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Where Splits Lead

18 May, 00:00

Looking at the various rifts in the political parties most strongly committed to Ukrainian statehood reminds one of the Ukrainian national movement early in this century. In 1900 the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, the first more or less mass Ukrainian political party in imperial Russia, was formed. Having evolved toward orthodox Marxism, in late 1904, the Ukrainian Social Democratic Spilka (Union) split off and joined the Russian Social Democrats, who allowed the organization to simply wither away. The rest renamed themselves the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers Party and became one of the leading forces in the Ukrainian Revolution. The other leading force in that revolution was the agrarian socialist Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries.

In the spring of 1918 both split, with the more radical Social-Democrats dedicated to a Ukrainian-led Soviet Ukraine and peace at any price with Bolshevik Russia taking the name Nezalezhnyks, from which an even more leftist splinter, the Left Nezalezhnyks then appeared. Their SR counterparts took the name Borotbists, later merging with the Left Nezalezhnyks and swapping their agrarian socialism for Marxism. In 1920 they merged with the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, the local branch of Lenin's party. The main group of Nezalezhnyks renamed themselves the Ukrainian Communist Party, and soon the ancestor of what would become the KGB organized a Left Fraction to undermine the party from within. Both groups were ordered dissolved by the Communist International, and most of their members were admitted to the CP(b)U in 1925. With one exception (the late Iwan Majstrenko managed somehow to survive until the war and then flee the country), all surviving alumni of both groups remaining in the USSR ended up being arrested in the 1930s and killed. The former Borotbist leader Oleksander Shumsky spent well over a decade in the Gulag, was released and then killed on personal orders from Stalin and Kaganovich on a train in 1946.

Mainstream Ukrainian socialists, weakened by their own disunity, lost to Lenin's Bolsheviks and fled the country. In the 1920s, some returned, lured by the cultural opportunities offered by a policy called Ukrainization, the one pro-Ukrainian interlude in the history of Soviet Ukraine. They, for the most part, were arrested as early as the first half of the 1930s. Some only served ten years in the Gulag and managed to survive, but most were shot.

There were, of course, more groups and splinters in the period, but the scheme simplifies as it ends. The disunited fighters for the Ukrainian cause ended up either in emigration, shot, or at best in the Gulag. Today's disunited fighters for the Ukrainian cause would do well to ponder this.

Newspaper output №:

№18, (1999)

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Day After Day