The “Man of Steel” From Shepetivka

September 29, 2004, marks the centenary of Nikolai Ostrovsky. If the Soviet Union still existed, this jubilee would have been celebrated with much pomp. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the new generation rejected or reappraised many cherished Soviet values. The name of Nikolai Ostrovsky means little or nothing to many young Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, and others. Yet not so long ago this writer was one of the main icons and role models for young communists.

Although the ideas that this author used to propagate are mostly rejected now, there still are Nikolai Ostrovsky museums in those places in Ukraine where he lived and worked, and you can easily find his works and various publications about him in Ukraine’s libraries.

Naturally, Ostrovsky’s birth centenary deserves attention, for he played an extremely important role in the Soviet propaganda system. Without a doublt this requires a closer examination of his personality. The jubilee could serve as a good opportunity for an in-depth discussion of the writer, his place in the system of Soviet symbols, and his attitude to Ukraine, as well as to reassess what this man’s life and works can teach us.

Nikolai Ostrovsky’s attitude to Ukraine and Ukrainians is no simple matter.

On the one hand, he was born in the Ukrainian village of Viliya (now Ostrih district, Rivne oblast) and spent a considerable part of his life in this country (in his home village and later in the cities of Shepetivka, Kyiv, and Iziaslav, Berezda district). So the Ukrainian atmosphere influenced him one way or another.

However, Ostrovsky’s family can hardly be considered Ukrainian. His mother Olga came from a family of Czech colonists who settled in Volyn in the second half of the 19th century. Not willing to be a farm hand, she married an older widower named Aleksei Ostrovsky, who was not a compatriot of hers.

Ostrovsky’s mother was sort of an “ethnic outcast.” Pulled out of her environment, she had no pronounced sense of national identity and had to accept the “common” values that were often of a Russian imperial nature.

It was Ostrovsky’s mother who shaped his views. What could she teach her son as far as ethnic identity was concerned? Obviously, very little.

Did the father, Aleksei, perhaps try to instill certain ethnic values in the young Nikolai? This is very doubtful. First of all, the father spent very little time in the family and exerted a superficial influence on his children. Neither in his own autobiographies nor in the almost autobiographical novel How the Steel Was Tempered did Ostrovsky ever mention his father. Second, although we know very little about Aleksei Ostrovsky, existing evidence suggests that he barely had any sense of national identity. His father, i.e., Nikolai’s grandfather, had long served in the tsarist army, as did Aleksei himself. In all probability, he considered himself a “Russian person.”

Nikolai Ostrovsky’s life story includes an interesting episode that Soviet biographers preferred not to mention. When the First World War broke out, the teenaged Nikolai twice ran away from home to join the army and fight for the tsar. This means he was educated as a Russian Empire loyalist. Ostrovsky spent his childhood mostly in the countryside. Before WW I, he lived in the village of Viliya and for a few months in the town of Starokostiantyniv and the village of Turiya. In spite of Russification, strong Ukrainian ethnic traditions were still intact in these places. Those traditions also existed, at least partially, in Shepetivka, to which the family moved when the war broke out. School played a certain role in instilling an ethnic identity in the future writer. He went to a parish school in Viliya and a secondary school in Shepetivka. These were educational institutions with Russian as the language of instruction and where the “Russian spirit” was instilled in the pupils. Most of the books that the future writer read were in Russian. His teacher M. Rozhanivska reminisced that Nikolai “especially liked Russian reading lessons. He would ask a lot of questions during the Russian-language classes that I taught.”

Still, it would be wrong to claim that Nikolai Ostrovsky was totally isolated from the Ukrainian national culture. His brother Dmitry recalled that Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar was among Nikolai’s books. When the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) was in power in Shepetivka, and later the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, and then the UNR again (second half of 1917-first half of 1919), the future writer attended an elementary school with Ukrainian as the language of instruction. Recalling the day Nikolai came to the school, Rozhanivska wrote, “I explained to the boy that Ukraine was now opening schools where teaching would be done in the native language. The boy immediately asked for a book in Ukrainian. I gave him a textbook on the history of culture and let him take it home.”

Rozhanivska also recalls that the works of Taras Shevchenko made a great impression on the teenaged Ostrovsky, “...we were reading Taras Shevchenko’s biography and the Kobzar. The life of this great personality left a lasting impression on Nikolai. He said, “He suffered and endured very much, but still achieved his goal and became a world-famous writer whom everybody reads, loves, and remembers, and always will.”

These words indicate that Ostrovsky valued Shevchenko not as an outstanding national poet but a person who, in spite of sufferings, achieved success and fame. This was perhaps part of his inchoate life goal: to attain glory in spite of all obstacles.

Yet Ostrovsky chose not to recall that he attended a Ukrainian school. There is not a single word about this in the novel How the Steel Was Tempered. Nor is it mentioned in the autobiography that he included in the manuscript of the first part of this book, which he sent to Molodaya Gvardiya Publishers. Moreover, the author gives the impression that he was a factory worker in the years 1917- 1919, when this school was operating and there was a Ukrainian government in Shepetivka.

What caused Ostrovsky to remain silent about this episode in his life? He probably did not want to reveal that he had certain “relations” with the Ukrainian authorities, which must have benefited him, at least from the cultural perspective. A hard-core Bolshevik, Ostrovsky pretended not to see what could well have been labeled as “nationalism.”

Judging by his works, it made no difference to the writer what ethnic group an individual belonged to. What really mattered was one’s social class. This view runs throughout his autobiographies, which never mention his ethnic affinity but fully emphasize the class he came from and to which he belonged. Of special interest in this connection is the autobiography that Ostrovsky contributed to the Literary Encyclopedia. It begins with the words, “Ostrovsky Nikolai Alekseyevich, born in 1904. Son of a cook.”

Pavel Korchagin, the protagonist of How the Steel Was Tempered, also comes through as an “non-ethnic” person. Although he lives in a Ukrainian environment, the author gives him a Russian, not Ukrainian, surname. This man takes a dim view of anyone who shows his ethnic identity, whether Ukrainian, Polish, or Jewish. He assumes an extremely negative attitude toward people who are proud of being Ukrainian and uphold the Ukrainian national cause.

Read how Ostrovsky depicts the behavior of UNR troops: “A stream of Petliurite gangs of all hues and tints swept over the guberniya: small and big chieftains, all kinds of Holubs, Arkhangels, Angels, Hordiys, and an infinite number of other bandits.

Former officer scum, Right and Left Ukrainian SR’s (Socialist Revolutionaries — Ed.), any daredevil adventurer who managed to muster a bunch of cutthroats would declare himself warlord, sometimes unfurling the yellow-and-blue banner of Petliura, and seize power as far as his forces and capacity allowed.

It was out of these motley gangs reinforced by rich farmers and the Galician regiments of Ataman Konovalets’s occupational corps that ‘Chief Ataman Petliura’ formed his regiments and divisions. These SR and kulak filth would come under scathing attacks from Red guerrilla units...”

Needless to say, the above quotation is rather far removed from belles- lettres. This is typical agitprop. We see here a long series of typical terms (gangs, former officer scum, SR and kulak filth, etc.) that immediately set the reader against the Ukrainian authorities.

The conduct of UNR troops and administrative bodies is described in quite a biased manner. The novel How the Steel Was Tempered sometimes creates the impression that the UNR military were doing nothing but carrying out Jewish pogroms, picking fights, raping pretty girls, and running helter-skelter from the gallant Bolsheviks.

When Ostrovsky had to speak about some positive aspects of the Ukrainian government, even then he tried to present them in a negative light. This especially applies to the episode when the theater in Shepetivka staged the play Nazar Stodolia in honor of UNR soldiers.

“The town’s only theater launched a lavish party in honor of the arrivals. All the ‘cream’ of Petliurite intellectuals was in attendance: Ukrainian teachers, two priest’s daughters...petty landlords, former employees of Count Potocki, and a bunch of citizens who called themselves ‘free Cossacks’ — Ukrainian SR creeps.

The house was full to capacity. Dressed in gaudy and flowery Ukrainian national costumes adorned with all kinds of beads and ribbons, the female teachers, priests’ daughters, and landlords’ wives were surrounded by a large circle of spur-jingling officers, who seemed to have alighted from old paintings depicting Zaporozhian Cossacks.

The regimental band was thundering. The stage was feverishly being readied for the production of Nazar Stodolia.”

One can also cite more fragments of this kind, permeated with anti- Ukrainian spirit. The author frequently displayed disgust with Ukrainian things. Instead, he felt affection for all kinds of vagabonds who came to the Ukrainian land for a far from noble purpose, rather than for the native inhabitants of this land.

In assessing How the Steel Was Tempered on the whole, one can conclude that this work is in many ways insulting to Ukrainians.

Yet the novel’s anti-Ukrainian episodes proved to be very suitable for Communist Party propaganda. The fact of the matter is that the Bolsheviks did not wield much clout in Ukraine during the Civil War, and local Bolshevik organizations consisted almost entirely of non-Ukrainians. The Ukrainians wouldn’t accept Bolshevism.

Conversely, Ostrovsky’s novel tried to affirm a different “truth”: Ukraine was allegedly very sympathetic to Bolshevism, and the Ukrainians were bursting to be “liberated” by the Bolsheviks. This kind of “truth” could in fact be accepted when the novel came out, i.e., in the 1930s, for the younger generation did not know the realities of the Civil War. It is this generation that the novel How the Steel Was Tempered was largely aimed at.

The novel served another important ideological function in the context of Ukrainian conditions. Ukraine had just lived through a horrible tragedy — the manmade famine that claimed millions of Ukrainian lives. The Bolshevik mass media hushed this up, as if it had not happened at all. Instead, they offered the public a false symbolic world in which the Bolshevik Party was portrayed as a source of various noble deeds. How the Steel Was Tempered played a rather significant role in the formation of this false world.

It is symbolic in a way that the Ukrainian Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote the second part of his novel, which described the Soviet period, including some relatively recent events, at the very time when millions of people were dying a lingering death in famine-stricken Ukraine.

There were many rave reviews of the novel in Ukraine at the time. There were a lot of public forums from which young communists sent their greetings and words of gratitude to Ostrovsky, and not just words of thanks alone. Various gifts were sent to the writer. By far the best present was a posh villa in Sochi, which the Soviet Ukrainian government built for Ostrovsky in 1936. The proletarian writer lived in conditions that not only Soviet workers but also much of the Western bourgeoisie could not even dream of. He lived there, of course, at the expense of the Soviet peoples, including the Ukrainian peasants whom the authorities, glorified by Ostrovsky, would not only harshly exploit but also starve to death.

The publicity machine behind Ostrovsky and his works, set in motion in the mid-1930s, was still spinning out propaganda even after the writer died in late 1936. Monuments to him were erected in a number of places in Ukraine; museums were opened in Viliya, Shepetivka and Boyarka; Ukraine’s Young Communist League launched the prestigious Ostrovsky Prize; and many streets, children’s holiday camps, and various other facilities, mostly cultural and educational, were also named after him. Ostrovsky’s works and books about him were constantly republished in incredibly large press runs.

It is small wonder that the cult of Nikolai Ostrovsky, created in Stalinist times, managed to survive for so many decades. Even today remnants of this cult may be found. This writer’s name remains well known in Ukraine. But do Ukrainians really need him and his works?