Making Ukraine Soviet

Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin

Olena Palko

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350142718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Winner of the BASEES Alexander Nove Prize 2021
Winner of The American Association for Ukrainian Studies 2019-2020 Book Prize
Honorable Mention for the ASEEES Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies 2022 While most studies of Soviet culture assume a model of diffusion, according to which Soviet republics imitated the artistic trends and innovations born in Moscow, Olena Palko adroitly challenges this centre-periphery perspective. Rather than being a mere imposition from above, Making Ukraine Soviet reveals how the process of cultural sovietisation in Ukraine during the interwar years developed from a synthesis of different – and often conflicting – cultural projects both local and Muscovite in orientation. Engaging with a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including literary and archival material, Palko grounds her argument in the cases of two celebrated and controversial Ukrainian artists: the poet Pavlo Tychyna and prosaist Mykola Khyl'ovyi. Through this unique biographical lens, Palko's skilled analysis of cultural construction sheds fresh light on the complex process of establishing and consolidating the Soviet regime in Ukraine. In doing so, Palko offers a timely re-assessment of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict and adds nuance to current debates on the relationship between national identity, the arts, and the Soviet state.

Part One

Competing projects of Ukraine

Part One of this book examines the ideological and political rivalry between the supporters of a national and a socialist Ukraine, and the parallel cultural projects endorsed by these contradictory, and often mutually exclusive, projects of state-building. On the one hand, national leaders in Kyiv initiated a separatist project of Ukraine, with their demands ranging from an autonomous Ukraine within a free federative Russia, up to complete independence in early 1918. In the cultural sphere, those national governments wished to overcome the imperial legacy of Ukraine’s Russification and introduced numerous initiatives to provide a basis for national cultural awakening. Following the imperial ban on Ukrainian-language publications, a number of newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, as well as publishing houses, were launched. The most popular literary and artistic movement of the time was modernism, with poetry enjoying a dominant position.

On the other side, having seized power in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks turned their attention to Ukraine. In December 1917, the Soviet government was established in Kharkiv striving to extend its authority across Ukraine. The Bolsheviks aimed at a proletarian dictatorship that could not be achieved without a cultural domination of the working class. A new proletarian culture was required that would reflect its leading position. The cultural projects initiated during and after the Bolshevik revolution aimed at an international proletarian culture often insensitive to national differences. While promoting international culture, those projects were mostly Russia-oriented and Russian-speaking.

There was yet another party, however. In the revolutionary period of 1917–20, leftist groups and movements in Ukraine, unhappy with the Russia-oriented Bolshevik programme and moderate stand of the national leaders, joined forces to promote a national way to socialism. Representatives of Ukrainian communist parties believed that socialist revolutions would result in creating national republics; unlike the Bolsheviks, they sought a national form of proletarian culture in Ukraine that would be created in the Ukrainian language.

Through the analysis of the literary movements and artistic currents that had originated and been strengthened during and shortly after the revolution, the following chapters examine the origins of the divisions in Ukraine’s literature that would later result in a competition between the two incarnations of Soviet literature in Ukraine – Soviet literature in Ukrainian and Soviet Ukrainian literature. Chapter 1 examines Tychyna’s experience of the chaotic civil war years as reflected in his early poetry. The chapter traces the evolution of Tychyna from being a poet of the national revolution to embracing the proletarian discourse. Tychyna’s life and creative activity during this period suggest a difficult process of adaptation for those members of the national intelligentsia who found themselves under the new regime, whose values they did not necessarily share. Chapter 2 looks at Khvyl’ovyi’s prose written during the civil war period, highlighting the important difference in Ukraine’s revolutionary literature when compared to that of Russia. While Ukrainian writers shared many concerns and grievances similar to their Russian counterparts– over-romantization of the revolution, a bleak view on the post-revolutionary everydayness and criticism of the party’s early centralization and bureaucratization – they were also preoccupied with the national question. Those national concerns penetrated Ukrainian revolutionary literature and set Ukrainian writers against their Russian fellows, as well as against certain Ukrainian writers who embraced the centralization of cultural and political life.

1

‘Above Kyiv there is a Golden Hum’: The National Revolution in Kyiv

‘ … not Tychinin, but Tychyna’

Tychyna is conventionally regarded as one of Ukraine’s most gifted poets. His oeuvre consists of multiple volumes of poetry written between 1908 and 1967. He wrote his first poems before the First World War under the influence of modernism and gained fame for his poetic responses to the national revolutionary upheavals of 1917–20. During the civil war, the poet was forced to find his way amidst excruciating power struggles and finally adapt to the expectations of the victorious party. Within a decade, he had become a poet laureate and high-ranking official in the Soviet government of Ukraine. His successful career as a Soviet bureaucrat and the large print runs of his ‘ideologically sound’ poetry in Ukrainian suggest an uneasy compromise between the central authorities and Ukraine’s intellectuals, whereby cultural agents used their position to continue defining their cultural difference without challenging the party’s hegemony.

Tychyna’s rise to the heights of the Soviet hierarchy could hardly have been predicted from the start, however. He was born in 1891 in the village of Pisky in Chernihiv province (gubernia), Left-bank Ukraine, into the poor family of a priest’s assistant [psalomshchyk or diak] and a literacy teacher for a local church. Unsure on how to provide education for their nine children, his parents decided to send the nine-year-old Pavlo to the provincial capital of Chernihiv, where he successfully auditioned for a church choir and was soon promoted to soloist at the famous choir of the Chernihiv Trinity Monastery. As a choral singer, Tychyna also studied in a local religious school, bursa, and, on completing his education, entered Chernihiv seminary.

Chernihiv, although a provincial city, was an important cultural centre on the Russian Empire’s frontier. Its prominence dated back to medieval Kyivan Rus’, when the city had been second only to Kyiv. Chernihiv experienced its second renaissance as part of the Hetmanate, a Cossack state that existed on the territory of modern Ukraine from 1649–1775, before its autonomy was finally abolished by Catherine the Great. The city’s reputation for high-cultural heritage and intellectualism was connected to the work of the late seventeenth-century archbishop Lazar Baranovych, who transformed Chernihiv into an important religious, educational and publishing centre. The Great Reforms of Tsar Alexander II once again prompted the city’s cultural growth, especially the zemstvo reform of 1864 that provided for the creation of elected institutions of local self-governments.¹ A zemstvo was established in Chernihiv in September 1865 with many Ukrainian activists, being otherwise barred from public duties, joining this progressive organ of self-governance. The Chernihiv zemstvo was responsible for opening Ukrainian-language schools, while its statistical committee carried out ethnographic studies of the region. Moreover, under its auspices, a ‘Museum of Ukrainian Antiquities’ was opened in 1902, the first museum in the empire to have ‘Ukrainian’ in its name.²

Continued liberalization under the tsarist regime in the 1860s and 1870s led to the founding of the Hromada group in Chernihiv, part of a wider cultural and semi-political clandestine movement that united the Ukrainophile intelligentsia and contributed to the Ukrainian national revival in Imperial Russia. This was granted a significant boost by enlightenment societies for mass education (prosvity), which were opened throughout the gubernia after 1905, providing Ukrainian-language literacy courses.³ At the turn of the century, many prominent Ukrainian intellectuals, academics and artists lived and worked in Chernihiv. Among them were the leading literary figure and modernist Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi; the writer, ethnographer, member of the Ukrainian populist (narodnyky) movement and the editor of the four-volume Ukrainian Dictionary (Slovar’ ukrains’koi movy, 1907–9) Borys Hrinchenko; the poet and translator Volodymyr Samiilenko; the symbolist poet, theatre director and political activist Mykola Voronyi; the historian and head of the Chernihiv Archival Commission Vadym Modzalevs’kyi; and the academics, educators and political activists Oleksandr and Sofia Rusovs.

This was the cultural milieu that sixteen-year-old Tychyna joined as a student of the Chernihiv theological seminary. Creatively gifted, he conducted the seminary’s choir, wrote poetry and studied drawing with the famous modernist painter Mykhailo Zhuk, who at the time also lived and worked in Chernihiv. It was Zhuk who introduced the young Tychyna to Kotsiubyns’kyi, who hosted weekly literary salons attended by many talented youths.⁴ Tychyna often came together with his close friend Vasyl’ Ellans’kyi, later known as the poet ‘Ellan’ and the communist party activist Blakytnyi, the future composer and founder of the Ukrainian state folk chorus Hryhorii Veriovka, the poet Arkadii Kazka and the future playwright Ivan Kocherha, all of whom would come to play important roles in the creation of Soviet Ukrainian culture. To Kotsiubyns’kyi, Tychyna was indebted for having discerned his talent and for publicizing his early poetry. Indeed, Tychyna would later acknowledge that Kotsiubyns’kyi had been his greatest influence during these formative years.⁵ One of his first poems, Vy Znaiete Iak Lypa Shelestyt’? [You Know How Linden Rustle?], was published in 1912, under Kotsiubyns’kyi’s recommendation, in the prestigious literary journal Literaturno-Naukovyi Visnyk [The Literary-Scholarly Herald].⁶ Kotsiubyns’kyi also recommended Tychyna to the Russian realist writer Gorky, who would later speak fondly of his earlier work.⁷

In 1913, having spent twelve years in Chernihiv, 22-year-old Tychyna decided to move to Kyiv. According to imperial law, absolvents of theological schools could not study in a public university. Had he remained unaffiliated, Tychyna could have also been legally conscripted into the imperial army.⁸ Consequently, ‘Pavlo Tychinin’ (a Russified spelling of his surname used to register him at birth and in official documentation up until 1917⁹) enrolled at the newly created private Kyiv Commercial Institute.¹⁰ Whilst there, he studied alongside his childhood friend Blakytnyi; the Soviet Ukrainian writer Iurii Smolych and the world-renowned film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko belonged to this same cohort.

To support himself financially, Tychyna worked as a technical secretary in the editorial houses of several Ukrainian periodicals such as the daily Rada [Council], edited and financed by the conservative activist Ievhen Chykalenko, and the monthly pedagogical journal Svitlo [the Light]. These Ukrainian-language newspapers started appearing after the 1905 revolution, when the ban on Ukrainian-language printing, introduced in 1863 and further reinforced in 1876, was finally lifted.¹¹ Among other Ukrainian periodicals being published at this time in Kyiv were the monthly journal Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk, founded in Lviv in 1898 by Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi and moved to Kyiv in 1907; the monthly journal of literature, literary criticism and politics Ukrains’ka khata [The Ukrainian Hut]; an educational periodical for children and adolescents, Moloda Ukraina [Young Ukraine]; and Zapysky [Notes] of the Ukrainian Scientific Society. None of these periodicals could hope for state support with most being privately funded by two wealthy philanthropists: the industrialist and manager of his family’s sugar-refining company Vasyl’ Symyrenko and Chykalenko, a wealthy landowner known for saying ‘Love Ukraine not only to the depth of your heart, but also to the depth of your pocket.’¹²

Figure 2 Pavlo Tychyna, self-portrait, 1922. © Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Arts of Ukraine, courtesy of TsDAMLMU.

In the lead up to the First World War, these Ukrainian-language periodicals were closed down with the declaration of martial law in July 1914.¹³ Tychyna, now unemployed, moved back to Chernihiv, where he found employment in the zemstvo’s statistical office.¹⁴ The war also impeded his studies at the Commercial Institute, which was evacuated eastwards to Saratov in Russia. Those students who decided to remain in Kyiv continued their education by correspondence, expected to only return to Saratov for the exam period. Needless to say, during the war, travelling over a thousand kilometres from Kyiv to Saratov was neither cheap nor convenient.¹⁵ Tychyna withdrew from the Institute in 1915 and reapplied to study at the philology department of the newly established Ukrainian State University in 1917.¹⁶

Events in Petrograd during the spring of 1917 shook Ukraine.¹⁷ Following the abdication of Nicholas II, a Provisional Government was formed in Petrograd and began replacing imperial bureaucrats throughout the empire with their own administration.¹⁸ The Provisional Government was only intended to serve as a caretaker administration until elections could be held for an All-Russian Constituent Assembly that would decide the future of the empire. In Kyiv, civic and political activists formed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration and translation
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Competing projects of Ukraine
• Part Two: Debating Soviet culture in Ukraine
• Part Three: Fitting in the Soviet canon
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint