Genocide and totalitarianism in Ukraine: Sociogenetic heritage and remedies

Sovietologists in the West are habitually divided on the interpretation of the notions of totalitarianism and genocide. There have been sharp debates on both definitions and concepts. A number of scholars who received a post-secondary education during the Vietnam War regarded the US as the world’s reactionary center against the national liberation movements of the colonized peoples and studies of similarities between Stalin and Hitler’s regimes as the Cold War ideology. In 1986, a most prestigious US journal, The Slavic Review, published a debate between Robert Thurston and Robert Conquest, with the former claiming that during the Stalin period, barring Yezhov’s “aberration,” the Soviet system was never rooted in fear, and that the Great Purge was a manifestation of mass hysteria. In his book Totalitarianism. The Inner History of the Cold War (1995) Dr. Abbott Gleason is very skeptical about its very existence in 20th-century history. He attributes the po­pularity of the term in the postcommunist world to the attempts by certain forces to avoid being held personally responsible for what they did under the old regime. He says that today those who favor the word have new allies: Russian intellectuals and scholars who believe that totalitarianism is a notion that best corresponds to their country’s experience. The same is true of Germany where there is an ele­ment of self-rehabilitation. In other words, if a country (or a person) was in the claws of “totalitarianism,” it (s/he) can’t be blamed for it, well, not too much anyway. However, it is totally unclear what lies behind the increasing usage of this term in Russia and other post-Soviet countries; maybe something more than looking for ways to avoid responsibility; maybe hurt feelings or an attempt to join in a collective.

In other words, the legitimacy of defining the Stalinist policy in Ukraine as genocidal is called into question. Therefore, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, it is necessary to redefine our terms.

For a researcher who knows what really happened during the Stalin period the very fact of denying the existence of totalitarianism makes no sense because only a regime that had unprecedented power and control over the media could sick one class (workers) on another (peasants), against which it actually bore no grudges. Only this kind of regime could convince normal people that there was always an enemy hiding somewhere and inculcate in the whole society pathological suspiciousness under the slogan of “class vigilance.” The body of Ukraine today shows obvious deformities inherited from the Stalin period, and these deformities affect practically the whole social organism: economy, politics, culture, religion, genetics, etc.

So what happened during the Stalin period?

First, society was absorbed by the state, and this was a consequence of totalitarianism in the classical sense of the word, for only a system like the Stalinist one was capable of totally destroying a civic society and replacing it with the government machine.

Second, the Russian national model forcefully replaced the Ukrainian one. Now this is genocide in the classical sense of the word.

The old Soviet regime could be regarded as a temporarily successful attempt to provide an alternative to world civilization. An extremely aggressive alternative that posed a deadly threat to the other side. This social order could survive only with society being under constant pressure, while devouring itself, all spheres of public activity, individuality, or constantly warring against “world imperialism.” In fact, the USSR was constantly involved in armed conflicts with other countries, but it was also increasingly lagging behind the West technologically, and this prevented the third world war. And so the ideological, repressive machine shifted the whole pressure inside. The Soviet system isolated itself intellectually and economically (after WW II, in the periphery of so-called people’s democracies) from spontaneous contacts with world civilization.

Another important aspect is that nationalism was the basis of the Soviet totalitarian system (as it was in the Third Reich, by the way). Great Russian nationalism, in its very specific form of proletarian internationalism parasitized on the attractive socialist ideas, considering that left out of the socialist ideology were such significant components as democracy, or protection of sovereign rights of the individual, nation, and state. Actually, the socialist slogan of freedom was reduced to the eulogized equality of all and the conscious (i.e., enforced) necessity of constant struggle. There was a great deal of hypocrisy in the Soviet ideological doctrine. While pretending to reject any kind of nationalism, it cultivated the Big Brother myth, the “great and mighty Russian language,” the “language of interethnic communication,” Russian lite­rature and culture as a standard-bearer of world literature and culture, Russian history as that of the Russian people constantly freeing other peoples from the social and national yoke. That was how all the wars of aggression of the Russian tsars and the assimilation of other peoples by Russia’s more advanced culture were justified.

In conditions of this isolation Ukrainian culture started getting used to the myth that Russian culture wasn’t just part of world culture, but that it was world culture. Under the pressure of the universal Russian model as the sole standard of cultural values, Ukrainian culture found itself torn away from its roots and reformatted to fit into the Big Brother pattern. Decades ago, Bohdan Kravchenko clearly outlined the artificiality of this process, commenting on events in Soviet Ukraine, in the 1930s: the industrial policy, depletion of investment capital in Ukraine, denying Ukraine capital goods to manufacture end products for its own needs, mass repressions against all and everything having to do with the preceding Ukrainization period, belittling the role of the Ukrainian language in the education and cultural spheres, mass media, destruction of the very structure of the party and intelligentsia, replacing it with practically new ones. Probably even more important than huge manpower losses was the content of the new culture instilled in Ukraine. Kravchenko wrote:

“The decline of the Ukrainian-language press in the 1930s meant that the Ukrainian language could not serve as a means of modernization. Those who sought knowledge and ideas had to find them increasingly often through the Russian language. The content of publications was being substantially changed. Newspapers and magazines that previously reflected national values and served as a means of national mobilization [consolidation] were now focusing on the struggle against the slightest manifestation of Ukrainian individuality. Monotonous admonitions to overfulfill production plans and eulogies to Stalin’s genius also saturated the Russian press, but the situation in Ukraine was worse. Press commentaries on the ‘national question’ stressed that Ukraine’s cultural and economic progress was only possibly through Russia’s mediation. Denied independence, Ukrainian culture and thought was reduced to narrow provincialism, even by Stalinist Soviet standard. At the same time, the republic was increasingly under Russian cultural influence. Over 200 Ukrainian plays were banned and dozens of Ukrainian drama companies closed, whereas the number of Russian theaters increased from 9 in 1931 to 30 in 1935. In the sphere of music, more than 500 ‘new songs,’ mostly ‘the best works of Russian composers,’ were published in 1934, with the best Ukrainian composers phased out. Museums were ordered to stop ‘idealizing Cossack history’ after Russian historic figures were rehabilitated. In 1937, the republic was accused of failing to celebrate the anniversary of ‘Peter the Great’s Victorious Battle of Poltava.’ Every effort was being made to combat what was termed as the ‘nationalistic theory of Ukrainian specificity’ on the ‘cultural front.’”

The onslaught on all things Ukrainian in the 1930s ruptured the process of Ukraine’s natural evolvement. The inertia developed over the decades since those tragic events has raised doubts concerning the true content of Ukrainian history and culture, whereas physical isolation from the generations of liberation struggle and the Executed Renaissance caused the ge­neration of the Sixtiers to grow practically without being raised by its predecessors. Even under the Soviets the late Ivan Ly­siak-Rudnytsky noted that the Sixtiers were first-generation intellectuals whose education and intellectual upbringing were so unsystematic as to make their provincialism unavoidable. The inferiority complex always helps develop its opposite, a trend toward escaping to myth. Today this trend is manifest in certain Ukrainian intellectual quarters as incredible discoveries of aliens having visited prehistorical Ukraine-Oritania and helped ancient Sanskrit-speaking Ukrainian Aryans build steppe pyramids and the wheel of world civilization; that prehistorical Ukraine was where the elephants came from, the homeland of the builders of cultures ranging from Peruvian to Etruscan to that of the pre-Ukrainian center of Palestine, Jerusalem. Such intellectual dilettantism, ridiculed by the inimitable Ostap Vyshnia in his time, is the reverse side of the inferiority complex and is none other than a specific manifestation of inner intellectual Bolshevism, because it sees its objective in idealizing a national world outlook instead of fully comprehending national history, culture, current problems and realities.

The intelligentsia’s intellectual amorphousness has its political double. In 1963, Lysiak-Rudnytsky identified what would evolve into the political party currently in power. He pointed to Khrushchev’s reforms fundamentally changing the position of Soviet Ukraine. The formation of sovnarkhoz/radnarhosp regional economic councils, discarding of MTS machine and tractor stations, transfer of equipment to the kolkhozes, growing ratio of republican budgets in the central one (from one-fifth in 1953 to more than one-half in 1958) meant death to the hypercentralized Stalinist system and rebirth of territorial party bureaucratic elites that, naturally, set about protecting their territorial interests against the Center. Even though territorial activity growth was rather low in Ukraine, completely devoid of national content, this trend was there and it was stable. Lysiak-Rudnytsky wrote: “We would be very naive to regard any modern Soviet Ukrainian bureaucrats as secret supporters of Mazepa ideas, even as nationally conscious communists like those in the 1920s.” He saw people bred by the Stalinist system, to whom any manifestations of nationalism were totally alien. He realized, however, that there had appeared corporate interests, that these people would inevitably seek protection and success, that they objectively accepted the national territorial concept. Those who accuse a number of today’s administrative and political figures of their communist past and time serving ought to know that Ly­siak-Rudnytsky foresaw this transformation and considered it to be unavoidable. “We will not be mistaken to regard these people as inveterate careerists, at best as good administrators and managers denied a broader ideological perspective,” considering that they underwent a “long and substantial course of training geared to suppress the moral instinct and the ability to think as an independent politician,” but the “joining of local economic interests within a single organized community will help deepen ‘territorial patriotism’ among the ruling stratum of the Ukrainian SSR.”

Modern political elites have different roots. Here one practically has dualism, intertwinement, mutual rejection and unacceptance. The Ukrainian communist party bureaucracy begot today’s pragmatists, the so-called realists, heralds of economic reforms and at the same time fear and hopelessness. Bereft of the national spirit or ideology, these people, naturally, reduce political discussions to economic utopias, since their only ideology is that of the feeding trough. There is no dragging them away from it until they overeat and keel over. Criminal structures, built on communist-party-like discipline (with the avtoritet “authority” and vor v zakone “thief in law” at the top), have also experienced a crisis, which is only natural, with gang wars and rank-and-file mobsters killing thieves in law, something unheard of previously, glaringly contrary to the unwritten Thieves’ Code, held sacred under the Soviets. To think that there is bespredel [literally, without limits, but in this context flagrant violations of the basic rules of the Thieves’ Code – Ed.] in the organized underworld!

National democracy is another potentially losing side. I mean the first-generation intelligentsia, the political Establishment focusing on the finally revealed “glorious” past. Sorry about the quotation marks, considering that this past was glorious indeed. These quotation marks aren’t my idea as a historian specializing in Ukraine, and not even the idea of Ukrainian history, but of current realities. Romantic, disoriented, inexperienced, brilliant Ukrainian creative intellectuals are the main reason behind all achievements of the Ukrainian state, yet they simply can’t see any real imperatives. That was why they gave up struggle in a stalemate situation. A situation in which any move required a great deal of courage, since making any move seemed to make things worse. Yet staying motionless meant death. The traditional national myth — “Things will work out somehow,” as formulated by Ostap Vyshnia — became prevalent among members of the creative intelligentsia who were in power. For many the proclamation of national independence was the end result; they failed to realize that proclamation doesn’t mean the creation of a real nation-state, a healthy society; that it is just the start of a long, winding and thorny road.

National democracy, with its traditional respect for other ethnic groups within a given country, is the only [right] pathway currently lost among political intrigues, inaptitude, unwillingness to accept and unpreparedness for political realities, playing political opposition — actually going through the motions of carrying out political activities — with the party in power going through the motions of making reforms. The national democrats have withdrawn into themselves. Ukrainian national democracy, pampered and eulogized by backstage lickspittles, does not seem to realize its responsibility toward the international community, toward its own people. This is no longer a big-time experiment but a big chance, a crucial test for the freedom of a nation, state, and individual. In fact, it is a test for Europe and the rest of the world. The past 350 years of Ukrainian history have exhausted all options. Ukraine’s mind-boggling manpower, economic, and cultural losses in this [20th] century alone suffice to make it clear that Ukraine, as a member of the family of nations, is in danger. Another series of experiments, another turning back to the dead Marxist-Leninist dogma and the consequences may well be unpredictable, uncontrollable, and catastrophic. National independence is a necessity for Ukraine, a precondition of the survival of its people and culture — and let’s face it, independence of Russia in the first place, of its attempts to raise the “younger sister” after its standards.

Both the territorial elite, made up of old structures in power, and the national cultural elite made up of creative intellectuals have turned out totally unprepared for independence. Neither is firmly minded about an economic model for the new state or an expert examination. The impoverishment of the po­pulation is a product of the disintegration of the old command economy, in conditions that by no means facilitate the development of productive capitalism. Oleksandr Motyl correctly noted that at the time Ukraine received independence, there were perhaps a dozen economists who had a general idea about how the economy works in the West. This means that when our ranking politicians receive recommendations from their economic advisors with the same university degrees, there are perhaps a couple among them who know what they’re talking about, and several times more of those who are totally incompetent. In other words, those in a position to make decisions have no intellectual equipment for a true assessment of their advisors and their ideas. The results are there to see: an underdeveloped state incapable of keeping the command economy under control, shadow economy, unviable administrative and social system.

A key to the understanding of what the previous territorial elite actually had in mind is found in the book Ukraine on the Road to the 21st Century by Dmytro Vydrin and Dmytro Tabachnyk, which is chimerical and hard to get. The authors see “Soviet traditionalism that has taken shape” as a component of the Ukrainian national idea. They further stress the need to integrate with Russia, without which Ukraine will be left “alone.” They seriously believe that the West is plotting secret schemes in order to deindustrialize the postcommunist countries, and that only Russia can protect Ukraine and CIS countries against US global claims. They see Ukraine’s economic salvation not in new private firms, but in financial industrial groups and large-scale projects. Financial industrial groups are actually a plan to restore the economic system of “advanced socialism.” To think that these views are harbored by two most influential figures in the presidential milieu.

Given the political culture inherited from the old regime, Ukrainian society at the moment does not have any intellectual or value preconditions for a democratic political discourse.

I by no means see Ukraine’s prospects as hopeless, but I can’t help noting the greatest loss over the past five years, the loss of political consensus over the independence referendum. The rebirth of the communists under the return-to-the-USSR slogans — in other words, cancellation of the referendum results — is the clearest sign. Of course, five years is too short a period during which to form a political nation, civil society, to structure it, even if for the self-treatment of a society that was actually deformed by totalitarianism and genocide. Yet even the first steps haven’t been taken.

Recipes made in the West for the postcommunist world cannot be implemented within a year, but these recipes rely on hundreds of years of experience accumulated by the most successful sociopolitical evolution in the history of mankind. The territorial elite’s covert attempts to evade them and the failure of the cultural elite to comprehend them are at the core of the sociopolitical impasse of today’s Ukraine. Perception of notions such as democracy, open civil society, market economy, return of the national cultural and spiritual heritage, innovative Western ideas would mean taking the first step, without which the next step is impossible. Taking this step by no means indicates that Ukraine won’t be able eventually to evolve into a normal European nation. However, without this it is impossible to rid oneself of one’s servile mentality, to overcome the inertia of Bolshevism, untangle oneself from the grip on one’s throat of the dead hands from the past.