THE CHALLENGE WAS TO FIND THE RIGHT FLAG. THERE WAS NO shortage of red flags or red fabric in the Soviet Union, but getting a red flag with a white circle and a black swastika in the middle was no easy task in the Moscow of 1939. Hitler had gotten rid of the black, red, and yellow tricolor of the Weimar Republic the year he came to power, replacing it with the black, white, and red flag of the new Reich. In 1935, he changed the flag once again, choosing a red field with a swastika in a white circle. Since then, no senior German officials had visited the Soviet Union, and neither the People’s Commissariat of International Affairs nor the Kremlin protocol service had appropriate flags available to greet the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was coming on a hastily organized visit on August 23, 1939. They finally found the flags they needed at a Moscow movie studio, where they were used to shoot antifascist propaganda films.
As Ribbentrop’s plane made a soft landing at the Moscow airport, he was greeted not only with swastika flags but also by a guard of honor and the friendly faces of Soviet officials. In the early hours of August 24, Ribbentrop signed a nonaggression treaty with his Soviet counterpart, Viacheslav Molotov. Photos taken on the occasion show a happy Joseph Stalin, with a portrait of Lenin looking on benevolently. In signing the communist-fascist alliance with Germany, the Soviet Union made an about-face in international politics, breaking off negotiations with Britain and France.
The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact envisioned the division of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, effectively launching World War II, which would begin on September 1, 1939, with a German attack on Poland. Stalin believed that by signing the pact he had outmaneuvered the Western powers, postponed a Soviet conflict with Germany, and pushed Hitler toward a war with the West. He also believed that by claiming Moldavia, eastern Poland, and most of the Baltics as his sphere of influence, and, if required, as an occupation zone, he had moved the first Soviet line of defense farther west, improving the country’s geostrategic position.
The pact with Nazi Germany meant not only a change of Soviet foreign-policy rhetoric but also a major shift in propaganda efforts at home. The attacks on Hitler and Germany that had until recently been a hallmark of Kremlin propaganda were abandoned, but that was not all. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had a major impact on the Stalin regime’s nationality policy. It was not only the alliance with Hitler that had to be justified at home and abroad, but also the impending annexation of territory on the western borders of the USSR. In the 1930s, non-Russian Soviet nationalities with a significant presence outside the Soviet Union had been regarded as liabilities. But as the government’s foreign policy switched from one of defense to offense, those nationalities suddenly became an asset, allowing the regime to destabilize neighboring countries and legitimize its forthcoming aggression. It was something of a return to the policy of the 1920s, when the regime had expected a victorious revolutionary march to the West in which the non-Russian nationalities would play a major auxiliary role. The immediate beneficiaries of the foreign-policy shift were the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus.
When the Soviet Union entered World War II in September 1939, it justified its annexation of the Polish-ruled western Ukrainian and Belarusian lands as the liberation of fraternal peoples from oppression and their reunification with their brethren. From then on, Stalin would have to balance the interests of the newly empowered Russian nation with the demands and expectations of the minorities. That balancing act would prove most important in the case of relations between the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—the East Slavic core of the Soviet Union.
ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1939, THE RED ARMY CROSSED THE POLISH-Soviet border and began its advance into central Poland, which was already under German control. Viacheslav Molotov, who had signed the nonaggression pact with Ribbentrop less than a month earlier, addressed Soviet citizens by radio to explain what many of his compatriots, to say nothing about the rest of the world, saw as an act of naked aggression undertaken in conjunction with the antidemocratic and anticommunist Nazi regime. Molotov’s explanation was surprisingly simple: the Red Army had crossed the border to protect fellow Eastern Slavs—the Ukrainians and Belarusians who had settled in the eastern provinces of Poland. “The Soviet government,” claimed Molotov, “cannot be expected to take an indifferent attitude to the fate of its blood relatives, Ukrainians and Belarusians residing in Poland who previously found themselves in the position of nations without rights and have now been completely abandoned to the vagaries of fate. The Soviet government regards it as a sacred obligation to extend a helping hand to its brethren Ukrainians and brethren Belarusians residing in Poland.”
The formula had been produced by Stalin himself in the course of nocturnal deliberations with the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, whom Stalin summoned to his Kremlin office in the early hours of September 17. A week earlier, Molotov had told Schulenburg that the Soviet government was going “to declare that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians ‘threatened’ by Germany.” He then added, according to the German report on the meeting: “This argument was to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible to the masses and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an aggressor.” The Germans protested, but Molotov would not budge. “The Soviet government unfortunately saw no possibility of any other motivation,” he allegedly told Schulenburg, “since the Soviet Union had thus far not concerned itself about the plight of its minorities in Poland and had to justify abroad, in some way or other, its present intervention.”
It fell to Stalin himself to change the Soviet formula, removing from it the reference to the German threat. What remained was a reference to the threat allegedly posed by the disintegration of the Polish state, but the peoples to be saved from it were the same—the Ukrainians and Belarusians. The list of those whom the Soviet Union allegedly wished to rescue was incomplete. Missing were not only the Jews, of whom there were significant numbers in the soon to be “reunited” provinces, but also the Poles: the Soviet-German demarcation line that Molotov and Ribbentrop had drawn in August 1939 left not only ethnically Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, but also parts of the Warsaw and Lublin provinces—which had been settled largely by Poles—on the Soviet side. Stalin clearly did not want to annoy Hitler by mentioning that he was saving Jews, while claiming that he was saving Poles from Poles made no sense whatever. Stalin wanted some nationalities but not others, and the Poles constituted a special challenge that went beyond the legitimacy question.
The USSR had long abandoned its earlier attempts to gain the loyalty of ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland and other neighboring states in order to promote world revolution. With the rise of the German threat, it ceased to regard the members of those nationalities living in the USSR as allies in a future Soviet offensive against the West and began to see them as a potential threat to the USSR in case of a German invasion. The most recent threat of such a scenario had come in March 1939, with the German destruction of Czechoslovakia. In the eastern part of the Czechoslovak state, the government of Transcarpathian Ukraine had declared its independence, and fears ran high in Moscow that Hitler would use that declaration to declare war on the USSR under the banner of reunifying the Ukrainian lands. Hitler decided not to play the Ukrainian card against Stalin and awarded Transcarpathian Ukraine to the Hungarians, who crushed the pro-independence movement there. But Stalin had learned his lesson. He wanted no more Ukrainian or Belarusian enclaves outside the USSR; nor did he want to “share” any ethnic group, the Poles in particular, with his new ally.
In mid-September, Stalin decided to renegotiate the pact and change the dividing line between the German and Soviet spheres in Eastern Europe. He asked Ribbentrop to come back to Moscow. The Nazi foreign minister obliged. A Soviet movie camera captured his arrival in Moscow on September 27. Dressed in a long leather coat, Ribbentrop greeted the Soviet commanders with a Hitler salute. The next day, Ribbentrop and Molotov drew a new line on the map, which Stalin signed in blue and Ribbentrop in red. Under the new arrangement, Stalin traded Polish ethnic territory around Warsaw and Lublin for the Baltic state of Lithuania. For the time being, this meant that the Soviet occupation of Poland would be limited to territories settled largely by Ukrainians and Belarusians. Most of the East Slavic territories, including the city of Lviv, which had briefly been held by the tsarist army in 1914–1915, would now be under Stalin’s control—the unexpected realization of a dream of generations of imperial Russian nation-builders.
The new occupiers from the East entered Lviv under the Soviet Ukrainian banner—a change reflected in the name of the Red Army forces engaged in the operation, which were called the Ukrainian Front. In Belarus, similar Red Army units constituted the Belarusian Front. In justifying the Soviet entry into World War II and the annexation of the newly occupied Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, Stalin relied on the rhetoric of the 1920s, which meant a partial return to the policy of national communism and exploitation of the cultural aspects of Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism. In the fall of 1939, the former provinces of eastern Poland were declared parts of the Ukrainian and Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republics. This was proclaimed a triumph of Soviet nationality policy and a manifestation of the friendship of peoples. The use of the nationality card in the western parts of the newly enlarged republics brought back policies promoting Ukrainian and Belarusian cultural agendas that had first been implemented in the 1920s.
But these were different times. Russian nationalism was now at the core of the new Soviet identity, and the mobilization of other East Slavic nationalisms was conditioned by that new reality. The laws on the incorporation of the former Polish territories into the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics infringed on Russia’s status as the only “great nation” in the USSR—the Ukrainians and Belarusians were given that appellation as well. But some great nations were still more equal than others, or even showed a tendency to absorb others. Thus Vladimir Picheta, the president of Minsk University in the 1920s, who was arrested in 1930 on charges of being both a Great Russian chauvinist and a Belarusian nationalist, decided after his release from prison that it was much safer to be accused of chauvinism than nationalism. In a brochure written for mass circulation, he welcomed the annexation of eastern Poland as the reunification of historical Russian lands.
If one can trust the reports of Stalin’s secret police, Soviet entry into the war was met with enthusiasm by much of the Soviet population. The younger generation, indoctrinated in Soviet Marxist ideology and exposed to antifascist rhetoric, mistook it for the beginning of a Soviet-German war, the long-awaited struggle between communism and fascism. Many members of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia welcomed it as a reclamation of “ancient Russian lands”—a reprise of the imperial euphoria of the first months of World War I. Finally, many Soviet Ukrainian and Belarusian intellectuals welcomed the war as a reunification of their native land. The management of relations between Stalinist dogma, newly dominant Russian nationalism, and the reasserted Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism would involve numerous twists and turns of official policy.
AS ALWAYS, THE UKRAINIANS PRESENTED THE MAIN CHALLENGE to the regime in the formulation of the new nationality discourse and, eventually, policy. The rehabilitation of the traditional Ukrainian historical narrative, expressing pride in Ukrainian Cossack history, began a few years before the start of World War II, largely in preparation for the war and, not surprisingly, as part of the rehabilitated Russian imperial narrative. Only those parts of the Ukrainian narrative that fitted the prerevolutionary imperial narrative were selected for inclusion.
The key symbol of the new treatment of the Russian and Ukrainian historical narratives was the seventeenth-century Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had been denounced in Soviet literature of the mid-1930s as a “traitor and ardent enemy of the Ukrainian peasantry” and the architect of “union between the Ukrainian and Russian feudal lords.” The authorities boarded up the large monument to him in downtown Kyiv whenever communist demonstrations took place and considered tearing it down altogether. But Khmelnytsky was also a major hero of Russian imperial historiography who had brought about the “reunification of Rus’.” That turned out to be the key factor in the rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky in Soviet historical discourse. Given the prevailing circumstances, the rehabilitation of Khmelnytsky began in Moscow, not in Kyiv, and it was undertaken at the highest level.
In August 1937, Soviet newspapers published an official statement on history textbooks that criticized the outdated approach to the Ukrainian hetman. “The authors do not see any positive role in Khmelnytsky’s actions in the seventeenth century, in his struggle against Ukraine’s occupation by the Poland of the lords and the Turkey of the sultan,” declared Pravda. The author of the passage was Stalin himself. He went on to say that the annexation of Ukraine and Georgia to the Russian state was a “lesser evil” as compared with their takeover by other foreign powers. The elements of the traditional Ukrainian and Georgian narratives that glorified their unification with Russia were now restored to favor.
With the change of policy in Moscow, Ukrainian writers embraced the possibility of reasserting at least part of their heritage. The young Ukrainian playwright Oleksandr Korniichuk promptly wrote a play titled Bohdan Khmelnytsky in which he lauded the Cossack hetman for his war against Poland. Believers in the old class-based approach to history attacked Korniichuk, but the party leadership in Moscow backed the politically shrewd author. In 1939, the play was performed at the Malyi Theater in Moscow and began its triumphal circuit of theaters throughout the USSR. The film version, produced in 1941, received the highest literary award, the Stalin Prize. Khmelnytsky had become a member of the Soviet pantheon of heroes on a par with Aleksandr Nevsky and Minin and Pozharsky.
Korniichuk’s play was among the theater productions brought to Lviv and western Ukraine in the wake of the Soviet annexation of the region. Korniichuk himself served as a plenipotentiary of Soviet Ukrainian culture in the newly occupied territories and played an important role in the Ukrainization of the cultural scene that was formerly not just dominated but monopolized by the Poles. In the fall of 1939, Polish theater and opera productions were swiftly replaced with Ukrainian and Russian ones. The authorities proceeded with the Ukrainization of the press and the educational system. Ethnic Poles were purged from administrative, cultural, and educational institutions. Arrested en masse, many of them were imprisoned or exiled to remote parts of the Soviet Union, including former politicians and police officers and veterans of the military.
Although the local Ukrainian intelligentsia was recruited to help with the de-Polonization and Ukrainization of the region’s administration, education, and culture, key positions were reserved for cadres from the east, such as Mykhailo Marchenko, the new president of Lviv University. He was parachuted into his position from the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kyiv, where he had headed the department of the history of feudalism and had been working on a dissertation on the Ukrainian-Polish wars of the second half of the seventeenth century. On Marchenko’s watch at Lviv, Polish professors were removed from administrative positions at the university, Ukrainian-language courses were introduced, and the number of ethnic Ukrainian students increased. From 1919 to 1939, the university’s official name had been Jan Kazimierz University, in honor of John II Casimir, the king who had fought against Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1651. Now the name was changed to Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Franko was a major Ukrainian writer and political activist of the pre–World War I era.
Marchenko was hated by the Polish professors, many of whom lost not only their administrative positions but also their jobs. But it soon turned out that Marchenko himself was under suspicion. He was removed from his position in the spring of 1940 and placed under police surveillance after his return to Kyiv. He was arrested in June 1941 on charges of maintaining ties with the Ukrainian nationalist underground. The rise and fall of Marchenko at the helm of Lviv University coincided with the rise and fall of Ukrainization in the newly annexed territories. Although Moscow made an all-out push for Ukrainization between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1940, supporting the local Ukrainian cadres and going after the old Polish guard, by summer the policy had changed. The Poles were still persecuted, but some steps were also taken to accommodate them, while the Ukrainians were favored in cultural policy but attacked for real or perceived manifestations of political nationalism. As far as Moscow was concerned, it was a short step from dedicated party Ukrainizer to Ukrainian nationalist: constant vigilance was required to keep in step with the party line.
One reason for changing nationality policy and broadening the scope of repressions and deportations was the course of the war and Stalin’s foreign-policy calculations. The fall of Paris to the Nazis in May 1940 caught Stalin by surprise—he had expected a lengthy conflict on the western front. Now Hitler could turn east and attack the Soviet Union at almost any time. The Soviet dictator, still believing that the farther west he moved his borders, the more security he gained, rushed to claim his part of the booty in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. He rapidly occupied the Baltic states and claimed Moldavia and ethnically Ukrainian territories from Romania. He also began a war with Finland, which would not go the way of the Baltic states and mounted strong resistance, bleeding the Red Army and minimizing Soviet territorial gains along the Soviet-Finnish border. But claiming territory was only part of Stalin’s calculus: securing it in the face of the coming aggression was another major task.
Whom Hitler could count on if he moved into western Ukraine and Belarus was the question that Stalin and his security team were trying to answer in the month after the fall of Paris. The Poles were still disloyal, but, given German policy in occupied central and western Poland, they were no Germanophiles—the executions of thousands of Polish political, cultural, and intellectual leaders were carried out with little or no secrecy and widely known in Polish circles. There was a different attitude among the Ukrainians, with many of them eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Germans. Old-timers looked back fondly to Austrian rule, which had created opportunities for Ukrainians to assert themselves. Many of the younger western Ukrainians rejected not only Polish but also Soviet rule and joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. They had high hopes that the Nazis would help them establish an independent Ukrainian state. Along with former members of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, who were suspected of either Ukrainian nationalism or disloyalty to Stalin, Ukrainian nationalists became the main target of the Soviet occupation authorities.
The nationalist leaders’ sympathy toward and collaboration with the Germans (in early 1941 they surreptitiously formed two Special Forces battalions under the auspices of German military intelligence) was reason enough for the Soviets to take action against them. Moreover, their brand of nationalism stressed the complete distinctness of Ukrainians from Russians, which exacerbated ethnic tensions resulting from the Stalin regime’s reassertion of Russian nationalism. Few sets of data provide a better understanding of Soviet nationality policy in the annexed territories of Ukraine and Belarus than the figures on Soviet deportations of unreliable political elements from those areas. In February 1940, during the first wave of large-scale deportations, close to 140,000 Poles were shipped from western Ukraine and Belarus to Siberia and Central Asia. They included former government officials and policemen as well as military veterans, along with many members of their families. More deportations would follow, targeting Poles, Jews, and finally, Ukrainians and Belarusians. In May 1941, more than 11,000 Ukrainians would be deported from the former Polish territories to the Soviet interior.
THE NOTION OF PATRIA, WHICH IN THE RUSSIAN RENDITION OF motherland (rodina) and fatherland (otechestvo) was fully rehabilitated in the Soviet Union only in 1934, became the rallying cry of the communist leadership after Hitler, having failed to invade the British Isles in the fall of 1940, turned his armies eastward and attacked his former Soviet ally on June 22, 1941.
On that day, Stalin, too stunned to address the population himself, told his right-hand man, Viacheslav Molotov, whose signature stood next to Ribbentrop’s on the pact that Hitler had just violated, to read the text of the appeal edited by Stalin himself. Taken by surprise, the Soviet dictator had nowhere to look for consolation, reassurance, and inspiration but to history. The text of the appeal read by Molotov stated, “Not for the first time, our people must deal with an arrogant enemy attacker. In the past, our people responded to Napoleon’s campaign against Russia with a patriotic war, and Napoleon suffered defeat, which led to his downfall. That will also be the fate of the arrogant Hitler, who has proclaimed a new campaign against our country. The Red Army and all our people will again wage a victorious patriotic war for the Motherland, for honor, for freedom.” The German-Soviet conflict would eventually become known in the Soviet Union as the “Great Patriotic War of the Soviet People.”
A few days after Molotov’s speech, two Soviet songwriters—the composer Aleksandr Aleksandrov, who had founded the Red Army Ensemble, and the poet Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach—wrote a song that became an emblem of the war. Titled “The Sacred War,” it would lead every Soviet morning radio broadcast from the autumn of 1941 until the end of the war. Beginning with the words “Rise, tremendous country, / Rise to do battle to the death,” the song referred to the motherland but not to the party. According to one theory, the lyrics had actually been written not by Lebedev-Kumach but by a provincial schoolteacher, Aleksandr Bode, back in 1916, during World War I. Lebedev-Kumach allegedly replaced a few words, writing “fascist” instead of “Teutonic” and “our great Union” instead of “our Russian native land.” The song, which revived themes and tropes of prerevolutionary Russian nationalism, could ignore the party but had to take account of the multiethnic composition of the USSR and rally the patriotism not only of the Russians but also of the other peoples.
That was the theme of Stalin’s first public speech of the war, delivered on July 3, 1941. After explaining how right he had been to sign the nonaggression pact with Hitler, he called Hitler and Ribbentrop “monsters and cannibals.” The distressed Stalin called his subjects “brothers and sisters,” trying to create a family feeling and a sense of spiritual, almost religious brotherhood among the Soviet peoples. According to Stalin, the goal of the German invasion was “to reestablish the rule of the landowners, to reestablish tsarism, to destroy the national culture and national statehood of the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tatars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and other free peoples of the Soviet Union, to Germanize them and turn them into slaves of German princes and barons.”
The appeal had little immediate impact. German divisions were advancing eastward, crushing the resistance of the Red Army, which was manned largely by peasants who had little sense of loyalty to the regime that had put them through the nightmare of collectivization and, in the case of Ukraine and southern Russia, a devastating famine. The non-Russian inhabitants of the western territories that had been newly annexed and quickly lost by the Soviets tended to see the Germans as liberators (they would soon be proved wrong). In the fall, after retreating from the Baltics and Belarus and losing 600,000 soldiers who had been surrounded near Kyiv, the Red Army was waging war on Russian territory for the very survival of the regime. Almost all the non-Russian provinces of the western USSR were lost.
That must have been one of the reasons why, in his next highly publicized address, delivered on November 7, 1941, Great October Socialist Revolution Day, on Red Square in front of troops leaving for the front lines only a few dozen kilometers from Moscow, Stalin dropped all reference to the non-Russians. For him, the war was now a purely Russian undertaking. “The war that you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war,” he declared. “May you be inspired in that war by the manly image of our great ancestors—Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitrii Donskoi, Kuzma Minin, Dmitrii Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov! May you be shielded by the victorious banner of the great Lenin!” There was no mention of any non-Russian hero, only glorification of the imperial ones who had often been ridiculed by Soviet propaganda only a few years earlier. Even the reference to Lenin had religious overtones, as the Russian verb oseniat’ (to shield) often means “to bless” or “to make the sign of the cross.” With the regime’s back to the wall, Stalin was invoking symbols and gods previously discarded and desecrated.
It looked as if the emphasis on the Russian imperial tradition at the expense of the primacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology was working. The transfer of fresh Soviet divisions from the Far East helped Stalin hold on to Moscow in December 1941 and push the Germans back. In January 1943, in the middle of the furious fighting at Stalingrad, Stalin reintroduced military shoulder patches that had been closely associated with the tsarist regime in Soviet prewar propaganda. A less ideological foreign policy allowed for building bridges with former adversaries, Britain and the United States, which formed with the Soviet Union what the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, called the “Grand Alliance” against Germany.
The Western allies, in particular the United States, helped save the Soviet regime by providing weaponry and equipment through the Lend-Lease program, but Stalin wanted more—a second front in Europe. To gain Western public support, he had to shed the image of a crazed atheistic communist bent on world revolution. In 1943, in preparation for the Teheran summit with the Western leaders, Stalin dissolved the Communist International, which Western public opinion regarded as an institution committed to plotting world revolution and the overthrow of democratic governments around the globe. Stalin also made major concessions to the Russian Orthodox Church, allowing the election of the Moscow patriarch to the throne that had remained vacant since the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks’ antireligious campaign had begun. With the Russian Orthodox Church getting a new lease on life, an important element of imperial Russian history and identity began its return to public consciousness.
The ideological and cultural return to imperial values culminated with the elimination of “The Internationale,” the song of the international socialist movement of the late nineteenth century, as the national anthem of the Soviet Union. In December 1943, the Politburo approved the lyrics and music of a new anthem written by Aleksandr Aleksandrov, the coauthor of “The Sacred War.” Its music closely resembled that of Aleksandrov’s other hit, the “Hymn of the Bolshevik Party” (1938). But whereas the party hymn had contained not a word about Russia, the new Soviet hymn had no reference to the party. “Great Rus’ has forever conjoined / An indissoluble union of free republics,” went the first two lines of the new hymn. Stalin had personally edited and approved the lyrics. The non-Russian republics of the Union would now have to rally around Russia in the struggle against foreign aggression.
DURING THE MOST DIFFICULT FIRST MONTHS AND YEARS OF THE war, when the authorities in Moscow focused on stoking the fires of Russian nationalism, their counterparts in other Soviet republics, especially those occupied by the Germans, were allowed and even encouraged to exploit their own nationalism to the maximum in order to mobilize anti-German resistance behind the front lines and motivate their ethnic brethren in the ranks of the Red Army.
Very soon after Molotov’s speech of June 22, 1941, Ukrainian writers discovered their own Great Patriotic War as a source of inspiration. Apparently they did not consider the war against Napoleon to be theirs (Napoleon’s army had never entered Ukraine). In a letter addressed to Stalin, leading Ukrainian cultural figures claimed that in the early modern era the Ukrainian Cossacks had waged their own patriotic war against the Poles and Germans. Ukrainian historians and propagandists found their own Aleksandr Nevsky in the person of the thirteenth-century Prince Danylo of Halych. Ironically enough, while Nevsky had fought against the West, Danylo had fought the Mongols with the help of Western allies and even accepted a royal crown from the pope. But such historical details were readily overlooked in the process of emulating the elder Russian brother and contributing to war propaganda.
In Belarus, the most prominent national poet, Yanka Kupala, also turned to history for inspiration. He praised the struggle of “my heroic Belarusian people” under Stalin’s leadership against the “cannibal and bloodsucker” Hitler. Kupala called for a jacquerie, or peasant revolt, against the invader: “Partisans, partisans, Belarusian sons! / For bondage, for shackles, slaughter the evil Hitlerites so that they do not revive for eons!” Officials at the Belarusian partisan headquarters in Moscow were eager to exploit all available symbols of Soviet Belarusian nationalism. They gave the name of Kastus Kalinoŭski (Konstanty Kalinowski), who had been conveniently transformed in Soviet Belarusian historiography from a leader of the Polish revolt against Russia in 1863 into a fighter for the Belarusian people, to one of the best-known partisan units active on Belarusian territory. Its core consisted of officers of the secret police who were parachuted into western Belarus in the spring of 1943.
While non-Russian heroes were recognized locally, they found it difficult to gain visibility at the all-Union level and function on a par with their Russian counterparts. In mid-1942, Stalin approved the creation of new military awards for Red Army officers. They were named after Prince Aleksandr Nevsky and two tsarist generals, Aleksandr Suvorov, who had crushed the Polish uprising led by Tadeusz Kościuszko in the late eighteenth century, and Mikhail Kutuzov, who had surrendered Moscow to Napoleon in 1812 but had then driven him out of Russia. All three commanders were ethnic Russians. Among the non-Russians, even Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who was as popular among the soldiers as Aleksandr Nevsky, thanks to the film made about him on the eve of the war, was not given similar recognition. Ukrainian cultural figures felt offended.
The situation began to change only in the fall of 1943, when the Red Army began its offensive in Ukraine and Belarus. Late that summer, the best-known Ukrainian filmmaker, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, appealed to the party boss of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, to establish a high military award honoring Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Khrushchev turned to Stalin, suggesting that such an award would raise morale among Ukrainians in the Red Army and beyond. Khmelnytsky, wrote Khrushchev, was very popular in Ukraine, because he had fought for its liberation and the union of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. Stalin agreed. In October 1943, Moscow announced the creation of an award designed by Ukrainian artists and featuring Khmelnytsky’s name in its Ukrainian rather than its Russian transcription. The Pravda editorial that accompanied the publication of the decree stressed that the seventeenth-century hetman had been a great statesman and had understood that the Ukrainian people could survive only in union with the fraternal Russian people.
That was just the beginning. A few days later, Stalin ordered four army groups fighting in Ukraine to be renamed as four Ukrainian Fronts. In the spring of 1944, the name “Belarusian Front” was given to three army groups fighting in Belarus. By that time, Ukraine, Belarus, and other republics had their own commissariats of defense and international relations. After the Teheran Conference with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in December 1943, where Stalin received a much-desired promise to open a second front in Europe, and preparations were made for the formation of what would become known as the United Nations Organization, the Soviet leader initiated constitutional changes creating an array of formally independent Soviet republics, the object being to claim more seats in the future United Nations. None of the republics had real independence, or even autonomy, in administrative matters, to say nothing of military and international affairs, but Stalin managed to convince the Allies to admit Ukraine and Belarus, along with the Soviet Union (understood as Russia), into the UN General Assembly. The big Russian nation, now with three voices instead of one, had reentered the international arena.
The simultaneous mobilization of Russian and non-Russian nationalism in the effort to defeat Germany created new challenges for the Soviet authorities in Moscow, who had to ensure that non-Russian nationalism did not overshadow Russian nationalism. In November 1943, Georgii Aleksandrov, the head of the propaganda department of the party’s Central Committee in Moscow, criticized Ukrainian writers for a letter celebrating the liberation of Kyiv from Nazi occupation. According to Aleksandrov, the letter implied that there were “two leading peoples in the Soviet Union, the Russians and the Ukrainians,” although it was “universally accepted that the Russian people was the elder brother in the Soviet Union’s family of peoples.”
Aleksandrov was among the party officials who supported the decision to deny the Stalin Prize to the History of the Kazakh SSR, published in 1943 by a group of Moscow and Kazakh authors led by the prominent Soviet historian Anna Pankratova, on the grounds that it discredited imperial Russia. He wrote: “The book is anti-Russian, as the authors’ sympathies are on the side of those revolting against tsarism, and there is no effort to exonerate Russia.” Pankratova and her colleagues never received the Stalin Prize.
But finding a balance between the class and national principles, as well as between Russian and non-Russian nationalism within that context, was no easy task. As long as the war was being waged, the patriotism of every Soviet nationality was useful. Thus, while Aleksandrov and like-minded party officials and intellectuals pushed the Russian line, patriots of other peoples were allowed to push back. Ukrainian writers and historians protested the attempts of Russian authors to claim Danylo of Halych as a Russian prince, or to refer to western Ukraine as ancient Rus’, or Russian land. Pankratova and her colleagues appealed Aleksandrov’s decision to higher party authorities, claiming that they could not rehabilitate the colonial policies of the tsars and that, if there had been no oppression before the revolution, there would have been no revolution either.
The senior Politburo members Georgii Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov tried to settle the dispute by calling a meeting of historians to discuss the work of Pankratova and her colleagues. It ended with no clear winners, and the party postponed its verdict until the end of the war. In August 1945, a high party organ, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, issued a resolution condemning the 1943 history of Kazakhstan and ordering Kazakh historians to revise it. One cannot imagine the Kazakh authorities passing such a resolution without an explicit signal from Moscow.
The Soviet victory against Germany marked the end of the nationality policy originating with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. The status of the non-Russian nationalities was radically downgraded and Russian dominance reasserted—a policy shift signaled by Stalin himself. In a highly publicized toast that he delivered on May 24, 1945, at the Kremlin banquet in honor of Soviet military commanders, Stalin declared:
As a representative of our Soviet government, I would like to raise a toast to the health of our Soviet people and, first and foremost, of the Russian people. I drink first and foremost to the health of the Russian people because it is the foremost of all our nations making up the Soviet Union. I raise a toast to the health of the Russian people because in this war and earlier it has merited the title, if you will, of the leading force of our Soviet Union among all the peoples of our country. I raise a toast to the health of the Russian people not only because it is the leading people but also because it has good sense, political good sense in every respect, and endurance.
On the following day, the toast was published in slightly revised form in the main Soviet newspapers. In years to come it would be printed and reprinted more than once, signaling the new turn in the party’s nationality policy. Oleksandr Korniichuk, the winner of the Stalin Prize for his play Bohdan Khmelnytsky, was made aware of the change even before the toast. In early May 1945, his award-winning play was taken out of production when a pro-Soviet Polish delegation visited Ukraine. Korniichuk, who was then still Stalin’s favorite playwright, was appalled. He complained that no one had curtailed performances in Moscow of the much more anti-Polish opera Ivan Susanin. Korniichuk got nowhere. His play was now subject to criticism and on its way out, while Ivan Susanin, a reworking of the imperial-era Life for the Tsar, remained on stage.
The regime was prepared to improve relations with the Poles by curbing Soviet Ukrainian nationalism, but not its much more powerful Russian counterpart. The Great Patriotic War was over, and not every brand of patriotism was now welcome.