two main components, one political and social, the other cultural and linguistic. Adopted by the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, when Lenin had already left the political scene, the policy was rooted in Lenin’s writings on the Ukrainian question, particularly his texts of December 1919, when the Red Army had recaptured Ukraine from the armies of Denikin and the troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic led by Symon Petliura. Back then, Lenin had argued for bringing local cadres into Soviet institutions. Now the party launched an affirmative-action program to staff party and government structures with non-Russians, thereby creating local elites loyal to the regime in faraway Moscow. The cultural component called for the promotion of local languages and cultures, which began with support for education, publishing, and theatrical performances in those languages and ended with the obligatory Ukrainization, Belarusization, and so on of the party and government apparatus, first on the local level and then in the major cities and capitals as well. These measures were intended to enracinate the new Soviet regime in the non-Russian peripheries of the former Russian Empire.
Stalin’s reasons for championing the indigenization program were not limited to his belief, held in common with Lenin, that nationalism was an inevitable stage of human development. From the political viewpoint, enlisting local cadres was an obvious way to overcome the hostility that the Bolsheviks had encountered among the non-Russians during the Civil War and mitigate the centralism of the Bolshevik Party structure. Under the terms of the Union treaty, formerly independent states such as Ukraine and Georgia had to give up control of key political functions, including defense and foreign affairs: by way of compensation, they were allowed to increase their indigenous membership in the republican branches of the party and promote their languages in administration, education, and other spheres of public life. Moreover, Stalin needed the support of republican cadres in his struggle for power in Moscow. As the party’s leading official in charge of the non-Russian nationalities, he was perfectly placed to develop clients among the republican elites and call on their loyalty as he fought his numerous rivals in the Bolshevik Politburo, such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigorii Zinoviev.
No non-Russian republic was as important in Stalin’s political calculations as Ukraine. With Russians “owning” the all-Union communist party, which was called the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) until 1925, the Ukrainian communists formed the largest “autonomous” party organization in the country. Until 1923, the head of government in Ukraine had been Trotsky’s ally Khristian Rakovsky, who exploited Ukrainian autonomist aspirations to challenge Stalin’s position at the center of power. With Rakovsky sidelined at the Twelfth Party Congress in the spring of 1923, and dispatched to London shortly afterward, Stalin worked hard to ensure the loyalty of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks. In April 1925, he put his loyalist Lazar Kaganovich, an ethnic Jew from Ukraine, in charge of the Ukrainian party organization.
The period after the Twelfth Party Congress became known in Ukraine as one of “Ukrainization by decree,” meaning that the authorities kept issuing one decree after another, demanding rapid Ukrainization of education, culture, and the government apparatus. But whereas the shift from Russian to Ukrainian in the media and book publishing was rapid, the use of Ukrainian as the working language of administration encountered major obstacles. Deadline followed deadline without the apparatus switching to Ukrainian. The resistance to Ukrainization came from the top ranks of the party, whose membership in 1924 was 45 percent Russian, 33 percent Ukrainian, and 14 percent Jewish.
The second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Dmytro Lebed, was the author of the theory of the struggle of two cultures. He regarded the Russian language and culture as attributes of the city, and thus of the working class, and the Ukrainian language and culture as attributes of the village. In the conflict of those two cultures, argued Lebed, the communists had to be on the side of the proletariat, not of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Although Lebed was forced to abandon the public propaganda of his theory before the Twelfth Party Congress adopted the indigenization policy, his views were widespread in the party leadership.
ON HIS VISIT TO KYIV IN DECEMBER 1925, VASILII SHULGIN HAD an opportunity to assess the results of “Ukrainization by decree” at first hand. Signs of the new policy were everywhere. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, the avenue leading to the railway station had been named after Dmitrii Bibikov, the governor general of Kyiv from 1837 to 1852. It was now called Taras Shevchenko Boulevard to honor the poet who had been arrested in Kyiv during Bibikov’s tenure in 1847. On the base of the monument to the Russian count Aleksei Bobrinsky, which had been installed on the boulevard to honor the founder of the
sugar industry in the Kyiv region, there was now a pyramid with a sign in Ukrainian celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. The signs on government institutions and shops were also in Ukrainian.
No less disturbing to Shulgin was the fact that his old opponent, the leader of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, was back in Kyiv after years of exile in Central Europe. While Shulgin visited Kyiv incognito, under the name Edward Schmidt, Hrushevsky was living in the open, welcomed by the Bolshevik authorities and holding a position at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Shulgin visited the place in Kyiv where Hrushevsky’s house had once stood. It had been burned down by Bolshevik shelling in January 1918. “But that time, too, has passed,” wrote Shulgin in his travel log. “And Mr. Mykhailo? He is prospering. He’s alive, the old dog.… What has fallen to the lot of Mykhailo himself is ‘not much, just the capital’ of the republic, which burned down his home, true enough, but only ‘by misunderstanding.’ That is obvious from the fact that Hrushevsky has made his peace with the USSR, returned to Kyiv, and is now mumbling praise to Soviet rule in the language of black magic. Obviously, for establishing the ‘Ukrainian republic.’”
But on his visit to Kyiv Shulgin also encountered strong opposition to the indigenization policy. On his train journey from Kyiv to Moscow, he became a witness and then a participant in a conversation about the merits of Ukrainization. “What do you want? My little girls should know a language that would be of some use to them. Tell me what they’re going to do with that language!” remarked a Jewish woman, born in Ukraine but now living in Moscow. Shulgin was glad to hear Russian spoken in the streets of Kyiv, seeing it as a sign of the failure not only of the Ukrainian project but also of Bolshevik rule, which associated itself with it. Indeed, Kyiv continued to speak mainly Russian, notwithstanding the quite impressive efforts of the Bolshevik government to switch city names and signs from Russian to Ukrainian and to introduce Ukrainian into the educational system.
THE LACK OF PROGRESS OF LINGUISTIC UKRAINIZATION IN THE cities, especially among the ethnically Russian or highly Russified working class, was a fundamental concern of Oleksandr Shumsky, a former member of the Borotbist faction of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party who became Ukraine’s commissar of education in the early 1920s. In 1925, a few months after Stalin appointed Lazar Kaganovich to head the Ukrainian party, Shumsky appealed to Stalin to begin the Ukrainization of the working class and replace Kaganovich with Vlas Chubar, an ethnic Ukrainian who then headed the government of the republic. Shumsky was generally unhappy with the progress of the Ukrainization campaign and demanded that Kaganovich extend it from the party and government apparatus to the working class. Shumsky was appalled by the very same thing that had inspired optimism in Vasilii Shulgin: signs and many newspapers in Kyiv were in Ukrainian, but the population at large spoke Russian.
Stalin formulated his views on the progress of Ukrainization in a letter to the Ukrainian Politburo in April 1926. It was a direct response to Kaganovich’s complaints about Shumsky and his criticism of the Ukrainization drive. Stalin threw his support behind Kaganovich, whom he kept as leader of the Ukrainian party, against Shumsky. According to Stalin, Shumsky was guilty of two major errors. He refused to distinguish the Ukrainization of the party and the state apparatus from that of the working class: the first had to proceed as planned, argued Stalin, but the second had to be stopped. “We must not force Russian workers en masse to give up the Russian language and culture,” wrote Stalin. Shumsky’s second alleged error was his refusal to recognize that, given the weakness of indigenous communist cadres in Ukraine, Ukrainization managed by the intelligentsia was likely to take on “the character of a battle for the alienation of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian society from all-Union culture and society, the character of a battle against Russian culture and its highest achievement—against Leninism.”
Stalin’s letter was not an attack on Ukrainization as such, but it insisted that the party needed a certain kind of Ukrainization. The party was to proceed with the policy within the apparatus but avoid alienating the working class. No less important, Ukrainization was to be conducted in a way that would not alienate the Ukrainian public from Russia. To ensure the fulfillment of those tasks, the policy had to be implemented by trusted Bolshevik cadres headed by Stalin’s right-hand man in Ukraine, Kaganovich, who was ordered to speed up cultural Ukrainization. In May 1926, the Ukrainian Central Committee approved a number of new decrees on the policy, and Kaganovich took personal responsibility for the success of the Ukrainization drive. In 1927, the rebellious Oleksandr Shumsky was replaced as commissar of education by the old Bolshevik Mykola Skrypnyk, who put all his Bolshevik zeal and conviction into the Ukrainization policy.
As envisioned by party decrees, Ukrainization proceeded on two fronts—the recruitment of local cadres and the linguistic Ukrainization of the existing apparatus. The first trend was reflected in the rise of the portion of ethnic Ukrainians in the party ranks. Between 1925 and 1927, ethnic Ukrainians became a majority in the party, their numbers growing from 37 to 52 percent of the membership. At the same time, the share of ethnic Russians dropped to 30 percent, while the percentage of Jews, the second-largest minority in Ukraine, remained essentially the same, falling from 20 to 18 percent of the membership. The linguistic Ukrainization of the apparatus was led by Kaganovich himself, who delivered his report to the Central Committee for 1927 in Ukrainian.
The percentage of Ukrainian-language newspapers grew from under 40 percent in 1925 to more than 60 percent in 1927, while Ukrainian-language book production increased from 40 to 54 percent. There was growing pressure on party and government bureaucrats to learn Ukrainian as Kaganovich began to deliver on the threat of firing officials who failed to master the language. More than 250 employees lost their jobs owing to the new party line. Cultural Ukrainization made its most impressive strides in the educational sphere, where by the end of the 1920s almost 98 percent of ethnic Ukrainian schoolchildren were being taught in Ukrainian. The Ukrainization drive also affected university teaching—the realm of science and high culture—with the share of Ukrainian-language classes increasing from 33 percent in 1927 to 58 percent in 1929.
An important sphere in which the policy made little headway was the city street. The cities remained largely if not exclusively Russian-speaking, as the proponents of Ukrainization had little influence on the working class. This resulted in the gradual Russification of Ukrainian peasants who left their villages to work in the cities. There was also resistance and resentment on the part of Russified Ukrainians, especially ethnic minorities, which were a significant part of the Ukrainian population. Vasilii Shulgin would probably have noticed little difference on the streets of Kyiv if he had been able to visit the city in 1928—the last year of Kaganovich’s rule in Ukraine and of the party’s all-out drive for Ukrainization.
THE INDIGENIZATION POLICY MEANT DIFFERENT THINGS IN DIFFERENT republics, given the uneven development of cultures in the Russian Empire and varying levels of mobilization of elites and the public at large in support of the policy. If in republics such as Ukraine and Georgia the central authorities had to adjust their policy to accommodate the growing demands of proponents of the local culture and political autonomy, in other places indigenization meant the imposition of cultural policies from above. Moscow got busy creating new ethnic territorial entities, promoting the education of indigenous elites in languages whose written form had yet to be created, and developing literatures that had not yet existed. This pertained especially to ethnic groups in the far north, as well as to some nationalities in the North Caucasus and Central Asia. In the western borderlands of the former empire, those who benefited the most from Moscow’s nation-building efforts were the Belarusians—an essential component of the imperial-era tripartite Russian nation.
The Bolsheviks proclaimed the creation of the Belarusian Communist Party and the Belarusian Soviet Republic in December 1918, after gaining control of most
of Belarus in the wake of the German retreat. The republic lost more than half its territory to Poland as a result of the Treaty of Riga (1921), which was signed by representatives of the Russian Federation on behalf of the rump Soviet Belarus. Although it was now reduced to a narrow strip of land around the city of Minsk, the Belarusian state was needed by Moscow to counteract possible efforts on the part of the Poles, especially supporters of Józef Piłsudski, the head of the new Polish state, to create Polish protectorates in Ukraine and Belarus. In order to turn the tables on the Poles, the Soviets had to recognize and enhance the existence of a distinct Belarusian nationality—a step that the Soviet leadership, Stalin in particular, was prepared to take despite the protests of its own cadres on the ground, who believed in one big Russian nation, at least when it came to Belarus.
At the Tenth Party Congress, which concluded a few days before the signing of the Riga treaty, Stalin did his best to silence party officials who had doubted the existence of the Belarusian nation by evoking the Ukrainian example and the laws of history. “I have a note saying that we communists are allegedly imposing the Belarusian nationality artificially,” Stalin told the delegates. “That is untrue, for there exists a Belarusian nation that has its own language, distinct from Russian; hence Belarusian culture can be raised only in its own language. Such things were heard some five years ago about Ukraine, about the Ukrainian nation. And not long ago it was still being said that the Ukrainian republic and the Ukrainian nation had been thought up by the Germans. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian nation exists and that the development of its culture is a communist responsibility. One cannot go against history.”
The authorities defined Belarusian nationality on the basis of research by ethnographers and linguists and the maps they produced, in particular Yefim Karski’s ethnographic map first published in 1917. According to that map, Belarusians on the Soviet side of the border inhabited not only the Minsk region, which was included in Soviet Belarus, but also the areas around Mahilioŭ, Vitsebsk, Homel, and Smolensk, which were parts of the Russian Federation. The Karski map helped the Soviet nation-builders define the new borders of Soviet Belarus, which in Moscow’s opinion had to be extended if they were to be treated seriously by the Poles. The first two regions were transferred to the Belarusian republic in 1924, more than doubling its population from 1.5 million to 3.5 million. The Homel region was added in 1926. Smolensk, however, which had been part of the Muscovite tsardom since 1654, stayed in Russia.
Lost Kingdom Page 27