Unlike the situation in Russia proper, an important section of the Ukrainian Communist Party itself had originally come from the Left Social Revolutionaries. Their main body in the Ukraine had turned nationalist, under the name Borotbist. This party was dissolved early in 1920, and several thousand of its members, including Lyubchenko and Grinko, entered the Communist Party.
Time and time again, Bolshevik leaders sent to the Ukraine with strong centralizing views modified them over the years. The attempt to rule solely as agents of a foreign power, through a handful of Quislings, was seen as in the long run nonviable. It was a problem of the type which repeated itself in Hungary and elsewhere after the Second World War.
Chubar, who was to be moderate on this issue, became Premier of the Ukraine in July 1923. But in 1925, Kaganovich was sent to Kiev as First Secretary. His centralizing policy was unpopular in the local Party, which otherwise had no quarrel with Stalin. Stalin himself writes of a demand from the Ukraine in 1926 that Kaganovich be replaced by Grinko and Chubar.69 Stalin, involved in his great struggle at the center, did not wish for a quarrel with the more moderate faction in the Ukraine simply on this local issue. When, in July 1928, Kaganovich was removed from the Republic, Stalin, as Bukharin put it, “bought the Ukrainians by withdrawing Kaganovich from the Ukraine.”70 He was replaced by Stanislav Kossior, a short, bald, bullet-headed Pole who backed Stalin unreservedly right up to the Yezhov period.
In the years of dispute with the Left and Right oppositions, Stalin’s calculations proved correct. The Ukrainian Party gave no trouble. There seems to have been very little Trotskyism in it. And in fact, the national minorities in general disliked Trotsky more than Stalin. Even after experience of Stalin’s rule, an Ossetian Communist believed that while Trotsky’s intended method of rule was in general identical with Stalin’s, on the nationality question Trotsky was “even more reactionary.”71
And the Ukrainian experience with the oppositionists had not been reassuring. Pyatakov, who had briefly ruled in Kiev during the Civil War, had put the view that the Ukraine must submit to Russia very bluntly: “Can we declare that the form of existence of proletarian-peasant Ukraine can be determined solely and absolutely by the working masses of the Ukraine? Of course not!”72
In the early 1930s, the collectivization campaign had turned the Ukraine, more than anywhere else, into a battlefield between the Party and the population, and Party solidarity was the decisive criterion. Non-Communist nationalism remained powerful. The trial of forty-five leading cultural figures as a “Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” in March and April 1930, and the similar trials which followed it, were directed against a real resistance.
This extreme and rigorous purge erased the old Ukrainian intellectuals and left the Old Bolshevik Skrypnik, in the Commissariat of Education, as the protector of only a residue of Ukrainian culture. This, however, he determined to defend.
There is no doubt that Skrypnik and his genuine feeling of resistance to Moscow represented a powerful trend among the rank and file of the Party. But the rest of the leadership were in a different position. Stalin’s war on the peasantry had truly placed them in a position in which, in Lenin’s phrase, “who-whom?” was the only immediate question. Whatever their hidden reservations and whatever they may have thought of the plans which had led to the crisis, they could no more be expected to indulge them than a general fighting a desperate battle can spend time arguing about the strategic errors of the High Command.
But still, they seem to have become shaken and exhausted by the loyal fulfillment of Stalin’s collectivization orders.
On 24 January 1933 a resolution of the All-Union Central Committee attacked the Ukrainian Party: “The Party organs in the Ukraine have not succeeded in carrying out the Party charges entrusted to them in the areas of organization of grain storage and completion of the plan for grain collection.”
This heralded the climax of the fearful terror-famine which reached its peak in March and April 1933, leaving millions dead in the Ukraine.73 Three of the seven Provincial Secretaries were censured and removed, together with three members of the local Politburo and Secretariat. And Postyshev, hitherto Secretary of the All-Union Central Committee, was sent to the Republic as Second Secretary, with plenary powers. Throughout 1933, non-Ukrainian Party workers of more unquestionable loyalty were transferred into the Republic from Russia. (It is estimated that there were some 5,000 of these.)74
From 8 to 11 June 1933 Skrypnik was strongly attacked. He refused to recant, and was violently rebuked by Postyshev for his attitude. Other attacks followed in the press, and on 7 July he committed suicide. His example may have been the Ukrainian writer Khvylovy, who had just done the same when accused of excessive Ukrainian feeling.
Skrypnik had been one of the three representatives of underground organizations who had gone to the conference of Bolshevik leaders in Paris in 1909. The day after Skrypnik’s suicide, Pravda described it as “an act of cowardice”: Skrypnik, “an unworthy member of the Central Committee,” had fallen prey to bourgeois–nationalist mistakes. And, as Petrovsky said, “It was not easy for us to ward off these nationalist attacks, since the chief aggressor was an Old Bolshevik, Slcrypnik.”75 However, Petrovsky added, Moscow had helped “by sending well-known Party members to aid us.”
Skrypnik’s supporters were disposed of by the unmasking of a “Ukrainian Military Organization” consisting mainly of the post-1930 generation of academic leaders in the Institute of Linguistics, the State Publishing House, the School of Marxist Philosophy, and the Shevchenko Institute of Literary Scholarship. Many further trials of intellectuals followed. But after Skrypnik’s death, there were no major attacks on the Party cadres of the Ukraine until Postyshev’s fall in early 1937. When Chubar was called to Moscow to be All-Union Vice Premier, he was replaced as Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars by Panas Lyubchenko, a former Borotbist, who shared his views—a slight and light-bearded figure with a sensitive, intellectual face, who had given satisfaction by his firmness in the collectivization struggle.
But there were long-standing feuds and factions in the Ukrainian Party. By the time the purges started, Postyshev and the Head of the Ukrainian NKVD, Balitsky, were working against Lyubchenko. They were later joined by M. M. Popov, Third Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, who around the end of 1936 fabricated a “case” and went to Stalin and Kossior to demand Lyubchenko’s dismissal and arrest as a “Borotbist” plotter.76
But Stalin, as we have seen, was now turning against Postyshev. And after the February–March plenum not only Postyshev, but also Balitsky and Popov were transferred from the Ukrainian Party, and a purge swept the Party officials at the provincial and local level. With the defeat of the Postyshev-Balitsky-Popov group, it looked as though Lyubchenko and the remainder of the leadership were in a strong position. But, in fact, both factions were destined to destruction.
A Politburo commission from Moscow, which included Molotov and Yezhov, is reported in Kiev about this time, seeking further changes but meeting with some resistance.77 At any rate, a new offensive was soon prepared, and a new NKVD People’s Commissar for the Ukraine was named: I. M. Leplevsky, fresh from his triumphs in the Tukhachevsky investigation. He brought with him a large force of new NKVD men.78 And Kossior, who had earlier shown some signs of resistance to the purge, was now put under strong pressure, and saved himself temporarily by accepting and implementing Moscow’s directives.