Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  That must have been one of the reasons why, in his next highly publicized address, delivered on November 7, 1941, Great October Socialist Revolution Day, on Red Square in front of troops leaving for the front lines only a few dozen kilometers from Moscow, Stalin dropped all reference to the non-Russians. For him, the war was now a purely Russian undertaking. “The war that you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war,” he declared. “May you be inspired in that war by the manly image of our great ancestors—Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitrii Donskoi, Kuzma Minin, Dmitrii Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov! May you be shielded by the victorious banner of the great Lenin!” There was no mention of any non-Russian hero, only glorification of the imperial ones who had often been ridiculed by Soviet propaganda only a few years earlier. Even the reference to Lenin had religious overtones, as the Russian verb oseniat’ (to shield) often means “to bless” or “to make the sign of the cross.” With the regime’s back to the wall, Stalin was invoking symbols and gods previously discarded and desecrated.

  It looked as if the emphasis on the Russian imperial tradition at the expense of the primacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology was working. The transfer of fresh Soviet divisions from the Far East helped Stalin hold on to Moscow in December 1941 and push the Germans back. In January 1943, in the middle of the furious fighting at Stalingrad, Stalin reintroduced military shoulder patches that had been closely associated with the tsarist regime in Soviet prewar propaganda. A less ideological foreign policy allowed for building bridges with former adversaries, Britain and the United States, which formed with the Soviet Union what the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, called the “Grand Alliance” against Germany.

  The Western allies, in particular the United States, helped save the Soviet regime by providing weaponry and equipment through the Lend-Lease program, but Stalin wanted more—a second front in Europe. To gain Western public support, he had to shed the image of a crazed atheistic communist bent on world revolution. In 1943, in preparation for the Teheran summit with the Western leaders, Stalin dissolved the Communist International, which Western public opinion regarded as an institution committed to plotting world revolution and the overthrow of democratic governments around the globe. Stalin also made major concessions to the Russian Orthodox Church, allowing the election of the Moscow patriarch to the throne that had remained vacant since the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks’ antireligious campaign had begun. With the Russian Orthodox Church getting a new lease on life, an important element of imperial Russian history and identity began its return to public consciousness.

  The ideological and cultural return to imperial values culminated with the elimination of “The Internationale,” the song of the international socialist movement of the late nineteenth century, as the national anthem of the Soviet Union. In December 1943, the Politburo approved the lyrics and music of a new anthem written by Aleksandr Aleksandrov, the coauthor of “The Sacred War.” Its music closely resembled that of Aleksandrov’s other hit, the “Hymn of the Bolshevik Party” (1938). But whereas the party hymn had contained not a word about Russia, the new Soviet hymn had no reference to the party. “Great Rus’ has forever conjoined / An indissoluble union of free republics,” went the first two lines of the new hymn. Stalin had personally edited and approved the lyrics. The non-Russian republics of the Union would now have to rally around Russia in the struggle against foreign aggression.

  DURING THE MOST DIFFICULT FIRST MONTHS AND YEARS OF THE war, when the authorities in Moscow focused on stoking the fires of Russian nationalism, their counterparts in other Soviet republics, especially those occupied by the Germans, were allowed and even encouraged to exploit their own nationalism to the maximum in order to mobilize anti-German resistance behind the front lines and motivate their ethnic brethren in the ranks of the Red Army.

  Very soon after Molotov’s speech of June 22, 1941, Ukrainian writers discovered their own Great Patriotic War as a source of inspiration. Apparently they did not consider the war against Napoleon to be theirs (Napoleon’s army had never entered Ukraine). In a letter addressed to Stalin, leading Ukrainian cultural figures claimed that in the early modern era the Ukrainian Cossacks had waged their own patriotic war against the Poles and Germans. Ukrainian historians and propagandists found their own Aleksandr Nevsky in the person of the thirteenth-century Prince Danylo of Halych. Ironically enough, while Nevsky had fought against the West, Danylo had fought the Mongols with the help of Western allies and even accepted a royal crown from the pope. But such historical details were readily overlooked in the process of emulating the elder Russian brother and contributing to war propaganda.

  In Belarus, the most prominent national poet, Yanka Kupala, also turned to history for inspiration. He praised the struggle of “my heroic Belarusian people” under Stalin’s leadership against the “cannibal and bloodsucker” Hitler. Kupala called for a jacquerie, or peasant revolt, against the invader: “Partisans, partisans, Belarusian sons! / For bondage, for shackles, slaughter the evil Hitlerites so that they do not revive for eons!” Officials at the Belarusian partisan headquarters in Moscow were eager to exploit all available symbols of Soviet Belarusian nationalism. They gave the name of Kastus Kalinoŭski (Konstanty Kalinowski), who had been conveniently transformed in Soviet Belarusian historiography from a leader of the Polish revolt against Russia in 1863 into a fighter for the Belarusian people, to one of the best-known partisan units active on Belarusian territory. Its core consisted of officers of the secret police who were parachuted into western Belarus in the spring of 1943.

  While non-Russian heroes were recognized locally, they found it difficult to gain visibility at the all-Union level and function on a par with their Russian counterparts. In mid-1942, Stalin approved the creation of new military awards for Red Army officers. They were named after Prince Aleksandr Nevsky and two tsarist generals, Aleksandr Suvorov, who had crushed the Polish uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko in the late eighteenth century, and Mikhail Kutuzov, who had surrendered Moscow to Napoleon in 1812 but had then driven him out of Russia. All three commanders were ethnic Russians. Among the non-Russians, even Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who was as popular among the soldiers as Aleksandr Nevsky, thanks to the film made about him on the eve of the war, was not given similar recognition. Ukrainian cultural figures felt offended.

  The situation began to change only in the fall of 1943, when the Red Army began its offensive in Ukraine and Belarus. Late that summer, the best-known Ukrainian filmmaker, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, appealed to the party boss of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, to establish a high military award honoring Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Khrushchev turned to Stalin, suggesting that such an award would raise morale among Ukrainians in the Red Army and beyond. Khmelnytsky, wrote Khrushchev, was very popular in Ukraine, because he had fought for its liberation and the union of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Stalin agreed. In October 1943, Moscow announced the creation of an award designed by Ukrainian artists and featuring Khmelnytsky’s name in its Ukrainian rather than its Russian transcription. The Pravda editorial that accompanied the publication of the decree stressed that the seventeenth-century hetman had been a great statesman and had understood that the Ukrainian people could survive only in union with the fraternal Russian people.

  That was just the beginning. A few days later, Stalin ordered four army groups fighting in Ukraine to be renamed as four Ukrainian Fronts. In the spring of 1944, the name “Belarusian Front” was given to three army groups fighting in Belarus. By that time, Ukraine, Belarus, and other republics had their own commissariats of defense and international relations. After the Teheran Conference with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in December 1943, where Stalin received a much-desired promise to open a second front in Europe, and preparations were made for the formation of what would become known as the United Nations Organization, the Soviet leader initiated constitutional changes creating an array of formally independent Soviet republics, the object being to claim more seats in the future U
nited Nations. None of the republics had real independence, or even autonomy, in administrative matters, to say nothing of military and international affairs, but Stalin managed to convince the Allies to admit Ukraine and Belarus, along with the Soviet Union (understood as Russia), into the UN General Assembly. The big Russian nation, now with three voices instead of one, had reentered the international arena.

  The simultaneous mobilization of Russian and non-Russian nationalism in the effort to defeat Germany created new challenges for the Soviet authorities in Moscow, who had to ensure that non-Russian nationalism did not overshadow Russian nationalism. In November 1943, Georgii Aleksandrov, the head of the propaganda department of the party’s Central Committee in Moscow, criticized Ukrainian writers for a letter celebrating the liberation of Kyiv from Nazi occupation. According to Aleksandrov, the letter implied that there were “two leading peoples in the Soviet Union, the Russians and the Ukrainians,” although it was “universally accepted that the Russian people was the elder brother in the Soviet Union’s family of peoples.”

  Aleksandrov was among the party officials who supported the decision to deny the Stalin Prize to the History of the Kazakh SSR, published in 1943 by a group of Moscow and Kazakh authors led by the prominent Soviet historian Anna Pankratova, on the grounds that it discredited imperial Russia. He wrote: “The book is anti-Russian, as the authors’ sympathies are on the side of those revolting against tsarism, and there is no effort to exonerate Russia.” Pankratova and her colleagues never received the Stalin Prize.

  But finding a balance between the class and national principles, as well as between Russian and non-Russian nationalism within that context, was no easy task. As long as the war was being waged, the patriotism of every Soviet nationality was useful. Thus, while Aleksandrov and like-minded party officials and intellectuals pushed the Russian line, patriots of other peoples were allowed to push back. Ukrainian writers and historians protested the attempts of Russian authors to claim Danylo of Halych as a Russian prince, or to refer to western Ukraine as ancient Rus’, or Russian land. Pankratova and her colleagues appealed Aleksandrov’s decision to higher party authorities, claiming that they could not rehabilitate the colonial policies of the tsars and that, if there had been no oppression before the revolution, there would have been no revolution either.

  The senior Politburo members Georgii Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov tried to settle the dispute by calling a meeting of historians to discuss the work of Pankratova and her colleagues. It ended with no clear winners, and the party postponed its verdict until the end of the war. In August 1945, a high party organ, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, issued a resolution condemning the 1943 history of Kazakhstan and ordering Kazakh historians to revise it. One cannot imagine the Kazakh authorities passing such a resolution without an explicit signal from Moscow.

  The Soviet victory against Germany marked the end of the nationality policy originating with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The status of the non-Russian nationalities was radically downgraded and Russian dominance reasserted—a policy shift signaled by Stalin himself. In a highly publicized toast that he delivered on May 24, 1945, at the Kremlin banquet in honor of Soviet military commanders, Stalin declared:

  As a representative of our Soviet government, I would like to raise a toast to the health of our Soviet people and, first and foremost, of the Russian people. I drink first and foremost to the health of the Russian people because it is the foremost of all our nations making up the Soviet Union. I raise a toast to the health of the Russian people because in this war and earlier it has merited the title, if you will, of the leading force of our Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I raise a toast to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people but also because it has good sense, political good sense in every respect, and endurance.

  On the following day, the toast was published in slightly revised form in the main Soviet newspapers. In years to come it would be printed and reprinted more than once, signaling the new turn in the party’s nationality policy. Oleksandr Korniichuk, the winner of the Stalin Prize for his play Bohdan Khmelnytsky, was made aware of the change even before the toast. In early May 1945, his award-winning play was taken out of production when a pro-Soviet Polish delegation visited Ukraine. Korniichuk, who was then still Stalin’s favorite playwright, was appalled. He complained that no one had curtailed performances in Moscow of the much more anti-Polish opera Ivan Susanin. Korniichuk got nowhere. His play was now subject to criticism and on its way out, while Ivan Susanin, a reworking of the imperial-era Life for the Tsar, remained on stage.

  The regime was prepared to improve relations with the Poles by curbing Soviet Ukrainian nationalism, but not its much more powerful Russian counterpart. The Great Patriotic War was over, and not every brand of patriotism was now welcome.

  17

  THE SOVIET PEOPLE

  JOSEPH STALIN DIED ON MARCH 5, 1953. FOUR DAYS LATER, AS part of the ceremonial farewell to the deceased, his body was placed next to Lenin’s in the Red Square mausoleum. He was mourned not just as the head of government but also as the leader of working people throughout the world.

  The new leaders of the Soviet Union invited the heads of communist governments of Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea as well as the leaders of the communist parties of Western Europe, including those of Italy, France, Spain, and Britain, to join them atop the mausoleum. Those delivering eulogies included members of Stalin’s inner circle and representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia, in particular the composer Dmitrii Shostakovich and the writer and war poet Konstantin Simonov. The leaders of the Soviet republics were nowhere in sight, as they were too insignificant in the Soviet hierarchy. The global spread of communism, not the nationality question in the Soviet Union, was the top agenda item for Stalin’s successors. Officially, the Soviet nationality question was considered to have been solved by Stalin himself.

  “The solution of one of the most complicated problems in the history of social development, the national question, is associated with the name of Comrade Stalin,” declared the new head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov, from the top of the mausoleum. “For the first time in history the supreme theoretician of the national question, Comrade Stalin, made possible the liquidation of age-old national dissension on the scale of a huge multinational state.” Malenkov then explained exactly what the solution of the nationality question in the USSR entailed: “Under the leadership of Comrade Stalin our party has managed to overcome the economic and cultural backwardness of previously oppressed peoples, uniting all the nations of the Soviet Union into one fraternal family and forging the friendship of peoples.”

  Conspicuously, Malenkov failed to mention Russia in his praise of Stalin’s achievements on the nationalities front. In fact, the Russocentrism of Soviet nationality policy constituted Stalin’s main amendment to Lenin’s formula for handling the nationality question in a multiethnic state. Apparently Stalin’s successors were not certain what to make of that part of his legacy.

  The gap between official rhetoric and the less-than-satisfactory condition of the friendship of peoples in the Soviet Union was revealed soon after the state funeral by the actions of the new regime’s security tsar, Lavrentii Beria, by far the most powerful of Stalin’s successors. In his speech at the funeral, Beria talked not only about the Soviet people but also about the peoples of the Soviet Union. Shortly thereafter, he took the initiative of stopping the anti-Semitic campaign that treated Jews as aliens and agents of the West. Among those whom he released from imprisonment was Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of the man who was officially the second most powerful official in the land, Viacheslav Molotov. On Stalin’s orders, she had spent more than four years in prison while her terrified husband had maintained his position in the Soviet leadership. He had to watch his every step as he helped his boss—and his wife’s captor—run the country.

  In June 1953, Beria gained ap
proval from the party leadership for measures aiming to end the Russification of the non-Russian republics: the first secretaries of party committees now had to belong to the titular nationality, cadres who did not speak the local languages were to be recalled, and official correspondence was to be conducted in the languages of the republics. It sounded like the beginning of a major reform of Soviet nationality policy, turning away from the Russocentrism of the Stalin years back to the indigenization of the 1920s.

  We do not know how far Beria was prepared to go in his revision of Stalin’s nationality policy. Before the end of June 1953, he was arrested as the result of a plot engineered by his main rival, Nikita Khrushchev, the former viceroy of Ukraine. By the end of the year, Beria would be shot on trumped-up charges of working for the British. He was also accused of attempts to revive bourgeois nationalist elements in the republics and undermine friendship between the peoples of the USSR and the “great Russian people.” It now appeared that Stalinist Russocentrism was again the order of the day. But the story was more complicated than that. Despite the execution of Beria, the plotters did not reverse measures taken on his initiative to check the Russification of the non-Russian republican leadership and party apparatus, or of education and culture. Some of those measures would remain in effect until the last days of the Soviet Union.

  THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN STALIN’S HEIRS NOTWITHSTANDING, the dictator’s death brought about a general relaxation of the political climate. At the end of the war, Stalin had moved to reestablish party control over ideology and culture, which had been shaken during the conflict, and to restore the primacy of Russia and the Russians in the Soviet hierarchy of nations. The Zhdanov period, named after Stalin’s chief ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov, brought official attacks on all manifestations of liberalism or deviations from the party line. Real or imagined manifestations of openness to the West and writings that strayed from party-approved models of classical Russian literature of the imperial era came under fire. Among the victims were not only writers and artists but also the all-powerful head of the propaganda apparatus during the war, Georgii Aleksandrov. Aleksandrov was accused of failing to condemn idealism strongly enough in his History of Western Philosophy. The renowned film director Sergei Eisenstein was criticized for depicting Ivan the Terrible as a weak and confused leader in the second part of his film about the Russian tsar, whose first part had been admired by Stalin.