In many cases, the transfers were accomplished not only without consulting the local population but even against its wishes. But some inhabitants who spoke Belarusian nevertheless associated themselves with Russia and Russianness in the tradition of the anti-Polish nation-building project of imperial times. Avel Yenukidze, a close ally and relative of Stalin, stated with regard to the transfers: “This is a blow to the local population, and I understand the fear of the Belarusians. Their children understand Russian better than Belarusian and, from the cultural viewpoint, we are sacrificing the interests of the people.… But in this case we are guided by the political consideration that we must expand Belarus and draw the attention of foreign countries to her.”
When it came to Moscow’s foreign-policy considerations, the Soviet Belarusian project was never purely defensive. It also had a strong offensive component with regard to Belarusian lands that had gone to Poland under the Riga treaty. As in the case of Soviet Ukraine, the Bolsheviks wanted to present Soviet Belarus as a beacon of national revival to attract fellow Belarusians on the Polish side of the border. The Belarusization policy was first placed on the party agenda in early 1921, a few months before the signing of the Riga treaty. In January of that year, a group of thirty-two Belarusian communists issued a declaration calling for the unification of the Belarusian lands into one socialist state and demanding the comprehensive Belarusization of the republic’s educational and cultural life. At that point, Belarusian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish were declared official languages of the republic. Belarusian was accorded primacy as the language of the republic’s largest nationality, which legitimized the creation and existence of the Soviet Belarusian state.
The Twelfth Party Congress of April 1923 strengthened efforts to promote cultural Belarusization by declaring indigenization as official party policy. A key figure in the Belarusization drive was Usevalad Ihnatoŭski, a former member of the Belarusian Socialist Revolutionary Party, who joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and became people’s commissar of education of Soviet Belarus in 1920. Between 1924 and 1926, he was in charge of the propaganda department of the Belarusian Central Committee, and after 1928 he served as president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. Ihnatoŭski’s pre-Bolshevik career was not much different from that of his Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Shumsky, who also belonged to the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and was a leading national communist.
Belarusization, promoted by Ihnatoŭski and his allies among the Belarusian national communists, was similar to Ukrainization in the neighboring republic. Both policies were more successful in bringing local cadres into the institutions of the new regime than in the cultural “conversion” of the Russian-speaking urban population. Between 1922 and 1927, the number of ethnic Belarusians in the Belarusian Communist Party more than tripled. Significant progress was also achieved in the switch to Belarusian and other local languages for purposes of official propaganda, with the main newspaper of the Belarusian Bolsheviks beginning Belarusian-language publication in 1927. Even so, the Belarusian language and culture did not achieve dominance in the print media: of the nine newspapers published in the republic at the time, four were issued in Russian, three in Belarusian, and one each in Polish and Yiddish.
The promoters of indigenization and linguistic Belarusization faced major problems achieving their goals, not only for the working class and the party and government apparatus but also in the educational system. The problem stemmed from the underrepresentation of Belarusians in general—and Belarusian speakers in particular—in the cities. In 1922, Jews constituted 60 percent of the student body in the Belarusian universities, with Belarusians accounting for only 31 percent. Party officials decided to improve the language statistics by expelling students who failed to learn Belarusian and increasing the number of ethnic Belarusians in the student body to roughly 60 percent. This positive discrimination in favor of Belarusians meant negative discrimination against Jews, who constituted between 40 and 60 percent of the Belarusian urban population and had been correspondingly represented in the university system. Forced linguistic Belarusization, coupled with aggressive affirmative action in favor of Belarusian students, many of them with peasant roots, was often viewed negatively by the urban population, a good part of which was highly skeptical of the Belarusization project from the outset.
In the 1920s, as in the revolutionary era, the nationality policy of the central government in the western borderlands of the former empire was defined largely in response to the threat posed by the Polish question. But there was also a major difference: if before 1917 the local population had been mobilized against that threat under the banner of Russian nationalism, the mobilizing force was now that of Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism. The strategy of the central authorities would further evolve in the late 1920s and early 1930s as local nationalism was pushed aside and partly replaced by a variant of traditional Great Russian nationalism.
IN DECEMBER 1925, IN ONE OF HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH SOVIET opponents of indigenization, Vasilii Shulgin came up with a politically correct and effective way of resisting the policy. “I said that division into small nationalities lay [as an obstacle] on the path to internationalism,” recalled Shulgin later. “That the greater the number of people and the greater the territory covered by one language, the easier the transition to internationalism. That although the party had temporarily agreed to the creation of individual republics, each one to speak its own language, that was by no means an ideal situation; hence every true communist should try to restore the dominance of the Russian language in everyday life as the principal language on the whole territory of the USSR.”
That argument was shared to a greater or lesser degree by many party officials who opposed indigenization. The nationality issue became a hot potato in inter-party struggles, with Grigorii Zinoviev, a leader of the so-called Left Opposition, attacking Stalin and others for pushing Ukrainization too far. Stalin allowed Ukrainization to proceed apace. There was no change of policy in 1925, or in 1926; nor was there an official reevaluation of the threat posed by great-power chauvinism as compared with local nationalism—the former continued to be regarded as the main threat. But a few years later, the policy began to change, coming to be more in line with Zinoviev’s critique of indigenization than with Stalin’s defense of it. Ironically, the change began as soon as Stalin got rid of Zinoviev as a political rival. In the fall of 1927, Zinoviev was expelled from the party along with Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and their supporters on accusations of antiparty activity. In 1928, Kaganovich was recalled from Ukraine. As far as Stalin was concerned, his Ukrainization effort there had already run its course.
Stalin’s victory over his opponents in the Politburo meant that in future he would need less support from the national republics and would not have to appease their leaders with new concessions on the nationality question. The GPU was ordered to prepare the first major trial of members of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, so-called members of the “Change of the Landmarks” movement. These were old, often nationally minded cadres who had used the indigenization drive to engage in cultural and academic activities. Stalin and his new appointees in the republics did their best to create the impression that in the realm of nationality policy they were not following in the footsteps of a recently defeated opposition, but in practice they were putting a brake on indigenization and opening a new front of struggle against local nationalism.
The shift in the power balance within the party leadership due to Stalin’s victory over the opposition was only one of the reasons for the change in nationality policy. Another one lay outside the Soviet borders. Whereas Lenin had formulated his policies on the nationality question with an eye to world revolution and the possibility of future European and Asian membership in an international Soviet Union, Stalin had no such illusions by the late 1920s. The conventional wisdom of the day, fully embraced by Stalin, was that the Soviet Union, surrounded by hostile bourgeois powers, could rely only on it
self to guarantee its survival.
In 1926, two conservative coups took place on the western borders of the Soviet Union. The first brought an old enemy of the Bolsheviks, Józef Piłsudski, to power in Poland, while the second installed the authoritarian government of Antanas Smetona in Lithuania. Stalin and other party leaders began to talk about the end of peaceful coexistence with the West, causing a war scare that led people to hoard food and consumer goods. Stalin asserted in April 1927 that the major threat to the Soviet regime was the prospect of a new imperialist war. In the following month, the British intelligence services raided ARCOS, a Soviet-run company in London engaged in trade between the two countries. The raid proved what the British had known all along—that the Soviets were spying on them, using the trading company as a cover. The British government broke off its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which had been established less than three years earlier.
War was in the air, but the Red Army commanders reported that the country was not ready for it. The secret police found peasants in the strategic borderlands increasingly dissatisfied with the regime and waiting for the arrival of the Whites, Poles, or Ukrainian nationalists. Given such attitudes among the population, there were fears that the tenth anniversary of the Soviet state, marked in the fall of 1927, might turn out to be its last. The war scare passed, but not without a major impact on Soviet policy. Many scholars associate the war scare of 1926–1927 with the origins of Stalin’s authoritarian and eventually dictatorial rule, the beginnings of industrialization and collectivization to modernize the Soviet economy, and changes in relations between the center and the republics. The latter kept their own Communist Party structures and nascent parliaments, called Supreme Soviets, and supported local cultures, but key political, economic, and cultural decisions would now come increasingly from Moscow and Moscow alone. Those decisions would encroach on the autonomy of local elites, which would eventually be integrated into a huge administrative pyramid centered on and ruled from the all-Union center.
Around the same time, the government in Moscow became more cautious with regard to policies that might alienate the Russian majority. It also began to see the cultural and political mobilization of the non-Russian nationalities not as an instrument for destabilizing adjoining states and bringing the world revolution to Central and Western Europe, but as bridgeheads for foreign aggression against the Soviet Union. That threat, real or imagined, became a major factor in the party’s rethinking of nationality policy in the Polish borderlands. Support for non-Russian nationalism was curtailed to prevent the West in general, and the Polish leadership in particular, from turning it against the center.
Nowhere was the link between the changed international situation and nationality policy more apparent than in Soviet Belarus, a polity created more in response to international pressures than in response to domestic demands. The war scare culminated in June 1927 with an event directly related to Belarus—the assassination of the Soviet ambassador to Warsaw, Petr Voikov. The assassin was a nineteen-year-old student, Barys Kaverda, who belonged to a pro-Polish Belarusian organization. Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism in neighboring Poland suddenly appeared to change from an opportunity to a threat to the Soviet Union. Many party officials began to suspect that England was turning border states against the USSR, and that those states, in turn, were exploiting anticommunist Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Polish organizations to undermine the Soviet state.
In 1928, Moscow sent a member of the Ukrainian leadership, Volodymyr Zatonsky, to inspect the implementation of nationality policy in Belarus. Zatonsky, a “company man” who readily adjusted his views to changing party policy, produced a devastating report. It claimed that leaders of the Belarusian cultural revival in the party ranks were orienting themselves toward the parochial world of the village and allying themselves too closely with non-communist intellectuals, many of them recent émigrés from Poland. Zatonsky’s critique of Belarusian nationality policy led to a purge of the Belarusian party apparatus, government, and Academy of Sciences to root out Belarusian nationalism. By the end of 1929, such charges had been used to dismiss the commissar of education, Anton Balitski, and the head of the party press department, Aliaksandr Adamovich. Altogether, close to 10 percent of the party membership was expelled. Many of those individuals would be arrested and given long sentences in a purge that began in December 1930. Among its victims was one of the leading architects of Belarusization, the former party official and then president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, Usevalad Ihnatoŭski. Dismissed in 1930, he committed suicide in 1931, foreshadowing the fate of a number of leaders of the Ukrainian indigenization drive, who found themselves under similar attack a few years later.
Ukrainization, which Zatonsky regarded as the model for his critique of practices in Belarus, fared little better in the eyes of Moscow. In the autumn of 1929, as leading figures of the indigenization policy were removed from their positions in Belarus, the GPU attacked prominent Ukrainian academicians and educators with prerevolutionary backgrounds in a highly publicized show trial of alleged nationalists. A total of 474 individuals were accused of belonging to the bogus Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, whose members had allegedly conspired with Piłsudski and leaders of the Ukrainian emigration in the West to start an uprising in Ukraine and separate it from the Soviet Union. Forty-five of the accused, among them the vice president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Serhii Yefremov, were found guilty and sentenced to forced-labor camps for terms ranging from two to ten years. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the leader of the Ukrainian revolution, was arrested and exiled in 1931. He would die under suspicious circumstances in Russia in 1934.
In December 1932, in the midst of policy discussions that would lead to the Great Ukrainian Famine a few weeks later and take the lives of close to 4 million victims, Stalin attacked Mykola Skrypnyk, the old Bolshevik who had replaced Oleksandr Shumsky in 1927 as commissar of education, for non-Bolshevik conduct of Ukrainization. Stalin explained peasant resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture, which the Bolsheviks launched in 1929, and their grain requisitions of 1932 by blaming it on agents of Józef Piłsudski and Ukrainian nationalists in Poland and Ukraine. In the months and years to come, Stalin and his propagandists would claim that Ukrainization had been hijacked by foreign agents and nationalists, who had exploited it against the party, alienating the Ukrainian peasantry from Moscow and endangering the communist project in the countryside instead of helping to implement it.
The Politburo ordered a stop to Ukrainization outside Soviet Ukraine, mainly in the Kuban and Far Eastern regions of the Russian Federation, which had significant Ukrainian populations. That decision led to the closing of newspapers, schools, and teacher-training institutions, and eventually to the Russification of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians. In Soviet Ukraine, Stalin installed new leaders of the party and the secret police. He also ended the Ukrainization not only of the proletariat but also of large groups of bureaucrats and engineers working for the ever-increasing number of institutes and enterprises belonging to all-Union ministries. The Ukrainian Famine took place in the midst of a full-scale onslaught by Stalin against the Ukrainian political elite and the Ukrainian language and culture—a well-established link that prompts many in Ukraine today to speak of the Great Famine as a genocide aimed not only at the peasantry but also at the Ukrainian nation as a whole.
The termination of the Ukrainization policy and the purge of the party officials and intellectuals who had led it produced a wave of arrests as well as suicides of major figures on the Ukrainian political and cultural scene. Fearing arrest, Mykola Skrypnyk committed suicide in July 1933. Two months earlier, the writer and poet Mykola Khvyliovy had shot himself. As early as 1926, Stalin had attacked him for calling on Ukrainian writers to turn away from Moscow and orient themselves toward Western Europe. Oleksandr Shumsky, whom Stalin accused of protecting Khvyliovy, was arrested in 1933. He would be murdered on Stalin’s orders in
1946 by a group of killers from the secret police who entered his train carriage in the middle of the night and administered poison that made the killing look as if it had been caused by a heart attack.
IN UKRAINE AND BELARUS ALIKE, THE REVERSAL OF INDIGENIZATION suspended the development of non-Russian languages and cultures at a moment when increasing numbers of peasants, driven out of the villages by the collectivization campaign, were beginning to migrate to the cities. The cities, in which the Russian language and culture were dominant, turned millions of Ukrainian-and Belarusian-speaking peasants into Russian-speaking workers and intellectuals, even though the cities themselves became predominantly Ukrainian and Belarusian in ethnic composition. In the 1930s, the Russification of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry proceeded at a rate that imperial proponents of a big Russian nation could only have dreamed of.
There was, however, a catch. Linguistic and cultural Russification did not obliterate non-Russian nationality, and millions of new Ukrainian and Belarusian urbanites would be officially classified and treated as such, not as Russians. Their languages and cultures would continue to exist, although clearly subordinate in status. Local non-Russian cadres were still recruited to the party and promoted to positions of responsibility in party and government structures. Affirmative action with regard to local cadres continued into the 1930s. Such policies encouraged ethnic Russians with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian or Belarusian to list their nationality as that of the titular group in their republic of residence. Among those who did so was a young party apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev. Born to Russian parents in the Ukrainian town of Kamenske, he gave his nationality as Ukrainian. By the time he became head of the Communist Party and the most influential Soviet leader in 1964, his official documents identified him as a Russian. The conflicting legacies of indigenization would reverberate for decades to come.
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