Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  It fell to Stalin himself to change the Soviet formula, removing from it the reference to the German threat. What remained was a reference to the threat allegedly posed by the disintegration of the Polish state, but the peoples to be saved from it were the same—the Ukrainians and Belarusians. The list of those whom the Soviet Union allegedly wished to rescue was incomplete. Missing were not only the Jews, of whom there were significant numbers in the soon to be “reunited” provinces, but also the Poles: the Soviet-German demarcation line that Molotov and Ribbentrop had drawn in August 1939 left not only ethnically Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, but also parts of the Warsaw and Lublin provinces—which had been settled largely by Poles—on the Soviet side. Stalin clearly did not want to annoy Hitler by mentioning that he was saving Jews, while claiming that he was saving Poles from Poles made no sense whatever. Stalin wanted some nationalities but not others, and the Poles constituted a special challenge that went beyond the legitimacy question.

  The USSR had long abandoned its earlier attempts to gain the loyalty of ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland and other neighboring states in order to promote world revolution. With the rise of the German threat, it ceased to regard the members of those nationalities living in the USSR as allies in a future Soviet offensive against the West and began to see them as a potential threat to the USSR in case of a German invasion. The most recent threat of such a scenario had come in March 1939, with the German destruction of Czechoslovakia. In the eastern part of the Czechoslovak state, the government of Transcarpathian Ukraine had declared its independence, and fears ran high in Moscow that Hitler would use that declaration to declare war on the USSR under the banner of reunifying the Ukrainian lands. Hitler decided not to play the Ukrainian card against Stalin and awarded Transcarpathian Ukraine to the Hungarians, who crushed the pro-independence movement there. But Stalin had learned his lesson. He wanted no more Ukrainian or Belarusian enclaves outside the USSR; nor did he want to “share” any ethnic group, the Poles in particular, with his new ally.

  In mid-September, Stalin decided to renegotiate the pact and change the dividing line between the German and Soviet spheres in Eastern Europe. He asked Ribbentrop to come back to Moscow. The Nazi foreign minister obliged. A Soviet movie camera captured his arrival in Moscow on September 27. Dressed in a long leather coat, Ribbentrop greeted the Soviet commanders with a Hitler salute. The next day, Ribbentrop and Molotov drew a new line on the map, which Stalin signed in blue and Ribbentrop in red. Under the new arrangement, Stalin traded Polish ethnic territory around Warsaw and Lublin for the Baltic state of Lithuania. For the time being, this meant that the Soviet occupation of Poland would be limited to territories settled largely by Ukrainians and Belarusians. Most of the East Slavic territories, including the city of Lviv, which had briefly been held by the tsarist army in 1914–1915, would now be under Stalin’s control—the unexpected realization of a dream of generations of imperial Russian nation-builders.

  The new occupiers from the East entered Lviv under the Soviet Ukrainian banner—a change reflected in the name of the Red Army forces engaged in the operation, which were called the Ukrainian Front. In Belarus, similar Red Army units constituted the Belarusian Front. In justifying the Soviet entry into World War II and the annexation of the newly occupied Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, Stalin relied on the rhetoric of the 1920s, which meant a partial return to the policy of national communism and exploitation of the cultural aspects of Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism. In the fall of 1939, the former provinces of eastern Poland were declared parts of the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republics. This was proclaimed a triumph of Soviet nationality policy and a manifestation of the friendship of peoples. The use of the nationality card in the western parts of the newly enlarged republics brought back policies promoting Ukrainian and Belarusian cultural agendas that had first been implemented in the 1920s.

  But these were different times. Russian nationalism was now at the core of the new Soviet identity, and the mobilization of other East Slavic nationalisms was conditioned by that new reality. The laws on the incorporation of the former Polish territories into the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics infringed on Russia’s status as the only “great nation” in the USSR—the Ukrainians and Belarusians were given that appellation as well. But some great nations were still more equal than others, or even showed a tendency to absorb others. Thus Vladimir Picheta, the president of Minsk University in the 1920s, who was arrested in 1930 on charges of being both a Great Russian chauvinist and a Belarusian nationalist, decided after his release from prison that it was much safer to be accused of chauvinism than nationalism. In a brochure written for mass circulation, he welcomed the annexation of eastern Poland as the reunification of historical Russian lands.

  If one can trust the reports of Stalin’s secret police, Soviet entry into the war was met with enthusiasm by much of the Soviet population. The younger generation, indoctrinated in Soviet Marxist ideology and exposed to antifascist rhetoric, mistook it for the beginning of a Soviet-German war, the long-awaited struggle between communism and fascism. Many members of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia welcomed it as a reclamation of “ancient Russian lands”—a reprise of the imperial euphoria of the first months of World War I. Finally, many Soviet Ukrainian and Belarusian intellectuals welcomed the war as a reunification of their native land. The management of relations between Stalinist dogma, newly dominant Russian nationalism, and the reasserted Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism would involve numerous twists and turns of official policy.

  AS ALWAYS, THE UKRAINIANS PRESENTED THE MAIN CHALLENGE to the regime in the formulation of the new nationality discourse and, eventually, policy. The rehabilitation of the traditional Ukrainian historical narrative, expressing pride in Ukrainian Cossack history, began a few years before the start of World War II, largely in preparation for the war and, not surprisingly, as part of the rehabilitated Russian imperial narrative. Only those parts of the Ukrainian narrative that fitted the prerevolutionary imperial narrative were selected for inclusion.

  The key symbol of the new treatment of the Russian and Ukrainian historical narratives was the seventeenth-century Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had been denounced in Soviet literature of the mid-1930s as a “traitor and ardent enemy of the Ukrainian peasantry” and the architect of “union between the Ukrainian and Russian feudal lords.” The authorities boarded up the large monument to him in downtown Kyiv whenever communist demonstrations took place and considered tearing it down altogether. But Khmelnytsky was also a major hero of Russian imperial historiography who had brought about the “reunification of Rus’.” That turned out to be the key factor in the rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky in Soviet historical discourse. Given the prevailing circumstances, the rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky began in Moscow, not in Kyiv, and it was undertaken at the highest level.

  In August 1937, Soviet newspapers published an official statement on history textbooks that criticized the outdated approach to the Ukrainian hetman. “The authors do not see any positive role in Khmelnytsky’s actions in the seventeenth century, in his struggle against Ukraine’s occupation by the Poland of the lords and the Turkey of the sultan,” declared Pravda. The author of the passage was Stalin himself. He went on to say that the annexation of Ukraine and Georgia to the Russian state was a “lesser evil” as compared with their takeover by other foreign powers. The elements of the traditional Ukrainian and Georgian narratives that glorified their unification with Russia were now restored to favor.

  With the change of policy in Moscow, Ukrainian writers embraced the possibility of reasserting at least part of their heritage. The young Ukrainian playwright Oleksandr Korniichuk promptly wrote a play titled Bohdan Khmelnytsky in which he lauded the Cossack hetman for his war against Poland. Believers in the old class-based approach to history attacked Korniichuk, but the party leadership in Moscow backed the politically shrewd author. In 1939, the play was performed at t
he Malyi Theater in Moscow and began its triumphal circuit of theaters throughout the USSR. The film version, produced in 1941, received the highest literary award, the Stalin Prize. Khmelnytsky had become a member of the Soviet pantheon of heroes on a par with Aleksandr Nevsky and Minin and Pozharsky.

  Korniichuk’s play was among the theater productions brought to Lviv and western Ukraine in the wake of the Soviet annexation of the region. Korniichuk himself served as a plenipotentiary of Soviet Ukrainian culture in the newly occupied territories and played an important role in the Ukrainization of the cultural scene that was formerly not just dominated but monopolized by the Poles. In the fall of 1939, Polish theater and opera productions were swiftly replaced with Ukrainian and Russian ones. The authorities proceeded with the Ukrainization of the press and the educational system. Ethnic Poles were purged from administrative, cultural, and educational institutions. Arrested en masse, many of them were imprisoned or exiled to remote parts of the Soviet Union, including former politicians and police officers and veterans of the military.

  Although the local Ukrainian intelligentsia was recruited to help with the de-Polonization and Ukrainization of the region’s administration, education, and culture, key positions were reserved for cadres from the east, such as Mykhailo Marchenko, the new president of Lviv University. He was parachuted into his position from the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kyiv, where he had headed the department of the history of feudalism and had been working on a dissertation on the Ukrainian-Polish wars of the second half of the seventeenth century. On Marchenko’s watch at Lviv, Polish professors were removed from administrative positions at the university, Ukrainian-language courses were introduced, and the number of ethnic Ukrainian students increased. From 1919 to 1939, the university’s official name had been Jan Kazimierz University, in honor of John II Casimir, the king who had fought against Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1651. Now the name was changed to Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Franko was a major Ukrainian writer and political activist of the pre–World War I era.

  Marchenko was hated by the Polish professors, many of whom lost not only their administrative positions but also their jobs. But it soon turned out that Marchenko himself was under suspicion. He was removed from his position in the spring of 1940 and placed under police surveillance after his return to Kyiv. He was arrested in June 1941 on charges of maintaining ties with the Ukrainian nationalist underground. The rise and fall of Marchenko at the helm of Lviv University coincided with the rise and fall of Ukrainization in the newly annexed territories. Although Moscow made an all-out push for Ukrainization between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940, supporting the local Ukrainian cadres and going after the old Polish guard, by summer the policy had changed. The Poles were still persecuted, but some steps were also taken to accommodate them, while the Ukrainians were favored in cultural policy but attacked for real or perceived manifestations of political nationalism. As far as Moscow was concerned, it was a short step from dedicated party Ukrainizer to Ukrainian nationalist: constant vigilance was required to keep in step with the party line.

  One reason for changing nationality policy and broadening the scope of repressions and deportations was the course of the war and Stalin’s foreign-policy calculations. The fall of Paris to the Nazis in May 1940 caught Stalin by surprise—he had expected a lengthy conflict on the western front. Now Hitler could turn east and attack the Soviet Union at almost any time. The Soviet dictator, still believing that the farther west he moved his borders, the more security he gained, rushed to claim his part of the booty in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. He rapidly occupied the Baltic states and claimed Moldavia and ethnically Ukrainian territories from Romania. He also began a war with Finland, which would not go the way of the Baltic states and mounted strong resistance, bleeding the Red Army and minimizing Soviet territorial gains along the Soviet-Finnish border. But claiming territory was only part of Stalin’s calculus: securing it in the face of the coming aggression was another major task.

  Whom Hitler could count on if he moved into western Ukraine and Belarus was the question that Stalin and his security team were trying to answer in the month after the fall of Paris. The Poles were still disloyal, but, given German policy in occupied central and western Poland, they were no Germanophiles—the executions of thousands of Polish political, cultural, and intellectual leaders were carried out with little or no secrecy and widely known in Polish circles. There was a different attitude among the Ukrainians, with many of them eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Germans. Old-timers looked back fondly to Austrian rule, which had created opportunities for Ukrainians to assert themselves. Many of the younger western Ukrainians rejected not only Polish but also Soviet rule and joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. They had high hopes that the Nazis would help them establish an independent Ukrainian state. Along with former members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, who were suspected of either Ukrainian nationalism or disloyalty to Stalin, Ukrainian nationalists became the main target of the Soviet occupation authorities.

  The nationalist leaders’ sympathy toward and collaboration with the Germans (in early 1941 they surreptitiously formed two Special Forces battalions under the auspices of German military intelligence) was reason enough for the Soviets to take action against them. Moreover, their brand of nationalism stressed the complete distinctness of Ukrainians from Russians, which exacerbated ethnic tensions resulting from the Stalin regime’s reassertion of Russian nationalism. Few sets of data provide a better understanding of Soviet nationality policy in the annexed territories of Ukraine and Belarus than the figures on Soviet deportations of unreliable political elements from those areas. In February 1940, during the first wave of large-scale deportations, close to 140,000 Poles were shipped from western Ukraine and Belarus to Siberia and Central Asia. They included former government officials and policemen as well as military veterans, along with many members of their families. More deportations would follow, targeting Poles, Jews, and finally, Ukrainians and Belarusians. In May 1941, more than 11,000 Ukrainians would be deported from the former Polish territories to the Soviet interior.

  THE NOTION OF PATRIA, WHICH IN THE RUSSIAN RENDITION OF motherland (rodina) and fatherland (otechestvo) was fully rehabilitated in the Soviet Union only in 1934, became the rallying cry of the communist leadership after Hitler, having failed to invade the British Isles in the fall of 1940, turned his armies eastward and attacked his former Soviet ally on June 22, 1941.

  On that day, Stalin, too stunned to address the population himself, told his right-hand man, Viacheslav Molotov, whose signature stood next to Ribbentrop’s on the pact that Hitler had just violated, to read the text of the appeal edited by Stalin himself. Taken by surprise, the Soviet dictator had nowhere to look for consolation, reassurance, and inspiration but to history. The text of the appeal read by Molotov stated, “Not for the first time, our people must deal with an arrogant enemy attacker. In the past, our people responded to Napoleon’s campaign against Russia with a patriotic war, and Napoleon suffered defeat, which led to his downfall. That will also be the fate of the arrogant Hitler, who has proclaimed a new campaign against our country. The Red Army and all our people will again wage a victorious patriotic war for the Motherland, for honor, for freedom.” The German-Soviet conflict would eventually become known in the Soviet Union as the “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People.”

  A few days after Molotov’s speech, two Soviet songwriters—the composer Aleksandr Aleksandrov, who had founded the Red Army Ensemble, and the poet Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach—wrote a song that became an emblem of the war. Titled “The Sacred War,” it would lead every Soviet morning radio broadcast from the autumn of 1941 until the end of the war. Beginning with the words “Rise, tremendous country, / Rise to do battle to the death,” the song referred to the motherland but not to the party. According to one theory, the lyrics had actually been written not by Lebedev-Kumach but by a provincial schoolteacher, A
leksandr Bode, back in 1916, during World War I. Lebedev-Kumach allegedly replaced a few words, writing “fascist” instead of “Teutonic” and “our great Union” instead of “our Russian native land.” The song, which revived themes and tropes of prerevolutionary Russian nationalism, could ignore the party but had to take account of the multiethnic composition of the USSR and rally the patriotism not only of the Russians but also of the other peoples.

  That was the theme of Stalin’s first public speech of the war, delivered on July 3, 1941. After explaining how right he had been to sign the nonaggression pact with Hitler, he called Hitler and Ribbentrop “monsters and cannibals.” The distressed Stalin called his subjects “brothers and sisters,” trying to create a family feeling and a sense of spiritual, almost religious brotherhood among the Soviet peoples. According to Stalin, the goal of the German invasion was “to reestablish the rule of the landowners, to reestablish tsarism, to destroy the national culture and national statehood of the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and other free peoples of the Soviet Union, to Germanize them and turn them into slaves of German princes and barons.”

  The appeal had little immediate impact. German divisions were advancing eastward, crushing the resistance of the Red Army, which was manned largely by peasants who had little sense of loyalty to the regime that had put them through the nightmare of collectivization and, in the case of Ukraine and southern Russia, a devastating famine. The non-Russian inhabitants of the western territories that had been newly annexed and quickly lost by the Soviets tended to see the Germans as liberators (they would soon be proved wrong). In the fall, after retreating from the Baltics and Belarus and losing 600,000 soldiers who had been surrounded near Kyiv, the Red Army was waging war on Russian territory for the very survival of the regime. Almost all the non-Russian provinces of the western USSR were lost.