Ukraine CLARENCE A
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Ukraine CLARENCE A. MANNING Associate Professor of Slavic Languages Columbia University ~ nder the Soviets BOOKMAN ASSOCIATES New York Ukraine Under the Soviets Copyright, 1953, by Clarence A. Manning MANUFACTURED IN THE UNII'ED STATES OP AMERICA PRIN'l'f.D BY RECORD PRESS, N. Y. C. Foreword It was not many months after the downfall of the tsarist regime in Russia in 1917 that that great empire began to disintegrate. The subject peoples began to demand their own states and showed themselves willing to fight for them. The significance of this was lost upon most of the leaders of the Western democratic powers and they tried to explain it as some new device of the German General Staff, instead of recognizing it as a part of a democratic procedure. Three and a half years of war had then passed and the atten tion of the democracies was focussed on the Western Front. They were aware of the contribution in manpower the Russian Empire had made to the common cause and they looked forward with apprehension to the campaign of 1918 without the aid of the im perial Russian army. They had greeted the disappearance of the tsars in a bloodless revolution as a sign of the triumph of democracy and they were ill prepared to face the strange events that followed the fall of the Romanovs. They could not believe that the government of Lenin and the Communists who seized control of the city of Petrograd late in 1917 could long endure. Its methods they could not understand and they sought to interpret them in terms with which they were familiar. They did not try to fathom the reasons why, within a few months, the Russian Empire fell apart and they sought instinctively to bring it once more together. They watched without understanding the downfall of the Ukrainian National Republic, the rise of Soviet rule in Ukraine and elsewhere, the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist 5 Ukraine Under the Soviets Republics and the events of the next years. The rise of Nazism seemed to them the all-important menace and the opening of World War II convinced them of this even more strongly. The sudden understanding between the Soviets and the Nazis and then the equally sudden attack of the Germans upon the USSR still did not clear up the situation. The West aided the Soviets and, despite one difficulty after another, they willingly conceded the Soviet demands as a contribution to a common victory and sought in the United Nations a common meeting place for all anti-Fascist states. With some misgivings they admitted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic as independent states to the United Nations. In the meanwhile, as Soviet armies pushed westward into the heart of central Europe, they spread out what has since been termed the iron curtain to mask from the eyes of the world the nature of their government. Step by step, information from the Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, from Rumania and Bulgaria has grown increasingly difficult to secure. When China and North Korea passed within the same veil, the world began to awake. The scanty reports from Ukraine today receive more attention than did the neglected information of thirty-five years ago. Yet that is still not enough. It is no exaggeration to say that the Russian Communists have used the Ukrainian land and the Ukrainian population as the laboratory for their future conquests. It is there, among the Ukrain ian people, that Lenin and his associates worked out their program of ~sintegration, infiltration, conquest, exploitation and ~a tion that they have employed so successfully since the end of World War II. It has cost the Ukrainians dearly to serve as this labora tory. By the millions they have perished of starvation, execution, and deportation, and the other peoples of central and eastern Europe are meeting the same fate. The object of this work is to study that process, insofar as it can be known. Other books have told the story of the Ukrainian 6 Forward struggle for independence, the efforts of the Ukrainian people to set up their own free and independent state. That story is not re told here, for this book is concerned with the reverse of the picture-the efforts of the Ukrainian people to protect themselves, their mode of life and their culture, against the extension of the Soviet Russian influences, against that system which, starting from a declared policy of internationalism, has turned into a rigid, Rus sian imperialistic policy which weighs heavily upon every form and department of life. It is not only a study of the past. What happened in Kiev and Kharkiv is happening to-day in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Bucharest and Sofia, in Ulan Bator, Peking and Pyongyang. It is the story of a process and it is from that point of view that we must view the developments in Ukraine and the methods of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Once that is grasped, much that is obscure in the history of the last years will become clear and we can see the process in its development and in its completed form. We will know what to expect and what methods can best be devised to check this creep ing paralysis of civilization and bring back to mankind its hope for a civilized future. 7 Acknowledgments This volume is primarily based upon a series of detailed studies of Ukraine under the Soviets, which were prepared by a group of Ukrainian DP professors in Europe. They were selected by the Shevchenko Scientific Society and supported during their work by the Ukrainian National Association, which has provided the means for publication. They were: Dm. Sv.-The Partisan Struggle in Ukraine Ivan Koval-The Ukrainian Communists Ivan Koval-The Russian Communists in Ukraine Kost Pankivsky-Westem Ukraine under Bolshevik Rule, 1939- 1941 . -The Ukrainian Lands under Bolshevism up to World War II Ol. Yurchenko-The State Legal System Mykola Vasiliyiv-The Soviet Economic System . -The Agricultural Exploitation of Ukraine V. Marchenko-Social and Economic Conditions K. Kononenko-The Agricultural Economy ... -Changes of Population in Ukraine Y. Sherekh-Principles and Steps of the Soviet Linguistic Policy M. Hlobenko-Ukrainian Literature Ol. Ohloblyn-The Humanities under the Soviet! M. Mishchenko-Ukrainian Medicine Ev. Olensky-Ukrainian Music N. Makhiv-The Natural Sciences in Ukraine Iv. M.-Ukrainian Religious Life 9 Contents PAGE FOREWORD 5 AcKNOWLEDGMENTS 9 CHAPTER I. The Background of the Communist Triumph 15 II. The Foundation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic 25 III. The Period of Militant Communism 35 IV. The New Economic Policy 45 v. Ukrainization 57~ ~I. The Literary Renaissance 65 I. The Scholarly Revival 73 ./vn1. M ykola Khvylovy 79 IX. The Five Year Plan 85 X. The Famine 93 XI. The Famine, The Soviets and The World 103 XII. The Early Trials 109 XIII. The Turning of the Cultural Tide 115 XIV. The Debacle 121 XV. The Thirties 131 XVI. Ukraine in the Late Thirties 141 Ukraine Under the Soviets CHAPTER PAGE XVII. The First Occupation of Western Ukraine 149 XVIII. The Western Ukrainian Reaction 159 XIX. The Soviets and the Ukrainians in Rumania 165 XX. The German Attack on the Soviets 167 XXI. The Return of the Communists 175 XXII. Soviet Ukraine During World War II 181 XXIII. Ukraine Mter World War II 185 /XXIV. The Soviet Cultural Policy in Ukraine Mter the War 195 /xxv. The Soviet Religious Policy 205 CONCLUSION 215 INDEX 221 Ukraine Under the Soviets CHAPTER ONE The Background of the Communist Triumph No idea could be more erroneous than that the triumph of Communism in Ukraine and the destruction of the Ukrain ian National Republic, which had declared its independence on January 22, 1918. was the choice of the Ukrainian people them selves. It did not suit their desires or their interests, and the methods which Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin adopted to master Ukraine were essentially the same as those by which the iron cur tain has been pushed steadily to the west. Ukraine was the testing ground for the development of the Communist methods of con quest, just as it has been the testing ground for all the Communist methods of control of their helpless satellites. From the moment when he arrived in Petrograd in April, 1917, Lenin commenced a policy of disintegration. The collapse of tsarist Russia had destroyed all of tneorga:illzed forces of law and order throughout the empire, and it was no easy task to restore these in an area where there had not been allowed for centuries a popular government resting upon the will of the people and staffed by experienced democratic administrators. Under such conditions, Lenin's propaganda of self-determination for all the peoples of the empire fell upon ready ears, as did his efforts to promote class conflict on every hand. At the same time his promises to the Great Russians constantly called, under one guise or another, for the restoration of Russian unity even while his talk of internationalism and the Communist International seemed to imply a world Com munist regime in which all peoples would be equal. It was this policy of lying and deceiving until the moment for successful armed intervention came that gave him the dominating position. 15 Ukraine Under the Soviets He enjoyed an immense advantage in the fact that the civil war between the Whites and the Reds was largely fought on Ukrainian territory and thus compelled the young Ukrainian government to fight upon two fronts throughout the entire period, while for some time the new republic was forced also to oppose the Poles in the west.