The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  In February 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain came to Yalta in the Crimea to discuss the future of the postwar world with Stalin, the Soviet leader insisted on drawing a new boundary between the Soviet Union and Poland along the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. The Western leaders agreed, giving retroactive legitimacy to the movement of population that had already taken place. Stalin also made sure that Ukraine and Belarus, with their new western borders, would become members of the United Nations, additionally legitimizing the new Soviet boundaries. The Potsdam Conference, which again featured the leaders of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union and took place in the summer of 1945, after the defeat of Germany and the end of hostilities in Europe, accommodated Stalin’s demand to assign former German lands in the west to Poland as compensation for the territories it had lost in the east. Moscow expelled more than 7.5 million ethnic Germans from the territory of the new Polish state, making room for Poles resettled from the east. The Soviets began to ship Poles westward even before Red Army troops captured the eastern German territories. Thus, in September 1944, Polish citizens of Lviv who were supposed to go to Breslau (Polish: Wrocław) were temporarily “parked” in the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek near the city of Lublin. Only later would they reach their final destination on former German territory.

  Given the open warfare between the Ukrainian and Polish undergrounds and the ethnic cleansing that accompanied it, many Poles and Ukrainians were indeed more than ready to leave their homes and save their lives, if not their possessions. But some refused to move. In the end, it did not matter much. Stalin and his Polish clients were only too eager to use the experience the NKVD had acquired in the course of mass deportations of the war era to achieve their goal of creating minority-free states. Soviet officials called the deportation campaign “repatriation.” The “patrias” were imagined, as most of the deportees were not returning to but leaving their homelands. About 780,000 Poles were “repatriated” west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line from Ukraine alone. Approximately the same number were moved from Belarus and Lithuania to the territory of the new Polish state. The deportees included close to 100,000 Jews who had survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Most of those resettled ended up in the former German lands assigned to Poland by Stalin with the reluctant agreement of the Western leaders.

  As Poles and Jews went west, Ukrainians headed east. In two years, between 1944 and 1946, close to half a million Ukrainians were deported from lands west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line to the Ukrainian SSR. Around the same time, more than 180,000 Ukrainians from western Ukraine were arrested and deported to Siberia and the Soviet interior for real or alleged collaboration with the nationalist underground. An additional 76,000 Ukrainians were deported in October 1947. The deportations aimed mainly to curb Ukrainian nationalist resistance, which continued in western Ukraine long after the end of the war. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that Stalin had been prepared to deport all Ukrainians to the east, but there were too many of them.

  That seemed to be an option open to the Polish communist authorities, though on a smaller scale. In 1947, in an operation code-named Vistula, they deported from their eastern borderlands the entirety of the Ukrainian population still remaining in Poland—altogether 140,000 men, women, and children—and replaced them with ethnic Poles. They expelled the deportees from their homes and resettled them in the former German territories in western and northern Poland. The checkered Polish-Ukrainian boundary, with its ethnically and religiously mixed population, was becoming a clear-cut Soviet-Polish border, with Poles on one side and Ukrainians on the other. Ukraine itself, a multiethnic territory for most of its history, was turning into a Ukrainian-Russian condominium as a result of the extermination of the Jews and the deportation of the Poles and Germans.

  Stalin moved populations around not to appease the nationalists but to fight nationalism and cement his control over the borderlands. He was sealing the Soviet borders not only with new demarcation lines and border guards but also with a neverending campaign against the capitalist West—closing the Ukrainian gates to Europe more tightly than during the interwar period or, indeed, any previous time in history. The reality of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine had crushed the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s dream of joining Europe. The Europe that the Germans brought to Ukraine came in the form of a colonial empire, its agents driven by notions of race, exploitation, and the extermination of “subhumans” (Untermenschen). The Soviets took advantage of this recent disappointment with the West to fuel the propaganda of the Cold War era. For years they would link Ukrainian nationalism with German fascism by constantly referring to the Ukrainian insurgents as “German-Ukrainian nationalists.”

  The Soviet regime was also intent on erasing age-old cultural boundaries. In March 1946, working through its agents, the NKVD convoked a special council of the Ukrainian Catholic Church at which the participants were forced to dissolve their church and join the Russian Orthodox Church instead. The council took place in the absence of bishops, whom the NKVD had arrested a year earlier. The decision to destroy the church came immediately after the Yalta Conference and was carried out within the borders defined by the meeting of the Big Three. As Transcarpathia was not yet officially part of Soviet Ukraine, the Catholic Church there was allowed to exist for another three years until it was crushed with the start of the Cold War in 1949. The Soviets suspected the Catholic Church as a whole of doing the bidding of the Vatican and the Western powers. All institutional, religious, and cultural links with the West had to be cut, destroying an institution that had long served as a bridge between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. In a few short years, more than 5 million Ukrainian Catholics became nominally Orthodox.

  By 1945 the victorious Soviet Union, using its military force, had moved its boundaries deep into east-central Europe. The Soviets took a page from the book of Ukrainian nationalism by expanding the nominally Ukrainian republic to include Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian territories traditionally settled by Ukrainians.

  These territorial acquisitions presented new challenges to the Soviet regime in Ukraine. After the Revolution of 1917, the Soviets had managed to anchor Dnieper Ukraine to the USSR by recognizing the Ukrainian claim to the industrial centers of eastern and southern Ukraine, often settled by ethnic Russians. By taking over largely Ukrainian-inhabited parts of the former Austria-Hungary claimed during the interwar period by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, Stalin brought into Soviet Ukraine fairly well-developed traditions of autonomy, parliamentary democracy, and communal and national self-organization that had been all but absent in the central and eastern Ukrainian lands. The Soviet regime also encountered a new ideological threat—radical nationalism, represented by a well-organized political structure with its own partisan military force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

  The full incorporation of those territories, which included their economic, social, and cultural integration into Soviet Ukraine and the USSR, would take decades to accomplish. Moscow still had to pacify those areas by driving the nationalist insurgency underground and then destroying it—a process that lasted into the 1950s. To become fully Soviet, those lands would have to undergo collectivization and industrialization, and their youth would have to be indoctrinated in the basics of Soviet Marxism. But even with the passing of time, the historical ties between the newly acquired Soviet territories and central and western Europe did not cease to exist. The westward shift of Soviet borders turned the formerly non-Soviet parts of Ukraine into internal borderlands, where for decades the regime imposed policies different from those that it pursued in the rest of Ukraine.

  The Soviets used the Ukrainian card not only to legitimize possession of the region but also to Sovietize it. Moscow returned to its Ukrainization policy of the 1920s, offering the region the opportunity to join Soviet society through the Ukrainization of its politic
al and cultural life. But the regime was slow to integrate local cadres, whom it did not trust, and therefore brought in Ukrainians from eastern and central parts of the republic. This delayed the full integration of the region. At the same time, the offer of Ukrainian culture in exchange for political loyalty helped slow down Russification in the rest of Ukraine. This policy of grudging Ukrainization, coupled with the historical tradition of high national mobilization within the boundaries of Austria-Hungary and then Poland, as well as memories of the nationalist insurgency, would turn western Ukraine, in particular Galicia, into Ukraine’s center of national culture and political activism for the rest of the Soviet era.

  V

  The Road to Independence

  chapter 24

  The Second Soviet Republic

  Ukraine’s membership in the United Nations, which admitted the republic as a founding member at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945, raised its international status to one comparable with the British dominions of Canada and Australia or even sovereign states like Belgium or Brazil. Nevertheless, it would take almost half a century to match the promise of UN membership with the attainment of national independence. In taking that path, Ukraine contributed to the disintegration of empires and the formation of new nation-states on their ruins—a process that almost tripled the number of independent states in the world from about 70 in 1945 to more than 190 today.

  Its United Nations seat and enhanced status aside, at the end of the war Ukraine presented a sorry picture. Although the map made it seem like one of the main beneficiaries of the war—Ukraine’s territory increased by more than 15 percent—the republic was in fact one of the war’s main victims. It lost up to 7 million of its citizens, who had constituted more than 15 percent of its population. Out of 36 million remaining Ukrainians, some 10 million didn’t have a roof over their heads, as approximately 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages lay in ruins. Ukraine lost 40 percent of its wealth and more than 80 percent of its industrial and agricultural equipment. In 1945, the republic produced only one-quarter of its prewar output of industrial goods and 40 percent of its previous agricultural produce.

  With its industrial base devastated by Soviet scorched-earth tactics, the deindustrialization and deurbanization policies of the Germans, and the relentless fighting between the two armies, in some places Ukraine had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Western advisers suggested that it was easier to build new plants than to restore old ones, but the authorities decided to reconstruct the plants they had built with such huge sacrifices in the 1930s. As had been the case then, they prioritized heavy industry. As far as the Kremlin was concerned, the rest could wait.

  By 1948, the wartime Soviet alliance with the United States and Britain had given way to the Cold War between Moscow and the West. At stake was Soviet control over central and eastern Europe, as well as Western positions in Iran, Turkey, and Greece. With the Soviet army stationed as far west as Germany, Ukraine was no longer a border republic facing what was considered the hostile West, as it had been during the interwar period, but its importance to the union’s industrial and agricultural potential remained as great as it had been before the war. Ukraine had to produce arms, food, and soldiers to fight what many deemed an imminent conflict between the communist East and the capitalist West. For Ukrainians, that meant a lot of guns and very little butter. Ukraine had rebuilt its economic potential by 1950, but agricultural production lagged behind, with prewar levels not reached until the 1960s.

  The first postwar decade in Ukraine largely entailed reconstructing the shattered economy, rehabilitating a shocked and traumatized society, and restoring the party’s ideological and political control over lands temporarily lost to Germany and its allies in the course of the war. In western Ukraine—the former Polish, Romanian, and Czech provinces of the country—the restoration of party control in fact meant its introduction, as the Soviet regime had lasted less than two years before the German invasion. Throughout Ukraine, this period saw the (re)implementation of the political, social, and economic models developed in the 1930s. In his last years, Stalin was not eager to engage in experimentation—late Stalinism was clearly running out of revolutionary zeal. The experience of the war that had just ended and preparations for war with the West, which the Kremlin believed was about to begin, informed most of the political, social, and cultural decisions made by Stalin and his aides.

  Among the reconstruction projects given high priority by those at the very top of the Soviet political pyramid was one of the giants of Soviet industrialization of prewar years: the Dnieper electric power station in Zaporizhia. The retreating Soviets had blown up part of the Zaporizhia dam in 1941, but they saved the remains in 1943, when the Germans tried to finish the job—Soviet scouts cut the wire that was supposed to detonate the explosives. The reconstruction of the dam and the electric power station became a priority for the newly appointed party boss of the Zaporizhia region and future leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, who came to the city in 1946 to find the power station and the industrial enterprises built around it completely destroyed. “Grass was already growing among the bricks and iron, the howling of dogs gone wild could be heard from afar, and all around there were nothing but ruins, with black crows’ nests hanging from the branches of burned trees,” wrote Brezhnev, recalling his first impressions on visiting what remained of the Zaporizhia industrial complex in the summer of 1946. “I had had occasion to see something similar after the Civil War, but then it was the dead silence of the factories that was frightening, while now they had been completely reduced to dust.”

  According to the report of a government commission, the city of Zaporizhia had no electricity or running water. More than 1,000 apartment buildings, 74 schools, 5 cinema theaters, 2 universities, and 239 stores had been destroyed. But Moscow sent Brezhnev to Zaporizhia not so much to rebuild the city as to get the power station and the steelworks, called Zaporizhstal, working again. He did what he was asked to do in record time. The electric power station generated its first electricity in March 1947, with the first steel produced in September of that year. In November 1947, in recognition of Brezhnev’s accomplishments, the Kremlin recalled him from Zaporizhia and promoted him to party boss of the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region, one of the main economic powerhouses of Ukraine. Brezhnev left Zaporizhia producing electricity and steel but still in ruins. That was the model for rebuilding Ukraine after the war: industrial enterprises took priority. People were left to suffer and even die.

  In his memoirs, first published in 1978, Brezhnev writes about difficult times in the cities but says nothing about the villages, which in 1946 and 1947 witnessed the return of famine on a scale comparable to that of 1932 and 1933. Close to a million people died as a result of the new famine that hit southern Ukraine especially hard, including the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia regions led by Brezhnev. Not surprisingly, Brezhnev remained silent about the new crime of the regime in which he held a prominent office—the starving to death of hundreds of thousands of its citizens. A prominent official who refused to stay silent was Brezhnev’s boss at the time, Nikita Khrushchev. In memoirs smuggled to the West and published in the United States in 1970 but unknown to the readers in the USSR until the late 1980s (Brezhnev’s, by contrast, appeared in print runs approaching 15 million copies in the 1970s), Khrushchev described not only the famine but also the inability of the republican leadership to do anything to save the victims—Moscow still made life-and-death decisions affecting Ukraine exclusively.

  Khrushchev blamed the new Ukrainian famine on Stalin, as he did much else that happened in the 1930s and 1940s. In this case, he was clearly on target. In the summer of 1946 the worst drought in half a century hit Ukraine, but the authorities in Moscow kept demanding grain from the Ukrainian countryside, devastated by the war and a bad harvest. This time they needed grain for the reindustrialization of the cities and for Soviet-occupied eastern Europe, where Stalin shipped mill
ions of tons of grain to keep the new communist regimes going. To prevent the impending catastrophe, Khrushchev appealed directly to Stalin, asking for the introduction of ration cards for the peasants like the ones introduced for city dwellers. His pleas went unanswered. Moreover, someone began spreading rumors accusing Khrushchev of Ukrainian nationalism—he was too protective of his republic and its people. Khrushchev soon fell out of favor with Stalin and was demoted: although left in office as head of the Ukrainian government, he lost his position as party leader. His new boss and replacement as party leader of Ukraine was Lazar Kaganovich, the promoter of the Ukrainization policy of the 1920s and an organizer of the Great Famine of the 1930s.

  Kaganovich saw his new task in Ukraine as reinforcing Moscow’s ideological control. Maksym Rylsky, a neoclassical poet and head of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, became the main victim of Kaganovich’s ideological witch hunt. He was attacked in the press for Ukrainian nationalism and removed from his position in the fall of 1947. Although Stalin soon recalled Kaganovich to Moscow, and Khrushchev got his old party office back, attacks on Ukrainian cultural figures continued. They were part of an all-union campaign associated with Stalin’s ideological watchdog Andrei Zhdanov, who attacked Soviet writers and artists for “bourgeois individualism,” “lack of ideological clarity,” and “kowtowing to the West.” Among the victims of Zhdanov’s campaign were the satirists Mikhail Zoshchenko in Russia and Ostap Vyshnia in Ukraine. Writers could depict only one conflict in their work—that between the good and the better—which put satirists out of a job. The search for ideological deviants that began with writers spread to musicians and historians. In Ukraine, a hunt for “nationalists” reached its peak in 1951 with an attack in Pravda on Volodymyr Sosiura’s poem “Love Ukraine,” a patriotic text written by that prominent poet in 1944. The regime came to see what was good for mobilizing Ukrainian patriotism against German aggression during the war as nationalistic when it sought to consolidate control over the formerly occupied territories.