Flashback

Back in 1981 I defended my doctoral dissertation on national Communism in Soviet Ukraine (1918-1933) and could not help but react to the latest attempt by contemporary Ukrainian Communists to gird up their ideological loins by means of the tried and true method of political education. Here, of course, everybody over the age of thirty remembers all too well what the content of such a course will be. After all, current Vice President of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences Ivan Kuras first made a name for himself writing on “the Bolshevik Party’s leadership of Ukraine’s toiling masses on the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution” and the “petty bourgeois nationalist” Ukrainian parties who tried to set up an independent state but were beaten by the Russian Red Army. However, for those who did not grow up in the realities of what was officially known as “real socialism,” some explanation seems in order.

For one thing, certain details tend to get left out. I doubt that the guardians of Leninist purity will recall that the official in charge of political education here in the late 1920s, one Mykhailo Volobuyev, wound up serving ten years for “bourgeois nationalist wrecking” and then spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully seeking rehabilitation. Or take Oleksandr Shumsky, Commissar of Education in 1925-27, who was arrested in 1933 and set free only in 1946, when he was murdered on the train taking him home on the personal orders of Iosip Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich. Actually, the history of Communism in this country with its three manmade famines (1921-23, 1932-33, and 1946-47) is not really all that attractive, as seen by the fact that in 1937 Stalin had the official USSR census repressed and those in charge of it shot for not finding enough people (the Great Dictator had obviously forgot to keep track of how many millions he had killed) or that of 102 members of the KP(b)U Central Committee in 1937, only two Stakhanovite shock workers remained by the end of the following year. The lucky head-of-state, one Hryhory Petrovsky, had earlier been a Bolshevik deputy to the fourth Tsarist Duma (for some reason known only to himself Stalin left this particular category alone) managed to get a job as a zavhosp (the guy in charge of paper clips, furniture, and organizing drinking sessions for the bosses) in the Leningrad Museum of the Revolution, singular evidence that in those days social mobility went both ways. Yet another committed suicide. The remaining 98 were shot. Sic transit gloria mundi.

It would be entertaining to read about the intellectual epicycles of these priests of the One True Faith of creating heaven on this earth, if only they did not represent such a hefty proportion of the population. But since they do, it becomes scarier than anything Stephen King ever came up with. This part of the world has had quite enough experience with gun-toting fanatics not shy of killing those whom they found inconvenient to their master plan. After Communist rule this country could have used something like the denazification Germany went through after Hitler. Now, unfortunately, it is too late. God help us all.