In his Memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev, using his occasionally scary imaginary, recalled that in January 1938 he arrived in Kyiv to take the position of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) as directed to by Stalin. “Ukraine looked like a Mongol horde had just stormed through it,” Khrushchev admitted, noting that party personnel at the regional and district levels were destroyed wholesale in 1937, and then several times over: they shot those who took the positions of just-shot officials as well...
Khrushchev’s Memoirs are, of course, a valuable source (provided it is subject to critical analysis). But there are, at least, three things that the leader of the USSR in 1953-64 stayed nicely silent about. First of all, he said nothing about his personal role in the repression, which was unacceptable and criminal (there is reason to believe that Khrushchev knew perfectly well what he did, and who knows, maybe it just became a motive for his famous “anti-Stalinist” steps). Secondly, it is also very important to understand that “a Mongol horde stormed through Ukraine” not only in 1937, but in 1918-21 too, and in the most terrible way in the early 1930s (counting from the trial of the Liberation Union of Ukraine, then including the Holodomor Genocide of 1932-33, and the so-called “Kirov” wave of repression at the end of 1934). And, finally, thirdly, Khrushchev did not reveal (did he even seek to reveal?) the main thing: the mechanism and “anatomy” of terror.
These days Ukraine commemorates the 80th anniversary of the official launch of the Great Terror (August 5, 1937, when the order of the USSR NKVD No. 00447 started the implementation of the Resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) dated July 2, 1937 and entitled “On the Anti-Soviet Elements”). That was the most massive societal purge of the entire Soviet era, targeting the “elements” that “did not fit” the effort to build communism. For Ukraine, this meant the third (!) extermination of the elite in a row: the first one occurred in 1917-21 with the massacre of the elite of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the national liberation struggle; the second one (1930-34) involved the genocidal extermination through hunger of the economically and socially independent Ukrainian peasantry which numbered in the millions, and the massacre of the national intelligentsia (both done in parallel, which is extremely important). And here is the Great Terror of 1937-38. Here, first of all (though not exclusively!), they exterminated the “Soviet elite” itself: the ruling party, enterprise management, military, scientific figures who were completely loyal to the Soviet regime (although they killed at that time prominent representatives of the old “pre-Bolshevik” Ukrainian intelligentsia as well: Marko Vorony, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, Yurii Kotsiubynsky, and Matvii Yavorsky died then...). Joseph Stalin decided to destroy them, because he needed absolutely, slavishly devoted and obedient young officials (Brezhnev’s cohorts, by the way), but not those who remembered too much.
One can offer the numbers of people shot at that time (not all of them were really “innocent victims”). Quite a few of them were those whom Pavlo Tychyna called in 1926 “same-class executioners,” claiming that “were they generals, we would know how to deal with them,” but since it was not so... These surprisingly accurate words of Tychyna (coming from a poetic epistle to Rabindranath Tagore, his “brother in spirit,” which explains a lot in the overall tragedy of Ukraine and the USSR) look even more dramatic, if we recall that the poet impressively sang praises to the heroes of the Battle of Kruty in 1918, while in 1933 (!!) he glorified “a wonderful time, a matchless time”... And Tychyna was not just a member of the “elite,” but a true poetry genius...
Therefore, an understanding of what happened to our elite in the 20th century will be more important than any numbers (I mean not the property-owning elite, not the power elite, but the intellectual one that is ready to take responsibility). On three occasions (!) was it butchered, and this is not taking into account more “pinpoint” repression targeting the national intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in this state that Ukraine gained independence in 1991. A failure to take into account this fact would reflect unpardonable naivety or cynicism. The well-known modern writer Andrey Kurkov wrote on Facebook that “while communicating with the contemporary elite of Lithuania, it turns out that almost every other of them was born in exile, in Siberia or in Kazakhstan. When communicating with the contemporary elite of Ukraine [Kurkov did not put quotation marks around the word “elite” in the second case. – Author], it is very easy to understand why our freedom and real independence are not appreciated as much as in Lithuania.” There is, of course, a lot of truth to this statement, but not the whole truth. For, first of all, we have Ukrainians who were born in exile, in “Siberia too vast to cross.” But the thing is that the Lithuanians – all without exception! – remembered that they were a free people with their own might, and not one sharing history with Muscovy. The Soviet ways prevailed there only for 45 years, until 1990. And, secondly, in Ukraine, the “totalitarian knife” entered the body of the nation much deeper, more mercilessly, and more bloodily...
