Serhiy BILOKIN: “Ukrainians still seem not to understand what was done to them”

We all have a recent totalitarian past, except that whether it is really our past remains a big question. The presidential elections showed that many in Ukraine still consider that past their present reality. They do so for various reasons. We can skip the purely speculative ones, being capitalized upon by the Left. There are other reasons. The phrase in the heading belongs to a noted Ukrainian historian, conscientious and astute researcher of domestic totalitarianism, author of a recently published monograph, Mass Terror as a Means of State Administration in the USSR, 1917-51. He offered it as a grimly resigned hypothesis. And his assumption is perfectly valid. In an unbiased researcher’s manner he analyzes public sentiments, public mentality, and public conscience.

The Day: Mr. Bilokin, your book, Mass Terror, on Stalinism has just come out. What makes it different from the many other publications on the subject?

S.B.: To begin with, I wouldn’t say that there are many such publications. Even though during Gorbachev’s glasnost this subject was broached by one and all, the topic soon exhausted itself. A lot of articles were published, but there aren’t many books, especially fundamental ones. Second, my book is not only about Stalinism — and I don’t like the word, because it spells an express mental stereotype. Everybody talks about Stalin’s purges and no one mentions Bolshevik and Communist repression.

The Day: So you decided to take on Communism?

S.B.: Well, attacking it was not an end in itself. You see, I am a researcher and I have never been a member of any political party. I try to stay purely academic — but then an end did appear. At first, I simply placed on a par Lenin’s terror at the time of War Communism” the 1933 Holodomor Manmade Famine, the Great Terror of 1937, mass shootings of career army officers, and the extermination of clergymen. In the end I had a description of a social revolution. Some were eliminated, others brainwashed and turned into builders of Communism. That’s how the “one Soviet people” was created.

The Day: You mean the Great Terror did not take place spontaneously, because of Stalin’s bad temper, but was done consciously?

S.B.: Precisely, and it started being planned not in 1929, as we are told, allegedly when Stalin came to power, not even in 1917. It must have started when Bolshevism took shape as a political and ideological concept, long before the Russian Revolution. The main task of Bolshevik domestic policy was to form a new human breed: builders of communism. Accordingly, the opposite side of the coin was eliminating all those that for some or other reason could not join the builders’ ranks.

The Day: Such a thesis cannot be put forward without proof, without documents.

S.B.: I have quite enough documents. My books has over 2,400 citations. In other words, quotations and excerpts from official documents, records of party conventions, works by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, Molotov’s and Kaganovich’s pension revelations, and political prisoners’ eyewitness accounts. There are dozens and dozens of resolutions passed by the CPU(b) CC Politburo, and what decisions they were! I have studied fifteen hundred criminal cases, involving individuals and groups, peasants, writers, clergymen, and engineers.

The Day: Any sensational discoveries? Any documents never before made public?

S.B.: By and large, there are no extraordinary official documents kept in Ukrainian archives. For example, you find cards signed by Shcherbytsky, reading that he has acquainted himself with such-and-such Moscow Politburo resolution, but the text of the resolution is missing; it is kept in Moscow. I mean they would deliver a resolution, Shcherbytsky would read it, sign the receipt obligating him to carry it out, and the documents would be returned to Moscow. That was the system.

The Day: So what can one expect from such a clear system?

S.B.: No one is perfect. Sometimes some government clerk could forget to delete a sheet from a file and feed it to the shredder. Years later that sheet would shed light on a mystery. Then there is expert analysis, microanalysis, when by studying and comparing texts one can read between the lines. In my book I reproduces pages from the third and fifth editions of Lenin’s Collected Works. The leader of the world proletariat was edited about as much as all the others. Actually, the greater the number of the documents you read the better picture you get. If you read ten case files you won’t notice how the state machine operates, but if you read thousands of them the picture is gradually brought into focus. It’s like a film developer.

The Day: And so?

S.B.: Reading such documents means a lot of strain on your mind. They have a terrible aura. Take one example. Yuri Butovych, born to a decent aristocratic family in Poltava oblast, was seven in 1917 when the family estate was torn down. His father, mother, and two older brothers were murdered. At first the boy made a living stealing at the local railroad and street markets. Now and then he would be hauled in and sent to a government-run orphanage. Miraculously, in 1935, he graduated from Kharkiv’s Agricultural Institute, became an “agronomist-economist,” worked in Stavyshchy in Kyiv oblast, and got married. His wife Tamara was 23 and their daughter Liudmyla 9 months in September 1937 when he was arrested. They wanted him to sign a plea of guilty, reading “... I hereby admit that I, being hostile to Soviet power, did spread [counterrevolutionary] anecdotes aimed at discrediting the Leader of All Peoples and Head of the Government.” Yuri Butovych was sentenced to death and shot on December 22, 1937. I have read 1,500 such cases.

The Day: But maybe the issue is not the number of documents.

S.B.: The issue of the system is. Take another example. A statement issued by a government agency back in 1988: “Please be informed that V. I. Tarasovych is not recorded in the card files of visitors to the German Consulate in Kyiv.” A document to the effect that the name of a woman is not in certain files. So what? But it’s a revelation! In 1988 their [KGB’s] 10th Directorate did have card files like that. We all knew that one mustn’t visit a consulate without permission, but we didn’t know that the name of every visitor was entered in some files. A higher level of knowledge, isn’t it?

The Day: All right, then what?

S.B.: There’s more. A schoolchild entering first grade gets a personal file. No matter where you get a job you start by (a) submitting an employment application, (b) filling in a personnel registration blank, and (c) a personal file. At the time all this boiled down to self-incrimination. On pain of criminal prosecution for untruthful answers to questions one had to inform whether or not one had relatives abroad, whether one had spent time in Nazi-occupied territories or been purged. By the way, at first the most risky column to be filled was about one’s origin/parentage (those with blue blood were the first to be arrested). It was this way, using a variety of registration files, questionnaires, and passport data, that the state collected the most detailed information on every citizen, primarily in the urban areas and focusing on men. A kind of aquarium with four transparent walls (with fishermen circling, picking their prey). This would last for decades. Here is another document, a statement referring to an arrest, dated 1938: “As per Referral No. 8, State Security Directorate, NKVD of the Ukr. SSR, Abram Hurevych was charged by the Kremenchuk City GPU Department as a suspected counterrevolutionary. According to Kharkiv Regional GPU Department files, Abram Naumovych Hurevych was a Menshevik and Bund member. Hurevych is to be arrested.” Imagine! The ax fell seventeen years later. The man had married, divorced, gone to the movies, and prison had been waiting all those years! And then his waiting was over.

The Day: So people got arrested even without being informed on?

S.B.: There is more to it than meets the eye. They say that after the campaign against illiteracy everybody learned to write, but most importantly everybody knew how to write reports on everybody and where to send such reports. Yet the role of all those pen pals was reduced perhaps to making improvements in their life; someone wanted his neighbor’s room in a communal apartment, and another wanted a promotion, meaning that the person occupying the post had to be put out of the way. But we all know that the USSR had a planned economy, so arrests were also planned, like meat and dairy supplies. They would organize a giant “communist construction project” somewhere in Siberia and knew precisely the amount of manpower required. The Politburo would pass a resolution specifying the category of the populace to be purged. The document would determine the first category, meaning those to be shot along with the second and third ones, meaning varying prison camp terms. Local authorities would submit “counterproposals.” Soviet Ukraine’s Commissar of Internal affairs Leplevsky (while in office the purges reached their peak) asked Moscow for additional arrest quotas on three occasions!

The Day: What was Stalin’s role?

S.B.: During Gorbachev’s glasnost some even wrote that Stalin was mentally deranged and that fluctuations in purges tallied with the ups and downs of his disease. Why all this was done is perfectly clear. Those ordering such newspaper and magazine articles wanted people to surmise (Gorbachev called it inculcating fantasy) that no such horrors would have taken place, had someone else been in Stalin’s place — Bukharin or Grandfather Lenin. Avtorkhanov, number one anti-Soviet, was convinced, however, that “Stalin killed no one just because he was fond of killing. Nor was he a sadist and even less so a paranoid... All of Stalin’s deeds and crimes were purposeful, logical, and strictly principled... Stalin was a politician using criminal means to reach his set goal.” I think that Mr. Avtorkhanov had a point there.

The Day: Thank God, all this is history...

S.B.: Yes, history, but the dead haunt the living. Purges befell all strata, even the workers. I was horrified to see the number of criminal cases involving the proletariat. Ukrainians still seem not to understand what was done to them. We must realize that modern Ukrainian society rests on a marginal base. This society was put together using fragments of destroyed classes. The Bolshevik purges were aimed against all classes, all strata, all social groups. This was how a nation’s aristocracy and old intelligentsia (teachers, cooperators, paramedics, and clergymen) were eliminated and replaced by the Soviet intelligentsia. Different strata were destroyed in varying proportions. Landlords and army officers were arrested one after the other. I traced cases of clergymen arrested in Kyiv and found out that genocide was practiced here, too. And the Bolsheviks conducted a policy of genocide against the peasantry. For how else can one define dekulakization? A kulak was a hard-working, skilled, and therefore prosperous farmer. During the Holodomor hundreds of thousands, nay millions of peasants were liquidated. In other words, far from everybody took part in the process of reproduction, mostly those chosen by authorities. This selection lowered the production quality amplitude in terms of the human factor.

The Day: The logical question is, who had a chance staying in this country?

S.B.: Dmytro Solovei, author of Ukraine’s Calvary , a brilliant book, believed, “All that was left in Ukraine was what had had the good fortune to be completely terrorized and vanquished. Or that which was still to be attended by the secret police...” Thus we arrive at one of the main reasons for the modern criminalization of Ukrainian society. Now is the time to rescue our creed, language, culture, and our nation as such.

№17 May 30 2000 «The Day»
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