THE MEETING WAS ARRANGED IN A RAILWAY STATION RESTAURANT in a Polish town on the Soviet border. A middle-aged man showed an older, gray-bearded man a box of matches that fit the description. The man with the beard was Vasilii Shulgin, the Kyiv-born Russian nationalist who had participated in the dramatic abdication of Nicholas II and then served as an adviser to General Anton Denikin of the Volunteer Army. He had spent the previous few weeks at his estate in Volhynia, which was now part of Poland, getting ready for his clandestine trip to the Soviet Union. The man with the matches was a smuggler who had promised to help Shulgin cross the border.
It was December 1925, and Shulgin was traveling to the USSR to meet with the leadership of a clandestine monarchist organization that had established contacts with Russian émigré circles in Europe. Shulgin crossed the Soviet border in the middle of the night of December 23, 1925. He visited Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad, managing to meet with Russian monarchist leaders. He left the Soviet Union on February 6, 1926. Upon his return, Shulgin published a book about his trip, The Three Capitals, which created a sensation and a scandal in Russian émigré circles in the West. Shulgin’s visit to the Soviet Union allowed him to assess not only the political climate in the country but also the results of the new nationality policy, known as korenizatsiia (literally, “taking root,” or indigenization). Shulgin was critical of the Soviet regime but argued that the Bolsheviks were in retreat: the New Economic Policy, a set of measures reinstating elements of the market economy introduced by Lenin after the Civil War, was restoring the country to health and bringing hope of the revival of Russian greatness. Shulgin argued “that Russia has not died; it is not only alive but also brimming with juices.”
Although Shulgin was unaware of it, his entire trip to Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad had been sponsored and arranged by the Soviet secret police, the GPU. Those who helped him cross the border and conducted negotiations with him on behalf of the bogus monarchist organization were GPU agents. The whole business was a sham created to lure General Petr Wrangel, the last leader of the White movement, to the Soviet Union and arrest him. As Wrangel did not come, the GPU decided to use Shulgin’s visit to influence the debate among the anticommunist Russian émigrés in Europe about Soviet Russia, presenting the Bolshevik experiment in a most attractive light. As Shulgin’s GPU handlers expected, he left the Soviet Union with the conviction that Russia was in the process of revival, and that the Bolsheviks were inadvertently promoting the rebirth of the Great Russian state. He wrote as much in his book, which was in fact “proofread” by the GPU before it went to print. If Shulgin was duped by his GPU hosts, his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the indigenization campaign was accurate enough.
JOSEPH STALIN, THE PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR OF NATIONALITIES AND subsequently general secretary of the party, was the main architect and promoter of the indigenization policy. Stalin’s disagreements with Lenin on the structure of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, the two Bolshevik leaders regarded nationalism as an inevitable stage in the development of human society. The sooner one allowed nationalities to flourish, the more quickly they would complete that phase and leave it behind, opening the way to the internationalist society of the future.
The indigenization policy had two main components, one political and social, the other cultural and linguistic. Adopted by the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, when Lenin had already left the political scene, the policy was rooted in Lenin’s writings on the Ukrainian question, particularly his texts of December 1919, when the Red Army had recaptured Ukraine from the armies of Denikin and the troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic led by Symon Petliura. Back then, Lenin had argued for bringing local cadres into Soviet institutions. Now the party launched an affirmative-action program to staff party and government structures with non-Russians, thereby creating local elites loyal to the regime in faraway Moscow. The cultural component called for the promotion of local languages and cultures, which began with support for education, publishing, and theatrical performances in those languages and ended with the obligatory Ukrainization, Belarusization, and so on of the party and government apparatus, first on the local level and then in the major cities and capitals as well. These measures were intended to enracinate the new Soviet regime in the non-Russian peripheries of the former Russian Empire.
Stalin’s reasons for championing the indigenization program were not limited to his belief, held in common with Lenin, that nationalism was an inevitable stage of human development. From the political viewpoint, enlisting local cadres was an obvious way to overcome the hostility that the Bolsheviks had encountered among the non-Russians during the Civil War and mitigate the centralism of the Bolshevik Party structure. Under the terms of the Union treaty, formerly independent states such as Ukraine and Georgia had to give up control of key political functions, including defense and foreign affairs: by way of compensation, they were allowed to increase their indigenous membership in the republican branches of the party and promote their languages in administration, education, and other spheres of public life. Moreover, Stalin needed the support of republican cadres in his struggle for power in Moscow. As the party’s leading official in charge of the non-Russian nationalities, he was perfectly placed to develop clients among the republican elites and call on their loyalty as he fought his numerous rivals in the Bolshevik Politburo, such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigorii Zinoviev.
No non-Russian republic was as important in Stalin’s political calculations as Ukraine. With Russians “owning” the all-Union communist party, which was called the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) until 1925, the Ukrainian communists formed the largest “autonomous” party organization in the country. Until 1923, the head of government in Ukraine had been Trotsky’s ally Khristian Rakovsky, who exploited Ukrainian autonomist aspirations to challenge Stalin’s position at the center of power. With Rakovsky sidelined at the Twelfth Party Congress in the spring of 1923, and dispatched to London shortly afterward, Stalin worked hard to ensure the loyalty of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks. In April 1925, he put his loyalist Lazar Kaganovich, an ethnic Jew from Ukraine, in charge of the Ukrainian party organization.
The period after the Twelfth Party Congress became known in Ukraine as one of “Ukrainization by decree,” meaning that the authorities kept issuing one decree after another, demanding rapid Ukrainization of education, culture, and the government apparatus. But whereas the shift from Russian to Ukrainian in the media and book publishing was rapid, the use of Ukrainian as the working language of administration encountered major obstacles. Deadline followed deadline without the apparatus switching to Ukrainian. The resistance to Ukrainization came from the top ranks of the party, whose membership in 1924 was 45 percent Russian, 33 percent Ukrainian, and 14 percent Jewish.
The second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Dmytro Lebed, was the author of the theory of the struggle of two cultures. He regarded the Russian language and culture as attributes of the city, and thus of the working class, and the Ukrainian language and culture as attributes of the village. In the conflict of those two cultures, argued Lebed, the communists had to be on the side of the proletariat, not of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Although Lebed was forced to abandon the public propaganda of his theory before the Twelfth Party Congress adopted the indigenization policy, his views were widespread in the party leadership.
ON HIS VISIT TO KYIV IN DECEMBER 1925, VASILII SHULGIN HAD an opportunity to assess the results of “Ukrainization by decree” at first hand. Signs of the new policy were everywhere. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, the avenue leading to the railway station had been named after Dmitrii Bibikov, the governor general of Kyiv from 1837 to 1852. It was now called Taras Shevchenko Boulevard to honor the poet who had been arrested in Kyiv during Bibikov’s tenure in 1847. On the base of the monument to the Russian count Aleksei Bobrinsky, which had been installed on the boulevard to honor the founder of the sugar industry in the Kyiv region, there was now a pyramid with a sign in Ukrainian celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. The signs on government institutions and shops were also in Ukrainian.
No less disturbing to Shulgin was the fact that his old opponent, the leader of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, was back in Kyiv after years of exile in Central Europe. While Shulgin visited Kyiv incognito, under the name Edward Schmidt, Hrushevsky was living in the open, welcomed by the Bolshevik authorities and holding a position at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Shulgin visited the place in Kyiv where Hrushevsky’s house had once stood. It had been burned down by Bolshevik shelling in January 1918. “But that time, too, has passed,” wrote Shulgin in his travel log. “And Mr. Mykhailo? He is prospering. He’s alive, the old dog.… What has fallen to the lot of Mykhailo himself is ‘not much, just the capital’ of the republic, which burned down his home, true enough, but only ‘by misunderstanding.’ That is obvious from the fact that Hrushevsky has made his peace with the USSR, returned to Kyiv, and is now mumbling praise to Soviet rule in the language of black magic. Obviously, for establishing the ‘Ukrainian republic.’”
But on his visit to Kyiv Shulgin also encountered strong opposition to the indigenization policy. On his train journey from Kyiv to Moscow, he became a witness and then a participant in a conversation about the merits of Ukrainization. “What do you want? My little girls should know a language that would be of some use to them. Tell me what they’re going to do with that language!” remarked a Jewish woman, born in Ukraine but now living in Moscow. Shulgin was glad to hear Russian spoken in the streets of Kyiv, seeing it as a sign of the failure not only of the Ukrainian project but also of Bolshevik rule, which associated itself with it. Indeed, Kyiv continued to speak mainly Russian, notwithstanding the quite impressive efforts of the Bolshevik government to switch city names and signs from Russian to Ukrainian and to introduce Ukrainian into the educational system.
THE LACK OF PROGRESS OF LINGUISTIC UKRAINIZATION IN THE cities, especially among the ethnically Russian or highly Russified working class, was a fundamental concern of Oleksandr Shumsky, a former member of the Borotbist faction of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party who became Ukraine’s commissar of education in the early 1920s. In 1925, a few months after Stalin appointed Lazar Kaganovich to head the Ukrainian party, Shumsky appealed to Stalin to begin the Ukrainization of the working class and replace Kaganovich with Vlas Chubar, an ethnic Ukrainian who then headed the government of the republic. Shumsky was generally unhappy with the progress of the Ukrainization campaign and demanded that Kaganovich extend it from the party and government apparatus to the working class. Shumsky was appalled by the very same thing that had inspired optimism in Vasilii Shulgin: signs and many newspapers in Kyiv were in Ukrainian, but the population at large spoke Russian.
Stalin formulated his views on the progress of Ukrainization in a letter to the Ukrainian Politburo in April 1926. It was a direct response to Kaganovich’s complaints about Shumsky and his criticism of the Ukrainization drive. Stalin threw his support behind Kaganovich, whom he kept as leader of the Ukrainian party, against Shumsky. According to Stalin, Shumsky was guilty of two major errors. He refused to distinguish the Ukrainization of the party and the state apparatus from that of the working class: the first had to proceed as planned, argued Stalin, but the second had to be stopped. “We must not force Russian workers en masse to give up the Russian language and culture,” wrote Stalin. Shumsky’s second alleged error was his refusal to recognize that, given the weakness of indigenous communist cadres in Ukraine, Ukrainization managed by the intelligentsia was likely to take on “the character of a battle for the alienation of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian society from all-Union culture and society, the character of a battle against Russian culture and its highest achievement—against Leninism.”
Stalin’s letter was not an attack on Ukrainization as such, but it insisted that the party needed a certain kind of Ukrainization. The party was to proceed with the policy within the apparatus but avoid alienating the working class. No less important, Ukrainization was to be conducted in a way that would not alienate the Ukrainian public from Russia. To ensure the fulfillment of those tasks, the policy had to be implemented by trusted Bolshevik cadres headed by Stalin’s right-hand man in Ukraine, Kaganovich, who was ordered to speed up cultural Ukrainization. In May 1926, the Ukrainian Central Committee approved a number of new decrees on the policy, and Kaganovich took personal responsibility for the success of the Ukrainization drive. In 1927, the rebellious Oleksandr Shumsky was replaced as commissar of education by the old Bolshevik Mykola Skrypnyk, who put all his Bolshevik zeal and conviction into the Ukrainization policy.
As envisioned by party decrees, Ukrainization proceeded on two fronts—the recruitment of local cadres and the linguistic Ukrainization of the existing apparatus. The first trend was reflected in the rise of the portion of ethnic Ukrainians in the party ranks. Between 1925 and 1927, ethnic Ukrainians became a majority in the party, their numbers growing from 37 to 52 percent of the membership. At the same time, the share of ethnic Russians dropped to 30 percent, while the percentage of Jews, the second-largest minority in Ukraine, remained essentially the same, falling from 20 to 18 percent of the membership. The linguistic Ukrainization of the apparatus was led by Kaganovich himself, who delivered his report to the Central Committee for 1927 in Ukrainian.
The percentage of Ukrainian-language newspapers grew from under 40 percent in 1925 to more than 60 percent in 1927, while Ukrainian-language book production increased from 40 to 54 percent. There was growing pressure on party and government bureaucrats to learn Ukrainian as Kaganovich began to deliver on the threat of firing officials who failed to master the language. More than 250 employees lost their jobs owing to the new party line. Cultural Ukrainization made its most impressive strides in the educational sphere, where by the end of the 1920s almost 98 percent of ethnic Ukrainian schoolchildren were being taught in Ukrainian. The Ukrainization drive also affected university teaching—the realm of science and high culture—with the share of Ukrainian-language classes increasing from 33 percent in 1927 to 58 percent in 1929.
An important sphere in which the policy made little headway was the city street. The cities remained largely if not exclusively Russian-speaking, as the proponents of Ukrainization had little influence on the working class. This resulted in the gradual Russification of Ukrainian peasants who left their villages to work in the cities. There was also resistance and resentment on the part of Russified Ukrainians, especially ethnic minorities, which were a significant part of the Ukrainian population. Vasilii Shulgin would probably have noticed little difference on the streets of Kyiv if he had been able to visit the city in 1928—the last year of Kaganovich’s rule in Ukraine and of the party’s all-out drive for Ukrainization.
THE INDIGENIZATION POLICY MEANT DIFFERENT THINGS IN DIFFERENT republics, given the uneven development of cultures in the Russian Empire and varying levels of mobilization of elites and the public at large in support of the policy. If in republics such as Ukraine and Georgia the central authorities had to adjust their policy to accommodate the growing demands of proponents of the local culture and political autonomy, in other places indigenization meant the imposition of cultural policies from above. Moscow got busy creating new ethnic territorial entities, promoting the education of indigenous elites in languages whose written form had yet to be created, and developing literatures that had not yet existed. This pertained especially to ethnic groups in the far north, as well as to some nationalities in the North Caucasus and Central Asia. In the western borderlands of the former empire, those who benefited the most from Moscow’s nation-building efforts were the Belarusians—an essential component of the imperial-era tripartite Russian nation.
The Bolsheviks proclaimed the creation of the Belarusian Communist Party and the Belarusian Soviet Republic in December 1918, after gaining control of most of Belarus in the wake of the German retreat. The republic lost more than half its territory to Poland as a result of the Treaty of Riga (1921), which was signed by representatives of the Russian Federation on behalf of the rump Soviet Belarus. Although it was now reduced to a narrow strip of land around the city of Minsk, the Belarusian state was needed by Moscow to counteract possible efforts on the part of the Poles, especially supporters of Józef Piłsudski, the head of the new Polish state, to create Polish protectorates in Ukraine and Belarus. In order to turn the tables on the Poles, the Soviets had to recognize and enhance the existence of a distinct Belarusian nationality—a step that the Soviet leadership, Stalin in particular, was prepared to take despite the protests of its own cadres on the ground, who believed in one big Russian nation, at least when it came to Belarus.
At the Tenth Party Congress, which concluded a few days before the signing of the Riga treaty, Stalin did his best to silence party officials who had doubted the existence of the Belarusian nation by evoking the Ukrainian example and the laws of history. “I have a note saying that we communists are allegedly imposing the Belarusian nationality artificially,” Stalin told the delegates. “That is untrue, for there exists a Belarusian nation that has its own language, distinct from Russian; hence Belarusian culture can be raised only in its own language. Such things were heard some five years ago about Ukraine, about the Ukrainian nation. And not long ago it was still being said that the Ukrainian republic and the Ukrainian nation had been thought up by the Germans. Yet it is clear that the Ukrainian nation exists and that the development of its culture is a communist responsibility. One cannot go against history.”
The authorities defined Belarusian nationality on the basis of research by ethnographers and linguists and the maps they produced, in particular Yefim Karski’s ethnographic map first published in 1917. According to that map, Belarusians on the Soviet side of the border inhabited not only the Minsk region, which was included in Soviet Belarus, but also the areas around Mahilioŭ, Vitsebsk, Homel, and Smolensk, which were parts of the Russian Federation. The Karski map helped the Soviet nation-builders define the new borders of Soviet Belarus, which in Moscow’s opinion had to be extended if they were to be treated seriously by the Poles. The first two regions were transferred to the Belarusian republic in 1924, more than doubling its population from 1.5 million to 3.5 million. The Homel region was added in 1926. Smolensk, however, which had been part of the Muscovite tsardom since 1654, stayed in Russia.
In many cases, the transfers were accomplished not only without consulting the local population but even against its wishes. But some inhabitants who spoke Belarusian nevertheless associated themselves with Russia and Russianness in the tradition of the anti-Polish nation-building project of imperial times. Avel Yenukidze, a close ally and relative of Stalin, stated with regard to the transfers: “This is a blow to the local population, and I understand the fear of the Belarusians. Their children understand Russian better than Belarusian and, from the cultural viewpoint, we are sacrificing the interests of the people.… But in this case we are guided by the political consideration that we must expand Belarus and draw the attention of foreign countries to her.”
When it came to Moscow’s foreign-policy considerations, the Soviet Belarusian project was never purely defensive. It also had a strong offensive component with regard to Belarusian lands that had gone to Poland under the Riga treaty. As in the case of Soviet Ukraine, the Bolsheviks wanted to present Soviet Belarus as a beacon of national revival to attract fellow Belarusians on the Polish side of the border. The Belarusization policy was first placed on the party agenda in early 1921, a few months before the signing of the Riga treaty. In January of that year, a group of thirty-two Belarusian communists issued a declaration calling for the unification of the Belarusian lands into one socialist state and demanding the comprehensive Belarusization of the republic’s educational and cultural life. At that point, Belarusian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish were declared official languages of the republic. Belarusian was accorded primacy as the language of the republic’s largest nationality, which legitimized the creation and existence of the Soviet Belarusian state.
The Twelfth Party Congress of April 1923 strengthened efforts to promote cultural Belarusization by declaring indigenization as official party policy. A key figure in the Belarusization drive was Usevalad Ihnatoŭski, a former member of the Belarusian Socialist Revolutionary Party, who joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and became people’s commissar of education of Soviet Belarus in 1920. Between 1924 and 1926, he was in charge of the propaganda department of the Belarusian Central Committee, and after 1928 he served as president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. Ihnatoŭski’s pre-Bolshevik career was not much different from that of his Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Shumsky, who also belonged to the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and was a leading national communist.
Belarusization, promoted by Ihnatoŭski and his allies among the Belarusian national communists, was similar to Ukrainization in the neighboring republic. Both policies were more successful in bringing local cadres into the institutions of the new regime than in the cultural “conversion” of the Russian-speaking urban population. Between 1922 and 1927, the number of ethnic Belarusians in the Belarusian Communist Party more than tripled. Significant progress was also achieved in the switch to Belarusian and other local languages for purposes of official propaganda, with the main newspaper of the Belarusian Bolsheviks beginning Belarusian-language publication in 1927. Even so, the Belarusian language and culture did not achieve dominance in the print media: of the nine newspapers published in the republic at the time, four were issued in Russian, three in Belarusian, and one each in Polish and Yiddish.
The promoters of indigenization and linguistic Belarusization faced major problems achieving their goals, not only for the working class and the party and government apparatus but also in the educational system. The problem stemmed from the underrepresentation of Belarusians in general—and Belarusian speakers in particular—in the cities. In 1922, Jews constituted 60 percent of the student body in the Belarusian universities, with Belarusians accounting for only 31 percent. Party officials decided to improve the language statistics by expelling students who failed to learn Belarusian and increasing the number of ethnic Belarusians in the student body to roughly 60 percent. This positive discrimination in favor of Belarusians meant negative discrimination against Jews, who constituted between 40 and 60 percent of the Belarusian urban population and had been correspondingly represented in the university system. Forced linguistic Belarusization, coupled with aggressive affirmative action in favor of Belarusian students, many of them with peasant roots, was often viewed negatively by the urban population, a good part of which was highly skeptical of the Belarusization project from the outset.
In the 1920s, as in the revolutionary era, the nationality policy of the central government in the western borderlands of the former empire was defined largely in response to the threat posed by the Polish question. But there was also a major difference: if before 1917 the local population had been mobilized against that threat under the banner of Russian nationalism, the mobilizing force was now that of Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism. The strategy of the central authorities would further evolve in the late 1920s and early 1930s as local nationalism was pushed aside and partly replaced by a variant of traditional Great Russian nationalism.
IN DECEMBER 1925, IN ONE OF HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH SOVIET opponents of indigenization, Vasilii Shulgin came up with a politically correct and effective way of resisting the policy. “I said that division into small nationalities lay [as an obstacle] on the path to internationalism,” recalled Shulgin later. “That the greater the number of people and the greater the territory covered by one language, the easier the transition to internationalism. That although the party had temporarily agreed to the creation of individual republics, each one to speak its own language, that was by no means an ideal situation; hence every true communist should try to restore the dominance of the Russian language in everyday life as the principal language on the whole territory of the USSR.”
That argument was shared to a greater or lesser degree by many party officials who opposed indigenization. The nationality issue became a hot potato in inter-party struggles, with Grigorii Zinoviev, a leader of the so-called Left Opposition, attacking Stalin and others for pushing Ukrainization too far. Stalin allowed Ukrainization to proceed apace. There was no change of policy in 1925, or in 1926; nor was there an official reevaluation of the threat posed by great-power chauvinism as compared with local nationalism—the former continued to be regarded as the main threat. But a few years later, the policy began to change, coming to be more in line with Zinoviev’s critique of indigenization than with Stalin’s defense of it. Ironically, the change began as soon as Stalin got rid of Zinoviev as a political rival. In the fall of 1927, Zinoviev was expelled from the party along with Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and their supporters on accusations of antiparty activity. In 1928, Kaganovich was recalled from Ukraine. As far as Stalin was concerned, his Ukrainization effort there had already run its course.
Stalin’s victory over his opponents in the Politburo meant that in future he would need less support from the national republics and would not have to appease their leaders with new concessions on the nationality question. The GPU was ordered to prepare the first major trial of members of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, so-called members of the “Change of the Landmarks” movement. These were old, often nationally minded cadres who had used the indigenization drive to engage in cultural and academic activities. Stalin and his new appointees in the republics did their best to create the impression that in the realm of nationality policy they were not following in the footsteps of a recently defeated opposition, but in practice they were putting a brake on indigenization and opening a new front of struggle against local nationalism.
The shift in the power balance within the party leadership due to Stalin’s victory over the opposition was only one of the reasons for the change in nationality policy. Another one lay outside the Soviet borders. Whereas Lenin had formulated his policies on the nationality question with an eye to world revolution and the possibility of future European and Asian membership in an international Soviet Union, Stalin had no such illusions by the late 1920s. The conventional wisdom of the day, fully embraced by Stalin, was that the Soviet Union, surrounded by hostile bourgeois powers, could rely only on itself to guarantee its survival.
In 1926, two conservative coups took place on the western borders of the Soviet Union. The first brought an old enemy of the Bolsheviks, Józef Piłsudski, to power in Poland, while the second installed the authoritarian government of Antanas Smetona in Lithuania. Stalin and other party leaders began to talk about the end of peaceful coexistence with the West, causing a war scare that led people to hoard food and consumer goods. Stalin asserted in April 1927 that the major threat to the Soviet regime was the prospect of a new imperialist war. In the following month, the British intelligence services raided ARCOS, a Soviet-run company in London engaged in trade between the two countries. The raid proved what the British had known all along—that the Soviets were spying on them, using the trading company as a cover. The British government broke off its diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which had been established less than three years earlier.
War was in the air, but the Red Army commanders reported that the country was not ready for it. The secret police found peasants in the strategic borderlands increasingly dissatisfied with the regime and waiting for the arrival of the Whites, Poles, or Ukrainian nationalists. Given such attitudes among the population, there were fears that the tenth anniversary of the Soviet state, marked in the fall of 1927, might turn out to be its last. The war scare passed, but not without a major impact on Soviet policy. Many scholars associate the war scare of 1926–1927 with the origins of Stalin’s authoritarian and eventually dictatorial rule, the beginnings of industrialization and collectivization to modernize the Soviet economy, and changes in relations between the center and the republics. The latter kept their own Communist Party structures and nascent parliaments, called Supreme Soviets, and supported local cultures, but key political, economic, and cultural decisions would now come increasingly from Moscow and Moscow alone. Those decisions would encroach on the autonomy of local elites, which would eventually be integrated into a huge administrative pyramid centered on and ruled from the all-Union center.
Around the same time, the government in Moscow became more cautious with regard to policies that might alienate the Russian majority. It also began to see the cultural and political mobilization of the non-Russian nationalities not as an instrument for destabilizing adjoining states and bringing the world revolution to Central and Western Europe, but as bridgeheads for foreign aggression against the Soviet Union. That threat, real or imagined, became a major factor in the party’s rethinking of nationality policy in the Polish borderlands. Support for non-Russian nationalism was curtailed to prevent the West in general, and the Polish leadership in particular, from turning it against the center.
Nowhere was the link between the changed international situation and nationality policy more apparent than in Soviet Belarus, a polity created more in response to international pressures than in response to domestic demands. The war scare culminated in June 1927 with an event directly related to Belarus—the assassination of the Soviet ambassador to Warsaw, Petr Voikov. The assassin was a nineteen-year-old student, Barys Kaverda, who belonged to a pro-Polish Belarusian organization. Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism in neighboring Poland suddenly appeared to change from an opportunity to a threat to the Soviet Union. Many party officials began to suspect that England was turning border states against the USSR, and that those states, in turn, were exploiting anticommunist Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Polish organizations to undermine the Soviet state.
In 1928, Moscow sent a member of the Ukrainian leadership, Volodymyr Zatonsky, to inspect the implementation of nationality policy in Belarus. Zatonsky, a “company man” who readily adjusted his views to changing party policy, produced a devastating report. It claimed that leaders of the Belarusian cultural revival in the party ranks were orienting themselves toward the parochial world of the village and allying themselves too closely with non-communist intellectuals, many of them recent émigrés from Poland. Zatonsky’s critique of Belarusian nationality policy led to a purge of the Belarusian party apparatus, government, and Academy of Sciences to root out Belarusian nationalism. By the end of 1929, such charges had been used to dismiss the commissar of education, Anton Balitski, and the head of the party press department, Aliaksandr Adamovich. Altogether, close to 10 percent of the party membership was expelled. Many of those individuals would be arrested and given long sentences in a purge that began in December 1930. Among its victims was one of the leading architects of Belarusization, the former party official and then president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, Usevalad Ihnatoŭski. Dismissed in 1930, he committed suicide in 1931, foreshadowing the fate of a number of leaders of the Ukrainian indigenization drive, who found themselves under similar attack a few years later.
Ukrainization, which Zatonsky regarded as the model for his critique of practices in Belarus, fared little better in the eyes of Moscow. In the autumn of 1929, as leading figures of the indigenization policy were removed from their positions in Belarus, the GPU attacked prominent Ukrainian academicians and educators with prerevolutionary backgrounds in a highly publicized show trial of alleged nationalists. A total of 474 individuals were accused of belonging to the bogus Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, whose members had allegedly conspired with Piłsudski and leaders of the Ukrainian emigration in the West to start an uprising in Ukraine and separate it from the Soviet Union. Forty-five of the accused, among them the vice president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Serhii Yefremov, were found guilty and sentenced to forced-labor camps for terms ranging from two to ten years. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the leader of the Ukrainian revolution, was arrested and exiled in 1931. He would die under suspicious circumstances in Russia in 1934.
In December 1932, in the midst of policy discussions that would lead to the Great Ukrainian Famine a few weeks later and take the lives of close to 4 million victims, Stalin attacked Mykola Skrypnyk, the old Bolshevik who had replaced Oleksandr Shumsky in 1927 as commissar of education, for non-Bolshevik conduct of Ukrainization. Stalin explained peasant resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture, which the Bolsheviks launched in 1929, and their grain requisitions of 1932 by blaming it on agents of Józef Piłsudski and Ukrainian nationalists in Poland and Ukraine. In the months and years to come, Stalin and his propagandists would claim that Ukrainization had been hijacked by foreign agents and nationalists, who had exploited it against the party, alienating the Ukrainian peasantry from Moscow and endangering the communist project in the countryside instead of helping to implement it.
The Politburo ordered a stop to Ukrainization outside Soviet Ukraine, mainly in the Kuban and Far Eastern regions of the Russian Federation, which had significant Ukrainian populations. That decision led to the closing of newspapers, schools, and teacher-training institutions, and eventually to the Russification of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians. In Soviet Ukraine, Stalin installed new leaders of the party and the secret police. He also ended the Ukrainization not only of the proletariat but also of large groups of bureaucrats and engineers working for the ever-increasing number of institutes and enterprises belonging to all-Union ministries. The Ukrainian Famine took place in the midst of a full-scale onslaught by Stalin against the Ukrainian political elite and the Ukrainian language and culture—a well-established link that prompts many in Ukraine today to speak of the Great Famine as a genocide aimed not only at the peasantry but also at the Ukrainian nation as a whole.
The termination of the Ukrainization policy and the purge of the party officials and intellectuals who had led it produced a wave of arrests as well as suicides of major figures on the Ukrainian political and cultural scene. Fearing arrest, Mykola Skrypnyk committed suicide in July 1933. Two months earlier, the writer and poet Mykola Khvyliovy had shot himself. As early as 1926, Stalin had attacked him for calling on Ukrainian writers to turn away from Moscow and orient themselves toward Western Europe. Oleksandr Shumsky, whom Stalin accused of protecting Khvyliovy, was arrested in 1933. He would be murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1946 by a group of killers from the secret police who entered his train carriage in the middle of the night and administered poison that made the killing look as if it had been caused by a heart attack.
IN UKRAINE AND BELARUS ALIKE, THE REVERSAL OF INDIGENIZATION suspended the development of non-Russian languages and cultures at a moment when increasing numbers of peasants, driven out of the villages by the collectivization campaign, were beginning to migrate to the cities. The cities, in which the Russian language and culture were dominant, turned millions of Ukrainian-and Belarusian-speaking peasants into Russian-speaking workers and intellectuals, even though the cities themselves became predominantly Ukrainian and Belarusian in ethnic composition. In the 1930s, the Russification of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry proceeded at a rate that imperial proponents of a big Russian nation could only have dreamed of.
There was, however, a catch. Linguistic and cultural Russification did not obliterate non-Russian nationality, and millions of new Ukrainian and Belarusian urbanites would be officially classified and treated as such, not as Russians. Their languages and cultures would continue to exist, although clearly subordinate in status. Local non-Russian cadres were still recruited to the party and promoted to positions of responsibility in party and government structures. Affirmative action with regard to local cadres continued into the 1930s. Such policies encouraged ethnic Russians with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian or Belarusian to list their nationality as that of the titular group in their republic of residence. Among those who did so was a young party apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev. Born to Russian parents in the Ukrainian town of Kamenske, he gave his nationality as Ukrainian. By the time he became head of the Communist Party and the most influential Soviet leader in 1964, his official documents identified him as a Russian. The conflicting legacies of indigenization would reverberate for decades to come.