Borderland (19 page)
Authors: Anna Reid
Another dimension of confusion was added to our life in the Institute soon after I entered by an order that all instruction and examinations be conducted in the Ukrainian language, not in Russian. The order applied to all schools and institutions. It was Moscow’s supreme concession to the nationalist yearnings of the largest non-Russian Soviet Republic.
In theory we Ukrainians in the student body should have been pleased. In practice we were as distressed by the innovation as the non-Ukrainian minority. Even those who, like myself, had spoken Ukrainian from childhood, were not accustomed to its use as a medium of study. Several of our best professors were utterly demoralised by the linguistic switch-over. Worst of all, our local tongue simply had not caught up with modern knowledge; its vocabulary was unsuited to the purposes of electrotechnics, chemistry, aerodynamics, physics and most other sciences.
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Notwithstanding Kravchenko’s misgivings,
korenizatsiya
was a success. It taught thousands of peasants to read and write – in Ukrainian – for the first time, and produced a brief literary renaissance. Ukrainian had its Symbolists, its Modernists, its Neoclassicists and its satirists, many of whom exercised their wit on the
korenizatsiya
programme itself. One of the most popular was Ostap Vyshnya, who lampooned his countrymen under the name ‘Chukrainians’:
There were lots of Chukrainians – more than thirty million of them, although most didn’t know themselves who they were. If someone asked them ‘what’s your nationality?’ they would scratch their heads and answer ‘God knows – we live in Shengeriyivka, we’re Orthodox’ . . . Academics say that ancient Chukrainians covered their milk pots with poetry books – proof of how highly developed their culture was even then . . .
But even at its height,
korenizatsiya
never meant intellectual freedom. Kravchenko recalled a friend pointing at some public toilets, signed ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ in Ukrainian, and hissing, There’s the whole of our national autonomy!’ The former Rada president, Hrushevsky, was lured back to the Soviet Union in 1924 with the offer of a chair at the Kiev Academy of Sciences, only to find himself tailed day and night by the OGPU, the Bolshevik secret police. An American visitor who had applied for a job at the faculty was shocked to find that Hrushevsky took this for granted, and went straight back home again. He was right to be nervous: the OGPU had already drawn up lists of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ to be dealt ‘a crushing blow when the time comes’. These ranged from all ex-members of defunct Ukrainian organisations to shopkeepers, traders, ‘all foreigners’ and ‘all those with relatives or acquaintances abroad’.
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The ‘crushing blow’ – and the end of
korenizatsiya
– came with the first Stalin purges. What collectivisation was to the countryside, the purges were to the towns, the two running side by side through the late 1920s and early ’30s. In Ukraine the purges started early, with the arrest in July 1929 of some 5,000 members of a fictitious underground organisation, the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’. The following spring a series of show trials kicked off with the pillorying of forty-five Ukrainian writers, scholars, lawyers and priests in the Kharkiv opera house. (Close to the Russian border, Kharkiv was republican capital from 1922 to 1934; if it had remained so a few years longer, more of Kiev’s churches might have been spared demolition.) The following year the OGPU ‘uncovered’ another conspiracy, putting Hrushevsky at its head. Though Hrushevsky himself was only exiled to Moscow, many of his colleagues and almost all his students were sent to the camps or shot. At the same time the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had re-formed in the early 1920s, was disbanded and its clergy deported.
With the arrival of Stalin’s new viceroy, Pavel Postyshev, in January 1933, the purges intensified. Postyshev denounced
korenizatsiya
as a ‘cultural counter-revolution’ whose aim was to fan ‘national enmity’ and ‘isolate Ukrainian workers from the positive influence of Russian culture’.
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Entire commissariats, judicial boards, university faculties, editorial departments, theatre groups and film studios were duly arrested and sent to their deaths. Several hundred of Ukraine’s wandering bards, the
kobzars,
were summoned to a conference and never seen again. Skrypnyk, the Old Bolshevik in charge of Ukrainian-language education, committed suicide at his desk, using a revolver he had kept hidden since Civil War days. At the same time, Postyshev set about decimating the Ukrainian Communist Party itself, on the ironic grounds that it had showed insufficient ‘Bolshevik vigilance’ during collectivisation. By the end of the year, it had lost 100,000 members. As Postyshev’s report to Stalin of November 1933 boasted, ‘almost all the people removed were arrested and put before the firing-squad or exiled’.
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Between 1937 and 1939 a third wave of terror swept the whole of the Soviet Union. Victims spanned all types: factory-workers and scientists, priests and atheists, shop-girls and Party wives. For every Party member arrested, six or seven non-Party members also went to the cells, where they were threatened or tortured into denouncing colleagues and neighbours. In one Kiev district sixty-nine people were denounced by one man; in Odessa, over a hundred.
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The victims’ actual identity mattered little, bald quotas for desired numbers of arrestees being imposed from above. Vera Nanivska, a Kiev friend, told me what happened to her grandparents:
One night – it happened all over the place under Stalin – they were warned by friends in the local soviet that they were on the list of tomorrow’s arrests. That night they left everything and fled, to another small town not very far away. You didn’t have to really hide because Stalin didn’t care about who was on the list and who was not on the list, it didn’t matter. What the Stalin regime cared about was the constant threat, the constant fear . . .
Ironically, the system allowed some genuine anti-Communists, like Vera’s grandparents, to fade into the background. Mykola Stasyuk, an ex-minister in the Rada government, took a job as a park attendant in Mariupol, surviving to become a partisan leader during the Second World War.
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Exactly how many people died in the purges is unclear. Conquest reckons that between 1937 and 1938, in the Soviet Union as a whole, 1 million people were executed, and 2 million died in labour camps, the total camp population at the end of the period being about 7 million, and the prison population another 1 million. Adam Ulam comes up with half a million people executed, and somewhere between 3 and 12 million sent to the camps. What percentage of these were Ukrainians we do not know. A mass grave of purge victims in the Bykivnya forest outside Kiev, rediscovered in the late 1980s, contains an estimated 200,000 bodies. Another at Vynnytsya, uncovered during the war underneath a Park of Culture and Recreation, holds at least 10,000, all shot in the back of the head. In Ukrainian villages, quite casually, one hears of other sites, forgotten by everyone but the locals, who themselves can’t quite remember who shot who, or why, or when. Faced with old battleaxes prone to rhapsodising about the good old days of the Soviet Union, I found that a failsafe riposte was to inquire gently whether any of their relatives had been ‘repressed’ under Stalin. The answer was invariably a grudging Yes.
Rural terror ran in three overlapping stages: food requisitioning, dekulakisation and mass starvation. In the spring of 1928, eighteen months before the first batch of Ukrainian intelligentsia were put on trial in Kharkiv, requisitioning brigades started appearing in the villages, the first time this had happened since the end of ‘War Communism’ seven years earlier. A group of activists, some local, some from nearby towns, would arrive, call a meeting, and demand ‘voluntary’ surrender of a certain quantity of grain or meat. The villagers, naturally, usually voted against. Thereupon the activists denounced the village spokesmen as counter-revolutionary kulaks, and put them under arrest or confiscated their property. The meeting was kept in session until the remainder changed their minds. The confiscations provoked widespread resistance – riots, looting and the murder of several hundred requisitioning agents.
The next stage, announced by Stalin in December 1929, was the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.
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In practice, this meant the arrest and deportation of anybody who resisted collectivisation – that is to say, of any peasant who refused to give up his land, tools and livestock in favour of bonded labour at derisory wages on a state-owned farm run by a Party appointee. Singled out were richer peasants, priests, and those who could write or read – in other words, all the villages’ natural leaders. Like the purges, dekulakisation proceeded on a quota system. Provincial OGPU offices came up with a total of ‘kulaks’ to be ‘eliminated’, and distributed it among local troikas made up of a soviet member, a Party official and an OGPU man, for fulfilment as they pleased. Denunciations were encouraged, giving ample scope for malice. ‘It was so easy to do a man in,’ wrote Grossman. ‘You wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to work for him as hired hands, or that he had owned three cows.’
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In some places, dekulakisation was only applied to heads of households, in others to entire families. Protests – very common – from local officials that there were simply no kulaks in their area were ignored.
In the winter of 1930–31, in the Kharkiv Technological Institute, the up-and-coming Komsomolyets Viktor Kravchenko started hearing something of what was going on:
Rumours of incredible cruelty in the villages in connection with the liquidation of the kulaks were passed from mouth to mouth. We saw long trains of cattle cars filled with peasants passing through Kharkov, presumably on their way to the tundras of the North, as part of their ‘liquidation’. Communist officials were being murdered in the villages and recalcitrant peasants were being executed en masse. Rumors also circulated about the slaughter of livestock by peasants in their ‘scorched earth’ resistance to forced collectivisation. A Moscow decree making the unauthorised killing of livestock a capital crime confirmed the worst of these reports.
The railroad stations of the city were jammed with ragged, hungry peasants fleeing their homes. ‘Bezprizorni’, homeless children, who had been so much in evidence in the civil war and famine years were again everywhere. Beggars, mostly country people but also some city people, again appeared on the streets.
The press told glorious tales of accomplishment. The Turkestan–Siberian railway completed. New industrial combinats opened in the Urals, in Siberia, everywhere. Collectivization 100 per cent completed in one province after another. Open letters of ‘thanks’ to Stalin for new factories, new housing projects . . .
Which was the reality, which the illusion? The hunger and terror in the villages, the homeless children – or the statistics of achievement?
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Transferred to the Metallurgy Institute in Dnipropetrovsk, his doubts grew. Arriving home one evening, he was surprised to find a small girl, ‘grey with exhaustion and prematurely old’, squatting by the radiator pipes on the kitchen floor. She was called Katya, his mother told him, and she had come begging to the door. After supper she told her story:
We lived in Pokrovnaya. My father didn’t want to join the
kolkhoz.
All kinds of people argued with him and took him away and beat him but still he wouldn’t go in. They shouted he was a kulak agent. . . We had a horse, a cow, a heifer, five sheep, some pigs and a barn. That was all. Every night the constable would come and take papa to the village soviet. They asked him for grain and didn’t believe that he had no more . . . For a whole week they wouldn’t let father sleep and they beat him with sticks and revolvers till he was black and blue and swollen all over . . .
Then one morning . . . strangers came to the house. One of them was from the GPU and the chairman of our soviet was with him too. Another man wrote in a book everything that was in the house, even the furniture and our clothes and pots and pans. Then wagons arrived and everything was taken away . . .
Mamochka, my dear little mother, she cried and prayed and fell on her knees and even father and big brother Valya cried and sister Shura. But it did no good. We were told to get dressed and take along some bread and salt pork, onions and potatoes, because we were going on a long journey . . .
They put us all in the old church. There were many other parents and children from our village, all with bundles and all weeping. There we spent the whole night, in the dark, praying and crying, praying and crying. In the morning about thirty families were marched down the road surrounded by militiamen. People on the road made the sign of the cross when they saw us and also started crying.
At the station there were many other people like us, from other villages. It seemed like thousands. We were all crushed into a stone barn but they wouldn’t let my dog Volchok come in though he’d followed us all the way down the road. I heard him howling when I was inside in the dark.
After a while we were let out and driven into cattle cars, long rows of them, but I didn’t see Volchok anywhere and the guard kicked me when I asked. As soon as our car was filled up so that there was no room for more, even standing up, it was locked from the outside. We all shrieked and prayed to the Holy Virgin. Then the train started. No one knew where we were going. Some said Siberia, but others said no, the far North or even the hot deserts.
Near Kharkov my sister Shura and I were allowed out to get some water. Mama gave us some money and a bottle and said to try and buy some milk for our baby brother who was very sick. We begged the guard so long that he let us go out which he said was against his rules. Not far away were some peasant huts so we ran there as fast as our feet would carry us.
When we told these people who we were they began to cry. They gave us something to eat right away, then filled the bottle with milk and wouldn’t take the money. Then we ran back to the station. But we were too late and the train had gone away without us.
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