The Zhdanov campaign, which sought to uphold the Russocentric character of official ideology and culture, gained new impetus with the start of the Cold War in 1948. Provoked by Soviet behavior in occupied Eastern Europe, where Stalin established communist regimes, and by the geopolitical contest in Turkey and Iran, the new international conflict pitted Moscow against its former British and American allies. The newly created Jewish state of Israel became one of the battlegrounds in an undeclared war for global influence, as the Soviets tried to turn it into their ally in the Middle East. At the same time, the Kremlin began to look with suspicion on Soviet Jewry, suspected of sympathizing with the West. A central aspect of the new ideological campaign in the USSR was an attack on “rootless cosmopolitanism,” a term used as a cover for the persecution of Jews and the promotion of xenophobic and anti-Western tendencies in the interpretation of the Russian cultural tradition and identity.
A return to Russocentrism meant a return to antinationalist campaigns in the non-Russian republics. Starting in 1946, party resolutions were passed to combat alleged nationalist deviations in the republics, including Ukraine and Belarus. Literary history became a target in both republics. In Belarus, the authors of one study were accused of drawing a direct line from the “Polish squires” and “Westernizers and liberals of old” to Soviet Belarusian literature while neglecting historical links between Belarusian and Russian democratic literature and culture. In Ukraine, party ideologues questioned details of literary history and exposed “errors,” condemning, for example, the failure to represent the progressive role of the Russian people in the opera Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Ukraine’s best-known filmmaker, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, also found himself under attack and was confined to Moscow, with no right to visit Ukraine. In 1951, a campaign was launched against one of Ukraine’s best poets, Volodymyr Sosiura, for his patriotic poem “Love Ukraine” (1944). What had been welcomed in wartime was now condemned as a manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism.
Nikita Khrushchev took part in the Stalin-inspired attack on Ukrainian cultural figures during his tenure in Ukraine, which ended in December 1949. But once he was no longer under the dictator’s thumb after Stalin’s death in 1953, he continued the turn away from Stalin’s policies. In that regard he was a continuator rather than an opponent of his archrival, Lavrentii Beria. Khrushchev and Beria emerged as contenders for power in the post-Stalin leadership, but, as noted above, Khrushchev soon outmaneuvered Beria and had him shot. Beria was dead before the end of 1953. What Khrushchev offered his supporters in the Politburo who feared Beria’s growing power and ability to use the secret police against them was a form of collective leadership. It took Khrushchev a good part of the rest of the decade to rid himself of other potential rivals in the Politburo, ranging from the head of the Soviet government, Georgii Malenkov, to the minister of foreign affairs, Viacheslav Molotov, and the minister of defense and hero of the “Great Patriotic War,” Georgii Zhukov.
Khrushchev’s years in power became known for a number of ambitious reforms, including decentralization of economic decision-making to the regions, attempts to revive struggling Soviet agriculture by paying salaries to peasants, and an ambitious campaign of building new urban housing. But few of his initiatives attracted more attention than his de-Stalinization campaign, which condemned Stalin’s crimes against the government and party elite (but not against the people), released most political prisoners from the Gulag—the state-run system of concentration camps—and launched public debate on economic, social, and cultural development. Khrushchev’s relaxation of ideological controls in the late 1950s produced a period in Soviet politics and culture that became known as the Khrushchev Thaw.
The search for a new nationality policy became part of Khrushchev’s reformist course, which was closely linked to his broader de-Stalinizing agenda. Khrushchev was originally quite hesitant to act on nationality policy. The nature and limits of his early thinking on the nationalities question are well demonstrated by changes to the Soviet anthem. The reference to Stalin was removed in 1955 and replaced with a reference to the party that had been completely absent from the original lyrics that had been written with Stalin’s participation. Thus the collective leadership and wisdom of the party replaced the power of the authoritarian leader, but the rest of the anthem, including the opening reference to the Great Rus’ uniting the other Soviet peoples, remained intact.
In January 1954, Khrushchev launched his first major public initiative, a lavish celebration of the tercentenary of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s acceptance of Russian suzerainty. The accompanying ideological campaign illustrated that there were limits to how much the Russian imperial narrative could be combined with the non-Russian national narratives under the banner of Marxist rhetoric and Soviet-style “friendship of peoples.” The Pereiaslav Council of 1654, at which the Ukrainian Cossack officers had decided to accept the protectorate of the Muscovite tsar, was now to be officially commemorated, as the Theses on the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia, endorsed that year by the Central Committee in Moscow, made clear.
The term “reunification” harked back to the preoccupation of Russian imperial historiography with the “reunification of Rus’.” It had made sense in the imperial period, when it was an article of faith that Rus’—or rather, Russia—had been inhabited by one people in Kyivan times, then divided by the Mongols, Lithuanians, and Poles, and then finally reunited in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the auspices of the Muscovite tsars. But Soviet historians claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were separate peoples, not mere branches of the same nation. How they could be reunited was a paradox never explained or resolved by Soviet propagandists. What the term made manifest, however, was that the model of the big Russian nation, first divided by foreign enemies and then reunited by Russian rulers, was again in favor.
The theses on the anniversary of the alleged reunification approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow read: “By linking their destiny forever with the fraternal Russian people, the Ukrainian people freed themselves from foreign subjugation and ensured their national development. On the other hand, the reunion of Ukraine and Russia helped considerably to strengthen the Russian state and enhance its international prestige. The friendship between the working people of Russia and Ukraine grew firmer and stronger in the joint struggle against the common enemies—tsardom, the serf-owning landlords, the capitalists, and foreign invaders.”
Thus, an event condemned by Soviet historians as absolutely evil in the 1920s because of its role in strengthening tsarism, and then recast as a lesser evil within the discourse of Russian statism in the 1930s, was now declared wholly positive. By acquiring new territories, the tsars had unwittingly strengthened the ties between the Russian and non-Russian working masses. Soviet propagandists had managed to square the circle: Russian imperialism had finally found a way to use class-based discourse to justify its reappearance in the Soviet Union.
The anniversary celebrations were accompanied by a lavish gift presented by the Moscow leadership on behalf of one fraternal people to another—the transfer of the Crimean Peninsula from the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation to that of the Ukrainian republic. On the symbolic level, the transfer was supposed to manifest the level of trust that now existed between the two nations. In practical terms, it meant that the authorities in Moscow did not take the differences between them too seriously and believed that ethnocultural issues could and should be subordinated to administrative and economic considerations. The Crimea, which had had difficulty recovering economically from the devastation of World War II and the Soviet deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, would benefit from administrative integration with the mainland republic on which it depended for most of its industrial and agricultural resources.
The official celebration of Russo-Ukrainian unity also contained an element of Slavic conspiracy against the non-Slavs. With Moscow refusing to allow the return of the Crimean Tatars to their homelan
d, Ukraine became implicated along with Russia in the unlawful deportation of and discrimination against an ethnic minority. Moreover, Moscow declared the anniversary a major event not only for Russians and Ukrainians, but also for the other Soviet nationalities. Indeed, the historical outline of Russo-Ukrainian relations presented in the Theses was used as a template for representing Russian relations with other Soviet nationalities until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine’s unofficial status was now elevated to that of second most important Soviet republic. Khrushchev, who had served as de facto viceroy of Ukraine for more than a decade, relied heavily on his Ukrainian clients to gain and then strengthen his position in Moscow as the sole leader of the Soviet Union. After conclusively defeating opposition to his rule in the summer of 1957, he began to bring Ukrainian cadres to Moscow and promote them. The first secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Oleksii Kyrychenko, became the de facto second secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow; his successor in Kyiv, Mykola Pidhorny, was installed as secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow after the ouster of Kyrychenko; and the onetime party leader of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Leonid Brezhnev, became head of the Soviet parliament. By the early 1960s, the Ukrainian party had become the junior partner of the Russian elite in running the Soviet Empire. Although Beria’s norm that the first party secretary of a Union republic was to be a member of the titular nationality remained in place, Moscow sent its own people, invariably Russians or Ukrainians, to keep an eye on the locals.
IN HIS SECRET SPEECH AT THE TWENTIETH PARTY CONGRESS IN February 1956, Khrushchev launched a major campaign to revise the Stalinist legacy in all aspects of public life. Stalin was accused of creating and promoting a cult of personality and persecuting loyal Soviet cadres within the party and the Red Army. His atrocities against national minorities were not mentioned or admitted publicly, but in practice under Khrushchev’s leadership the Soviet Union took steps to rehabilitate not only individuals but whole nations “punished” by Stalin during the war. In 1957, Khrushchev restored or formed anew the Kabardino-Balkar, Kalmyk, and Chechen-Ingush autonomous republics within the Russian Federation, allowing the minorities deported by Stalin on charges of collaboration with the Germans to return to their ancestral homelands. The rehabilitation was partial, as neither Germans nor Koreans nor Crimean Tatars were allowed to return, although police control over their settlements in exile was significantly relaxed by the authorities.
Khrushchev and his supporters tried to strike a balance between the legacy of Stalinism and what they called a return to Leninist norms—that is, the policies of the 1920s. One of Khrushchev’s initiatives that was deeply rooted in the policies of that period was the antireligious campaign, which he launched in the late 1950s. In the course of World War II, Stalin had ended the open persecution of religious believers while putting religious organizations under strict government control. The main beneficiary of that change was the Russian Orthodox Church, which became an agent of the state in the process of Russifying and Sovietizing the western borderlands. In 1946, Stalin arranged the liquidation of the Ukrainian Catholic (formerly Uniate) Church in Galicia and Belarus by following the Russian imperial model of “reunifying” the Uniates with the Russian Orthodox Church. As in the nineteenth century, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were united in one Russian church. In official terms, however, the liquidation was carried out under the slogan of reunifying the Ukrainian nation in territorial and cultural terms—most Ukrainians had traditionally been Orthodox.
Khrushchev, who was not above using the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of international policy, allowed its representatives to join the World Council of Churches and even attend the Second Vatican Council as observers in 1962, but he had little use for it inside the country. Moreover, at a party congress in 1961, he announced the construction of the foundations of communist society as the party’s main goal for the next twenty years. With the expected advent of communism, a proletarian paradise on earth, promoted as tantamount to a new official religion, the government was not about to tolerate competition in the realm of faith. Khrushchev promised to show the last religious believer in the USSR on a television screen—a manifestation of secular belief in the power of technological progress to crush belief in the supernatural. As a result of this antireligion drive, the government closed half of all Orthodox parishes in the country. Out of forty-seven Orthodox monasteries, only sixteen remained open. Especially harsh measures were taken against the Protestant groups, Baptists and Pentecostals who refused to succumb to government pressure and continued their activities in the underground.
The antireligion campaign turned out to be a major blow to the religious component of traditional Russian identity, which had been tolerated under late Stalinism. It also had the unintended effect of increasing the importance of the Ukrainian clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church. Although the authorities closed Orthodox churches en masse in the traditionally Orthodox regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, they were much more careful in western Ukraine, where excessive pressure might well have caused believers to abandon government-controlled Russian Orthodoxy and join the “nationalist” Ukrainian Catholic Church, which maintained an underground existence. Most of the approximately 8,000 parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church that survived Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign were located in Ukraine, and the majority of those were in the formerly Uniate regions of the republic.
The Russian Orthodox Church was never as crypto-Uniate or as ethnically Ukrainian as during Khrushchev’s years in power. In the eighteenth century, most of the Russian Orthodox had been led by Ukrainian bishops, and now Ukrainians constituted the majority of believers as well. No one seemed to bother about the implications of this new development for nationality policy. After all, few in the government saw any future for the church, or, indeed, for nationalities, in the new communist society that Khrushchev and his entourage were busily promoting.
THE YEAR 1961 MARKED THE HIGH POINT OF KHRUSHCHEV’S political career. His power at the top of the Soviet pyramid seemed unshakable. He had gained sufficient authority to remove Stalin’s body from the Red Square mausoleum and change the name of Stalingrad to Volgograd. In April, the Soviet Union sent the world’s first astronaut, Yurii Gagarin, into outer space. The Soviets were ahead of the Americans in the space race, and now no one doubted that Soviet missiles could threaten them on earth as well. There were problems with fulfilling immediate economic plans, and droughts were affecting agriculture, but overall economic growth was proceeding at a healthy pace of at least 5 percent per year, and the long-term future looked bright.
Khrushchev used the occasion of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, convened in October, to announce an ambitious program for the transformation of Soviet society. He and his aides had been working on it for several years. There was a stunning promise in its concluding sentence: “The party triumphantly proclaims that the present generation of Soviet people will live under communism!” Khrushchev promised the country and the world that in twenty years, the Soviet government would complete the creation of the material and technical basis for communism and build the foundations of a communist society. According to Marxist dogma, national differences would disappear under communism. In 1929, Stalin had rejected demands for the immediate merger of nationalities, noting that differences between nations were supposed to continue under socialism. But now, with socialism running its course and communism around the corner, there was no reason to maintain distinctions between Soviet nationalities—if anything, their merger should be accelerated.
The new party program fully reflected that new thinking even as it gave assurances about the free development and even flourishing of nations in the USSR. Khrushchev declared from the podium of the party congress: “A new historical community of peoples of various nationalities with common characteristics—the Soviet people—has taken shape in the USSR. They have a common socialist Motherland—the USSR, a common economic base—the socialist eco
nomy, a common social class structure, a common worldview—Marxism-Leninism, a common purpose—the building of communism, and many common characteristics in their spiritual outlook and psychology.” The concept of a Soviet people was not novel per se—Nikolai Bukharin had championed it in the 1930s, and Stalin himself had often used the term—but now it was expected to supersede nations in a few decades, reducing them to mere nationalities.
Khrushchev had moved away from Stalin’s view of the nation as defined mainly by a common language, culture, and territory. State, economy, class, and ideology were the main markers of the new Soviet political nation. Although the party program pledged to defend and develop the languages of the peoples of the USSR, in fact there was no alternative to building the new Soviet people on the foundations of the Russian language and culture. The program reflected that fact by pointing not to the future but to the existing situation: “The process now taking place of voluntary acquisition of the Russian language along with the native language has a positive significance, as it promotes the mutual exchange of experience and the access of every nation and nationality to the cultural achievements of all the other peoples of the USSR and to world culture. The Russian language has in fact become the common language of international exchange and cooperation among all the peoples of the USSR.”
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