1934

Oleksandr Shumsky was the People's Commissar of Education of Ukraine in 1924-1927. Earlier he was proclaimed leader of the “nationalist deviation” (together with the writer Mykola Khvylovy and the economist Mykhailo Volobuiev). In early 1927 Shumsky is dismissed from his post and transferred to Russia. In 1933 he is arrested on charges of allegedly heading the “Ukrainian Military Organization,” [UVO] imprisoned in the Solovetsky Islands, and then exiled to the Krasnoiarsk region. Returning to Ukraine in 1946, he is murdered on special instructions from Stalin and Kaganovich.

The system of education and science is totally “purged.” In 1933 a new “Ukrainian orthography” is approved (replacing the “nationalistic” orthography that was approved in 1928). A search for “nationalists” is launched at the Institute of Scientific Language at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. During 1933, 1,649 scholars, or 16.4 percent of the total number of scholars working in the academy in 1932, were arrested. The “purge” affected every sphere, including the All-Ukrainian Agricultural Academy, the People's Commissariat of Justice, the publisher of the “Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia,” the Palace of Measures and Weights, the film studio [VUFKU: All-Ukrainian Film Administration], museums in many cities, the Kyiv historical town (Lavra), libraries, the Geodesic Administration, the Karl Marx state courses of Ukrainization, the D. Bahalii Institute of Ukrainian Culture, the Institute of T. Shevchenko, the Institute of Soviet Law in Kharkiv, and other institutions. A pogrom of Ukraine's artistic forces was launched, particularly on the “theatrical front.” The staging of two hundred “nationalistic works” was banned, as were twenty “nationalistic translations” of world classics. In October 1933 the renowned theatrical director Les Kurbas was dismissed from his post as director of the Berezil Theater. In December of that year Kurbas is arrested and, like many other Ukrainian artists, writers, scholars, and political figures, ends up in the Solovetsky Islands, where “Ukrainization” is given a significant boost by Pavel Postyshev.

Augmenting the political terror with the famine, the Stalinist leadership decided to put an end to the policy of “Ukrainization” and “indigenization” by means of special political decisions issued during 1933-1938. This was the critical phase of Ukraine's subjugation and the liquidation of “nationalistic” potential that is never to be revived after this. Pavel Postyshev was assigned to carry out this task. In case of need, the “second first secretary,” as he was called in party-governmental corridors, owing to the full powers that Stalin had conferred on him, could consult with the Soviet leader directly, bypassing the first secretary of the CC CP(b)U Stanislav Kosior.

Together with Postyshev, a large group of party workers and Chekists, headed by Vsevolod Balitsky, arrived in Ukraine. These were the people who carried out punitive actions. They not only “purged” enemies but “their own” people. In January 1934 Balitsky declares that the liquidation of the lag in Soviet Ukrainian agriculture has forced them to “purge state and collective farms of elements that are foreign and hostile to us and to review key district cadres.” During the first ten months of 1933, “237 secretaries of district party committees [were] replaced by stronger workers, 249 heads of district executive committees, 158 heads of district controlling committees.” A case called the “Ukrainian Military Organization” was fabricated. This case is rightly called the “rubber organization,” because its so-called participants kept being “added” to it during the next few years. In 1933-1934 alone no fewer than 148 people were sentenced on charges stemming from this case. Another fabricated case was the “Polish Military Organization” [POV], which “conducted active espionage, subversive, terrorist, and insurgent work with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorship of the proletariat in Ukraine, separating the Ukrainian SSR from the Soviet Union and its capture by Polish imperialism.” During 1934 more than one hundred people were charged in this case.

“More and more I am convinced that they have decided to physically exterminate us slowly but systematically. They gave me a five-year sentence, but are shortening my life by twenty years.”
Les Kurbas to Myroslav Irchan, Solovetsky Islands, January 1935.

No less dramatic was the fate of those artists and writers who would not be arrested, e.g., the film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, who lived a double life. Although he appeared to be loyal to the system, in reality he detested it. The fact that throughout his entire life Dovzhenko was under the surveillance of the GPU-NKVD was learned only in the last few years, when his private statements and views became public.