James E. Mace

FAMINE AND NATIONALISM IN SOVIET UKRAINE: POSTSCRIPT

By the time the 1936 Soviet Constitution was adopted, the Soviet Union had become a state in which the administrative competence of its constituent republics had been sharply reduced and that of the Union greatly enlarged.* The ideology of Soviet patriotism dominated by Russian culture and centralism was in no small part a legacy of the Ukrainian famine. While the suppression of national self-assertion and the introduction of centralization were principal features of overall Soviet policy in the 1930's, the Ukrainians, as the largest and most self-assertive non-Russian nation, seemed to be singled out for special treatment. Only they had to suffer the loss of several million villagers to starvation in an artificially contrived famine. Placed in this context, the famine of 1933 makes sense as one of a series of policies designed to neutralize Ukrainians as a political factor, indeed, as a social organism in the Soviet Union. These policies entailed the destruction of the spiritual and cultural elites of Ukraine and the subordination of the Ukrainian structures to central ones; the destruction of the official sanctioned Ukrainian Communist political leadership as a distinct force in Soviet politics (almost all of those who turned on Skrypnyk** perished as well in the 1937-38 purges); the abandonment of Ukrainization and the gradual abolition of structures designed to prevent the assimilation of Ukrainians entering Russified urban and industrial environments; and a body blow against the main constituency of Ukrainian nationalism-the peasantry. In sum, one cannot understand the famine without understanding the turnabout in Soviet nationalities policy-from seeking to foster to seeking to absorb national cultures. By the same token, one cannot understand how this policy was imposed without reference to the famine. The famine must therefore be understood within the context of an attempt to impose a final solution on the "Ukraine problem" as it had hitherto existed.

Nevertheless, the Soviet state never solved its "Ukrainian problem," which still haunts Soviet leaders. Stalin himself helped to undermine his policy by annexing Ukrainian territories from Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia during World War II. Western Ukraine never went through such devastation as the famine and related repressions of the 1930's, and it was inevitable that the traditional cross-fertilization of ideas between western and eastern Ukraine would flourish when the two parts became united. In the 1960's, a dissident movement arose that included Ukrainians from all Ukrainian territories and combined demands for national and human rights, while even the Soviet Ukrainian government under Petro Shelest edged a little further away from Moscow for a brief moment. Shelest was removed and the dissidents were arrested. Yet, after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, a Helsinki Monitoring Group, similar to and connected with counterparts in other parts of the Soviet Union, was formed in Kyiv. Attempts to abolish the Ukrainian national churches have succeeded only in changing the official affiliation-not the spiritual essence - of Ukrainian Christianity.***

*** The USSR banned the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 1930 and the Uniate Catholic Church in 1946. One measure of the continued strength of the Ukrainian Catholics is the fact that the region of their tradition dominance, Western Ukraine, now contains one-fourth of all officially sanctioned Orthodox parishes in the USSR, which are kept open only to prevent a greater portion of the population from attending underground Uniate churches.

Taken from: James E. Mace. "Famine and Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine" in Problems of Communism, May-June 1984, pp. 49-50. Only a few years ago, there were Western scholars who argued that the USSR would assimilate the Ukrainians in a relatively brief period of time. No one makes such predictions today. It is difficult to see how the problem of the Soviet Union's non-Russian nations, having defied the most brutal attempts at solution, can ever be solved to the government's satisfaction.