Long ago and far away, to be specific, in the latter half of the 1970s and the idyllic American university town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a young graduate student set off to write a doctoral dissertation on the topic of Ukrainian national communism. Given that the very word Ukrainization and the very names of the historical figures he was studying were banned here, he knew he would probably never be allowed to travel here, and he set off to various North American libraries to find out about what could be learn from the official Soviet Ukrainian press and other then-available sources on a then little- researched topic that he found absolutely fascinating, a quest for all the open press sources he could find. Ultimately, he spent years on it, duly defended his doctorate, and the results were published by Harvard in 1983 with the long-winded title of Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933 . That benighted graduate student was I
The material by one Volodymyr Sverbyhuz, “Do Communists Have a Fatherland: The Ukrainian Answer,” is an admirable attempt to return to the historical consciousness of a people long cut off from major parts of its history the kinds of things any nation really ought to know about itself. Unfortunately, the author seems to have forgot the dictum that for a historian accuracy is not a virtue but a duty. Having covered the ground myself, I can testify that the Ukrainian Revolution presents some pretty convoluted territory. At one point in 1920 this country had three communist parties, the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Communist Party (of Borotbists), and the Ukrainian Communist Party that became known as the Ukapists, all with different roots but sharing not dissimilar fates: exile or execution. Our author mixed them up so badly, that I felt it only my duty to sort them out. The local Bolsheviks were an offshoot of their Russian parent party, albeit with a handful of Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians who confronted Ukrainian specifics in a way that convinced them they had to do things differently from their Russian comrades if they were to hope to have a chance to compete for power in Ukraine with the consent of the locals. The Borotbists were an offshoot of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries, who wanted a Soviet Ukraine as a product of the Ukrainian Revolution, not as an offshoot of the Russian one, but were prepared to go to almost any lengths to cooperate with the Bolsheviks, while trying to convince their allies that they had to allow Soviet Ukraine to be more Ukrainian. They merged with the Bolsheviks in 1920. The Ukapists were a numerically small offshoot of the Ukrainian Social Democrats who did take part in an anti-Bolshevik uprising and were kept at arm’s length (and heavily infiltrated) until allowed into the secular church of the One True Soviet Faith in 1925.
What united these disparate groups was a faith that Ukrainians ought to be allowed to create a Soviet Ukraine that would be Ukrainian in terms of its national character. Their momentary triumph and enduring tragedy is something Ukrainians of today need to know. The article in question tried to do this but failed.
Lenin’s nationality policy recognized the right of nations to self- determination including secession and the formation of independent states, but he also simultaneously held that “real” internationalists would never want to exercise such a right. While this was going much to far for the then head of the Kyiv Bolshevik organization, Yury Piatakov, the most radical of the Ukrainian Social Democrats, Lev Yurkevych (Rybalka) published a pamphlet in 1915 arguing that this was simply unacceptable. He pointed out that a right which nobody is supposed to exercise is like the formula of one minus one, which, as we all know, equals zero. This was prophetic for the national communists. If they wanted any limited form of Ukrainian self-determination, even if in the closest possible association with Bolshevik Russia, it could only mean that they were nationalists, and nationalism was in the eyes of the Proletarian Third Rome by definition a species of bourgeois false consciousness, therefore hostile, and the legitimate object of repression. Beginning with the XII Communist Party Congress in 1923, the Bolsheviks did authorize a policy known as indigenization (korenizatsiya) designed to give the new regimes in the non-Russian periphery some veneer of national legitimacy, and for almost a decade it worked. Quite a number of communists believed in it. Almost all perished.
The tale is a complex and tragic one, and even a superficial telling of it will take more time and space than we can offer today. A Ukrainian writer and politician also tempted by the charms of the Communist “beautiful commune just over the hill,” Volodymyr Vynnychenko, once said that one can read Ukraine’s history only through tears. Tears for this particular tragedy still remain to be shed, for the tragedy of history inevitably pulls at the heartstrings of each succeeding generation of its progeny.
