As a delegate to the XIII Party Congress, Ivan Mykytenko witnessed Kosior’s self-flagellation over his “loss of vigilance,” Postyshev’s criticism, heard Liubchenko and Popov’s speeches, and understood the aberrant nature of relations among the republican leaders. Those relations may have led Mykytenko to develop categories representing a new creative quality in Ukrainian dramaturgy, as evidenced by the Flute Solo.
An analysis of archival documents suggests that Postyshev might have complicated Mykytenko’s situation even earlier, if he hadn’t been given a party assignment in Russia in the spring of 1937, considering that the first “signals” of allegedly hostile activities of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine appeared that spring. The Writers’ Union of Ukraine held a report-and-election party meeting in early April. Mykytenko, Horodsky, Le, Patiak, and Usenko were elected members of the party committee. Inspired by his comrades’ confidence, Mykytenko paid no attention to something that was said during the meeting, namely that his father was allegedly a kulak and his brother a bandit. In this horrible period such a careless attitude often led to disaster. Until then Mykytenko had been spared the blows of fate, but dark clouds were already gathering over his head.
In July — August 1937 he was in Spain and France as a member of the Soviet delegation at the Second International Congress of Antifascist Writers. Meanwhile, a party meeting of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine was held in Kyiv where grim political accusations were directed at Mykytenko. He was accused in absentia of lack of self-criticism as an executive of the All-Ukraine Union of Proletarian Writers during 1927-1932; as chairman of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine membership committee, he was indiscriminate in admitting new members, which had led to the infiltration of the writers’ ranks by hostile elements; and he was not critical of the theory promoted by Averbakh, the former general secretary of the All- Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. He was even condemned for quoting a poet during an extraordinary congress of Soviets of Ukraine, who was later arrested as an enemy of the people.
Obliged to respond to these accusations, on September 5, 1937, Ivan Mykytenko published a contrite article in Literaturna Hazeta entitled “The Soviet Writer’s Duty.” He wrote, in particular, “I am prepared and have to suffer a severe punishment for lack of vigilance and political shortsightedness manifest in my defensive attitude not only toward Averbakh but also toward other individuals who have now been exposed as enemies of the people.” Today it is clear that he had to display an excessive degree of self-reproach, but at the time this was not deemed sufficient in certain literary quarters. The newspaper appended an editorial note: “Considering Comrade Mykytenko’s article insufficiently self-critical, the editors expect from him truly Bolshevik criticism of his political mistakes” (the editor of LH was Andriy Holovko — Auth.). On September 29, Literaturna Hazeta published an editorial entitled “For Purity in the Writers’ Ranks,” this time openly condemning Mykytenko as being responsible for admitting the wrong kind of people to the writers’ union when he headed the membership committee, so that “numerous dubious characters and even enemies” had become members. It further emphasized that “the Board of the Writers’ Union of the USSR had not so long ago described Mykytenko’s activities in Ukrainian literature as Trotskyite.” Almost the entire front page of the next issue was devoted to Mykytenko. In a report on the Writers’ Union of Ukraine and Derzhlitvydav [State Literary Publishing Committee responsible for censoring all periodicals and editions] joint party meeting held on October 1-2 to discuss “the results of the March 1937 Plenum of the CC of the CP(B)U and the tasks of the party organizations in the struggle against Trotskyite nationalist saboteurs in literature,” Ivan Mykytenko was mentioned in no uncertain terms: “Until recently a character hostile to the Party and the Soviet people has been in the leadership of the Writers’ Union. Backed against the wall by irrefutable facts, Mykytenko ‘admits’ to one crime after another perpetrated against the Party and the Soviet people.” The editorial provided details of the political accusations against Mykytenko. Among other things, he was tagged as a “mouthpiece and close friend of that exposed criminal and bourgeois nationalist scum Khvylia,” and a close friend of the “Trotskyite spy Averbakh.” According to the editorial, Mykytenko “concealed his social background from the Party and the Soviet public,” as “it is a fact that the heroes of his novel Brothers are Mykytenko’s relatives, out- and-out kulaks from the village of Rivne” and Mykytenko “not only helped his brother (an active organizer of a gang derailing trainloads of Red Army troops) evade Soviet justice, but also arranged for him to enroll in a higher [school] and then found a job for him.” Not bothering to consider the evidence, the editors branded Ivan Mykytenko a “smart operator in literature.”
The hostile moral and psychological atmosphere reigning in the Writers’ Union of Ukraine is evident from this quote: “It would be useless to expect any degree of frankness from I. Mykytenko. While ‘admitting’ everything that was impossible to refute, he tried every trick to cover his tracks, whitewash himself and pose as a victim of fraud, at the same time trying to conceal his contacts with the enemy, hide acts of sabotage by his bosses, and conceal his accomplices, thus clearly exposing himself as an enemy.”
Could such grave political accusations have passed unnoticed by the NKVD? There is sufficient evidence available to state that Mykytenko was in trouble there, too. A document from the former party archives with the letterhead of the Ukrainian SSR’s NKVD Directorate, dated 1937, states that a number of officials previously arrested and convicted had testified that Mykytenko was “an active participant in an anti-Soviet nationalist organization.” In particular, such damning testimonies were provided by P. Markitan, former first secretary of the Chernihiv regional party committee; I. Pron, research fellow with the Shevchenko Institute, and M. Sobol, deputy head of the art department at the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR.
Here we will analyze the incriminating evidence that the Soviet secret police possessed at the time. I. Pron was arrested in October 1936. During his interrogation in December, when he was asked who his friends were on the date of his arrest, Pron stated, “Borys Lvovych Kovalenko, former research fellow with the Ukrainian Association of Marxist-Leninist Institutes. He was my best friend. I was also on friendly terms with Natan Rybak and Chyhyryn, both of them writers. I often visited Mykytenko’s home.” That single sentence on record was enough to notify the Central Committee of Mykytenko’s involvement in what was described as “counterrevolutionary activities.” However, the NKVD must have realized that this evidence was too flimsy, so they took their time arresting him, all the while collecting incriminating materials.
It is difficult to say now whether Ivan Mykytenko knew what the NKVD was up to. He must have suspected the truth. All the facts available today indicate that he was badly shaken and that the horrible stress affected his conduct.
A plenary meeting of the Kyiv city party committee resolved to expel Mykytenko from the committee “as a person stripped of party membership.” In fact, he was not even allowed to argue his case. In September 1938 the Politburo of the CC CP(B)U advised Holovlit that all works by Ivan Mykytenko should be impounded as anti-Soviet (since the letter was signed by Nikita Khrushchev, this was an instruction rather than a recommendation). Already by that time all copies of his books had long been removed from the shelves of public libraries in Ukraine and his name was meticulously crossed out in every school textbook.
Zinayida Mykytenko, his wife and faithful friend, indefatigably tried to obtain information about her husband, but the Yagoda- Yezhov-Beria agency, represented by Balytsky, Leplevsky, and Uspensky at the Ukrainian NKVD, kept silent, as though taking revenge for the lost opportunity to make short work of such a noted figure in Ukrainian literary, public, and political life of the 1920s — 1930s. Numerous written replies, as a rule, stated that there was no information about the writer (more on this in an article by Oleh Mykytenko, the writer’s son, in the journal Kurier Kryvbasu, nos. 102-103, 1998).
Many years later, in March 1956, Zinayida Mykytenko received a letter from the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Ukrainian SSR: “Your husband Mykytenko, Ivan Kindratovych, was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head on October 18, 1937, in a Kyiv suburb, in the vicinity of Shovkobud A forensic medical examination established the cause of death as suicide.” The secret police were afraid of him even after his death, because it would have been necessary to open a criminal case and ascertain who or what had made the writer put the gun to his head, if it was indeed suicide.
Together with the delegates of the XX Congress of the CPSU, Soviet society slowly began to overcome the numbness caused by Stalin’s personality cult, or rather by the cult of that very fear. Creative intellectuals were among the first to set themselves the task of restoring the good names of innocent victims of the purges.
On April 18, 1956, the party organization of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine discussed the issue “On the Posthumous Rehabilitation of I. Mykytenko as a Member of the Party.” The case was presented by Yu. Zbanatsky, then secretary of the party committee; he was seconded by O. Honchar, I. Tsiupa, L. Pervomaisky, M. Bazhan, and I. Le. The party organization’s decision was unanimous: “The resolution of the party meeting of 1937, expelling Comrade Mykytenko from the party, is hereby annulled as groundless.”
Zbanatsky once told this author that the writers who had performed that first act of true justice, restoring their colleague’s good name, were ecstatic. True, the resolution was not made public knowledge and the party committee secretary was warned at the Central Committee that the decision “was sufficient.” Very likely it was feared that Mykytenko had contacts with persons still formally listed as enemies of the people or with their associates, including P. Liubchenko, A. Khvylia, L. Averbakh, all of whom would be subsequently rehabilitated.
Ivan Mykytenko’s elder brother Hryhory also had a tragic destiny. He was first interrogated as a witness in 1933. He testified that in 1919 a group of rebellious peasants opened fire on a train near Novo-Ukrayinka, but that he, Hryhory Mykytenko, “took no part in the plundering of the trainload and I personally played no leading part there.” After Ivan Mykytenko disappeared, Hryhory was arrested on October 14, 1937. He was again questioned about the attack on the train. In December he admitted that “in 1919 I did take part in an armed uprising in Rivne district, but not of my own free will, as I was captured by rebels and forced to go to Novo-Ukrayinka district at gunpoint.” He further stated, “I took no part in stopping and robbing the train, because I didn’t even get as far as the scene of crime and took the very first opportunity to run away from Novo-Ukrayinka.” The investigating officer didn’t believe him, because the NKVD had information to the effect that a gang led by someone known as Dubovy had operated in Novo-Ukrayinka district during the Civil War. Unfortunately for Hryhory Mykytenko, he had changed his last name to Dubovy in the late 1920s (changing names and adopting pseudonyms were rather common occurrences in those days — Auth.) Hryhory Mykytenko adamantly rejected his guilt; there was no incriminating evidence. Nevertheless, the judges with chevrons on their sleeves, members of the notorious NKVD “triyka” tribunal of three, for Kharkiv oblast, found him guilty as “an active participant in an armed uprising against the Soviet government in 1919 and as the head of the Dubovy gang, who kept in constant contact with his brother I. Mykytenko, an active participant in a Ukrainian nationalist counterrevolutionary organization.” The tribunal of three pas- sed a death sentence on March 23, 1938, and he was shot that same day. In January 1959 the Kharkiv Regional Court annulled the tribunal’s sentence in the case of Hryhory Mykytenko, which was deemed groundless.
The final accusation that dealt Ivan Mykytenko a very heavy moral blow and on which his writers’ union colleagues ardently insisted upon was his allegedly kulak family background. A guidebook to the Mykytenko Memorial Museum organized in his native region reads that the future writer’s father, Kindrat Mykytenko, was a seredniak peasant of average means, married to a woman named Kateryna. His father was a miller (the pond and dam at the end of the village are still known as Mykytenkivski). Those who were accusing him of kulak parentage knew very well that a kulak exploited hired labor, whereas Ivan’s parents relied on their own resources, and their four children learned to work hard from an early age, according to fellow villagers’ testimonies recorded during interrogations. This was further proof that his father was an individual peasant-farmer. Nevertheless, he joined the local collective farm and soon died during a famine. As a teenager, Ivan worked on his father’s farm and together with other boys worked on the landlord’s estate.
Hryhory became a physician and Ivan a noted author. Yet some members of the literary community were eager to see a celebrated playwright as a kulak’s son. If they had only bothered to learn the truth, they would have discovered that Ivan Mykytenko showed exceptional capabilities and a desire to study. After finishing a two-grade ministerial school in Rivne, he enrolled in a military paramedic school in Kherson, because it was the only way to receive an education without straining the family budget, as tuition for such training was financed by the state.
Let us hope that the story of Ivan Mykytenko’s tragic destiny will remind people of the writers’ union’s dishonorable stand during the tragic years of the Stalinist purges and will enhance the image of this gifted writer, playwright, and noted public figure of Ukraine.
Pavlo Zahrebelny, Hero of Ukraine, said this about Mykytenko: “It is always amazing to see talent born in this land and finding its way to the top from the remotest parts of this country. The grandeur of this land seemed to arise and find a reflection in the spirit of its famous sons. How significant and wonderful this is!
“Mykytenko is one of the glorious sons of our land.”
