Ukraine under the after-war Stalin regime (1946-53)

An important outcome of the war for Ukrainians was the unification of Western and Eastern Ukraine into one state. To the great disappointment of the Poles, Stalin persuaded Great Britain and the United States to accept his annexation of lands in which West Ukrainians constituted the majority of the population. Especially painful for the Poles was the loss of Lviv, a bastion of Polish culture and influence in the region. To avoid potential ethnic conflicts in the future, Stalin moved about 800, 000 Poles from Galicia and Volhynia to Poland. In similar manner, about 500,000 Ukrainians, who had found themselves on the Polish side of the new border, moved to Soviet Ukraine. Despite its harshness this decision of Stalin ended the long-term conflict between the two peoples.

    Shortly after the war, Stalin also persuaded Czechoslovakia and Romania (these countries were under Soviet occupation) to give up their claims to Transcarpathia and Bukovyna, respectively. Hungarians, Romanians, and some other nationalities were repatriated from Ukraine to their own countries. Thus, Western Ukraine, with its more than 7 million inhabitants was permanently incorporated into the USSR.

    Ukraine was the Soviet republic that suffered most in the war. Foreign experts calculated that it would take at least 20 years for Ukraine to recover. They were mistaken since they did not take into account the enormous mobilization possibilities of the Soviet totalitarian system. The party efficiently focused the masses and resources on strategic directions. In addition to millions of Soviet citizens, hundreds of thousands of “enemies of the people” (Soviet political convicts) and war prisoners were actively used to rebuild the economy. By 1950 the industrial output of Ukraine was 15% higher than in 1940. In the 1950s Ukraine once again became one of the leading industrial countries of Europe. In Western Ukraine, which had practically no heavy industry before the war, progress was especially impressive: by 1955 the industrial output of the region was four times greater than before the war. Because the factories were new and often outfitted with machines expropriated from Germany, the West Ukrainian enterprises possessed some of the most modern equipment in the USSR. Rapidly growing Lviv became one of the major industrial centers of the republic.

    In 1945 Ukraine, quite unexpectedly for itself, became a member of the United Nations. Stalin wanted to include all Soviet republics into the UN to get extra votes, but Americans said that in this case they would demand similar rights for their 50 states. As a compromise Stalin agreed to limit the number of Soviet votes to three (USSR, Ukraine, and Belarus).[17] However, the function of the Ukrainian foreign ministry was merely ceremonial and symbolic. It closely followed Moscow’s instructions.

    In 1946 Moscow decided to liquidate the Greek Catholic church, one of the major symbols of West Ukrainians’ distinctness. The Greek Catholic church did not oppose the Soviet regime. It was loyal and tried to cooperate. For example, it called UPA fighters to lay down their arms and surrender. But Moscow could not retain the church since it would have been contradictory to the Soviet unification policy principles (one language, one religion, one ideology). The Soviet leadership wanted Ukraine to be “sovieticized” and Russified as much as possible and it could not agree that West Ukrainians had a distinct church with the center in Rome. The center was to be in Moscow (to make control easier). In fact, all Russian Orthodox hierarchs were under strict control of the KGB (secret police). The Soviet leadership also used the Russian Orthodox Church as a means of Russification policy.

    In March 1946, the terrorized Greek Catholic priests proclaimed the dissolution of the Union of Brest of 1596, a break with Rome, and the “reunion” of the Greek Catholic church with the Russian Orthodox church. Those who refused were imprisoned. Some priests, however, continued to practice their religion secretly until 1989 when the Greek Catholic church was again legalized.

    Despite the end of the World War II the UPA continued its resistance to Soviet power. It hoped that a war between the USSR and the USA would soon start in which Ukraine would get independence with the UPA’s help. The widespread activity of the UPA was the result of its popular support and effective organization. In order to deprive the UPA of popular support, the NKVD used a variety of ruthless tactics. It depopulated areas where the UPA had base camps, deporting to Siberia the family of anyone associated with the resistance, and even entire villages. It is estimated that, between 1944 and 1952, about 500,000 West Ukrainians were repressed (153,000 of them were killed; 203,000 were exiled to cold areas of the USSR) On the other hand, the SB (the OUN security police) ruthlessly exterminated Ukrainians, who cooperated with Soviet authorities. The UPA’s leader, Roman Shukhevych, insisted on killing everyone who recognized Soviet power. “We should not be afraid of being cursed by the people for our cruelty, even if half the population perished,” he stressed. According to NKVD sources, UPA fighters exterminated more than 30,000 of the Soviet soldiers, activists, sympathizers and their families for the period of 1944-1953. More than 16,000 of them were peasants and workers, about 2,000 - intellectuals, and 860 - the old, housewives, and children. Thus, the civil population suffered from terror on both sides.

    By 1947-48, when it became obvious that an American-Soviet war would not occur, many UPA units disbanded. A serious blow to the UPA was the spread of collectivization because, unlike the individual peasant households, the strictly controlled collective farmers could not serve as sources of provisions for the partisans. At the beginning of the 1950s the OUN and UPA stopped to exist.

    A separate chapter in the history of the UPA was its activity on the Polish side of the border, in the area inhabited by the Ukrainian Lemkos. Between 1944 and 1947, the OUN-UPA enjoyed strong support and maintained a powerful presence in the area. In 1947 the Polish government decided to eliminate the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the region and launched an operation under the code name Wisla. With the help of Soviet and Czechoslovak troops, the Polish forces suppressed the OUN resistance in Poland and forcibly resettled the Lemko population (about 150 000) throughout Poland in order to prevent the UPA from ever reestablishing itself in the region again. In this manner, the Poles finally rid themselves of the Ukrainian problem.

    In 1946 a severe drought struck Ukraine, Moldova, and Southern Russia. It caused the third famine in Ukraine during its Soviet period. The famine could have been avoided had the government demanded less grain from Ukraine that year. In fact, the peasants were forced to give all their grain supplies. In 1946 and 1947 the famine killed hundreds of thousands in Ukraine. That famine was also artificial. The state had enough bread to feed its population. But for political, mostly propagandistic reasons, the USSR exported grain to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania, Hungary, and France at ridiculously low (even symbolic) prices. The president of Czechoslovakia Kliment Gotwald said, “The Soviet Union has saved us from famine.” The existence of famine in the USSR was silenced by the Soviet government. The famine avoided Western Ukraine since collectivization had not yet encompassed all the peasants in the area by 1946 and climatic conditions there had been good. Western Ukraine was lucky to escape all Soviet holodomors (1921, 1933, and 1946).

    In nationality policy Stalin decided to return to the old tsarist scheme of Russian-Ukrainian relations, slightly modifying it. In 1950 he put forward a thesis that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians were branches of a “single Old Rus Nationality” (Древнерусская народность). This nationality could be interpreted as the Old Russian, but in no way as the Old Ukrainian. Thus, paradoxically, Ukrainians were considered as younger brothers, despite the fact that Kyiv was the political center of the single Old Rus Nationality.[18]

    In 1946 in the USSR appeared the so-called Zhdanovshyna, named after its major protagonist Andrei Zhdanov. Zhadonovshyna was a wide ideological offensive of the Stalinist regime against those who wanted a freer cultural climate and admired the achievements of Western civilization. Stalin believed that this offensive was necessary since millions of Soviet people had seen life in Europe during the war. Zhdanov proposed an alternative to Western culture. The aim of his ideological campaign was the glorification of Russian cultural and scientific achievements. The Russian nation was proclaimed as “the most outstanding nation… the leading force in the Soviet union.” Thus, many intellectuals in Soviet republics who had glorified their own cultures were now accused of “bourgeois nationalism.” Ukrainian historians were given orders to stress close ties between Ukrainian and Russian peoples and show “the great progressive role of the Russian people” in Ukrainian history.

    Zhdanovshyna stiffened the cultural development of Soviet republics. Creative activity practically stopped as frightened intellectuals had to admit their ‘ideological mistakes’ and glorify the Soviet leadership and communist ideology.

    At the end of the 1940s Stalin became more anti-Semitic than ever before. According to M. Khrushchev, Stalin, at this time, often mocked Jews by imitating their accent at his Politburo meetings. Jews were selected as a special target for accusations of cosmopolitism[19] and of worshiping the West. Stalin was especially enraged when Jews asked him to establish a Jewish autonomous republic in Crimea.[20] Many Jewish intellectuals were repressed at this time. The press instigated anti-Jewish feelings. There were even pogroms in Kyiv and Kharkiv. 

The Thaw

In March 1953 Iosif Stalin died.[21] For the next two years there had been struggle for power among the elite. The victor of that inner-party struggle was Nikita Khrushchev. The new Soviet leader was much more liberal than Stalin. He condemned his former patron’s rule of terror and started a liberalization campaign, which came to be known as de-Stalinization or the thaw.

    The thaw was characterized by the relaxation of ideological control in the sphere of culture. The weakening of ideological pressure led to the revival of national cultural life in all Soviet republics, including Ukraine. Some Ukrainian cultural figures, repressed in the 1930s, were rehabilitated. Millions of GULAG prisoners were released and returned home. The Ukrainian language and culture got a fresh breath and produced such a phenomenon as “the sixties group” (shistdesiatnyky). This group included writers, film directors, artists, poets, composers and other cultural figures who tried not only to glorify the Soviet regime but also to introduce some non-ideological innovations in their fields of cultural activity. They also tried to renew traditional Ukrainian cultural values and to defend the Ukrainian language against Russification.

    The life of peasants was significantly eased during the Khrushchev period. Peasants were given passports and pensions. Their wages increased and they also started to pay fewer taxes. To enlarge the quantity of grain Khrushchev launched the so-called Tselina program. That was an attempt to solve the food problem by extensive way. Dozens of thousands of young Ukrainians enthusiastically responded to the Party’s call and went to Kazakhstan, Western Siberia, and Northern Caucuses to cultivate virgin lands.   

  Khrushchev also tried to significantly improve the living standards of Soviet citizens. He launched an extensive building program. Millions got new apartments in the so-called khrushchevki (the type of an apartment building). Salaries and wages of ordinary people rose substantially. Many families now could allow having such unthinkable in Stalin’s time goods as washing machines, refrigerators, type-recorders, and TV-sets.

    Since the rate of growth of Soviet industry was the highest in the world, Khrushchev decided to announce in 1961 that the Soviet Union would catch up with America soon and build a communist society by 1980. The Soviet leader did not understand that the West was experiencing a technological revolution which was characterized by quality and not by quantity (as was the Soviet case). Thus, his announcement was purely utopian and produced numerous anecdotes.

    Khrushchev was a very controversial leader. Besides his merits, he is noted for numerous mistakes. He reduced peasants’ private plots (ohorody) by half and thus diminished the number of agricultural products at city markets.[22] As a result of Khrushchev’s famous corn idea, collective farms were forced to plant corn everywhere. A lot of fertile land was used for corn instead of grain.[23] Thus, the Soviet Union started to import grain instead of exporting it. Taxes were imposed on citizens who kept cattle. That measure sharply reduced the amount of meat and milk in the country. Food shortages appeared in cities and towns. Due to Khrushchev’s atheistic campaign about 50 percent of churches disappeared. Many architectural religious masterpieces were destroyed.

    Several inconsistent structural reforms were carried out in industry and the party. These reforms came down into history as Khrushchev’s chekharda. They contributed to a significant slowdown of economic growth at the end of his rule. The most irritating for the party hierarchy was a reform of rotation. The reform put the careers of many party bosses at risk, since it did not allow them to occupy important state positions for more than a certain number of years. This reform was designed to enliven the party apparatus but it only scared the party leaders who were afraid of loosing their jobs. Thus, it did not look surprisingly that the party elite decided to remove Khrushchev from power. On October 14, 1964, at the party plenum, Khrushchev was forced to resign. Leonid Brezhnev became the party’s leader.        

The Brezhnev Era

The Nationality Policy and Dissidents

The after-Stalin cultural liberalization, which produced the revival of national cultures in all Soviet republics, frightened the Soviet leadership. During the Brezhnev reign a new party program was introduced which emphasized the importance of the Russian language for the integration of the Soviet peoples. Party theoreticians spoke of the diminishing significance of borders between Soviet republics; they also popularized the theory of “fusion of Soviet nations” that would be accompanied by the disappearance of national languages. The aim of that fusion was to create a new Russian-speaking Soviet man (homo Sovieticus), popularly known as sovok. Thus it is not surprising that Russification was spreading substantially. Many Ukrainian cultural figures, who continued to glorify Ukrainian culture and tried to protect the Ukrainian language from Russification after the end of the Khrushchev thaw, were accused of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and dismissed from their jobs or sent to prisons. A similar attack on intellectuals was conducted in other Soviet republics as well.

    This attack on national rights of Soviet republics was one of the reasons for the emergence of the so-called dissident movement. This movement appeared in the Khrushchev period but got momentum during the Brezhnev period. Several small clandestine Ukrainian dissident groups secretly issued their own magazines and newspapers generally called samizdat, where they criticized the Soviet Union’s policy on civil and national rights of its citizens. During the 1960s and 1970s practically all dissident groups were repressed. Many of their members were incarcerated in mental hospitals or sent to labor camps in Siberia. The Ukrainian dissidents made up the majority of all the Soviet dissidents (about 75 percent). The Ukrainian dissident movement did not enjoy wide support among Ukrainians, however. Due to communist propaganda efforts many citizens of Soviet Ukraine considered dissidents to be foreign agents or “fanatical Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.”[24]

 

The “Stagnation” of the 1970s – first half of the 1980s

The economic development in Ukraine in this period can be characterized by one word “stagnation.” The economy developed in extensive way in contrast to the economy of Western Europe, which developed in intensive way. The state gave plans to factories to fulfill. The workers did not have any wish to exceed state plans because in that case the plan quotas were often raised and next year the workers were supposed to work more to meet the plan obligations. Thus, the system discouraged hard work.

    New technologies were rarely introduced as there was no competition, which could stimulate innovations. The quality of goods was low because of the same reason – the absence of competition. About forty percent of the work force was engaged in ВПК (military-producing-complex).[25] The arms race with the United States consumed large part of the state budget. The cost of foreign aid to Soviet satellites (Cuba, Afghanistan, Vietnam, African socialist states, and Eastern Europe) added to the budget deficit, which was three times higher than that of the United States (1985).

    The central planning system often looked very inefficient and even awkward. For example, the Kyiv power station repair facility received electric cable from the city of Kuibyshev in central Russia, even though a large factory was producing just such cable in Kyiv. Some historians say that such a policy was specially designed to tie different republics economically. Other historians doubt it and say that such awkward economic schemes are typical of a command economy.

     The Soviet government spent too much on consumer subsidies for propagandistic purposes. State subsidies keptconsumer prices artificially low. One government official noted, “The state pays four rubles, eighty kopecks for a kilogram of meat and sells it (to consumers) for one ruble, eighty kopecks.” From the 1960s to the start of the 1990s bread prices never increased. The subsidized price of bread was so low that many farmers fed bread instead of grain to their livestock because it was cheaper. Despite having more farmers than all of the industrialized West and Japan put together, the Soviet Union was forced year after year to spend precious hard currency to import Western grain. The state controlled agricultural complex was very ineffective. More than 30 percent of foodstuff rotted in state storehouses before it could reach consumers. Up to 40 percent of grain was lost during harvesting and transit. In contrast to state farms, peasants’ individual plots – ohorody (which had only 3% of the land) provided the agricultural market with 1/3 of meat, 1/3 of milk, 35% of fruit and 50% of eggs and potatoes. In general, Ukrainian peasants produced at their tiny plots a third of the total agricultural production of the republic.

     The quality of medical service was poor, though free. Housing was cheap, but people had to wait for many years to get it. Food was cheap but it could not satisfy the demand. People, mostly women, had to spend hours each day in lines to get cheap products. In general, the life of a woman in Soviet times was harder than that of a man. The average Ukrainian woman worked full-time, took care of the children, and did most of the shopping (read: queuing).

    One of the positive sides of the Soviet system was the absence of poverty. About 90% of the population had approximately the same living conditions. Foreign observers noted that the planned economy brought the Soviet population economic security, full employment, and a high level of equality. Or, in the words of one American analyst, “the state offered the people protection from ‘three evils of capitalism’: unemployment, inequality, and inflation.”

    But full social equality was not reached anyway. The nomenklatura remained, as in the Stalin times, a privileged class. Their living standards were high. They lived in large apartments (sometimes with state maidservants) and could enjoy using special shops, sanatoriums, and hospitals. Their salaries were at least three times as much as those of ordinary people.

    The late 1970s were characterized by a growing apathy to propaganda. With the death of Stalin the Soviet society lost the fear of mass repressions; with the removing of Khrushchev from power it lost enthusiasm and romanticism. Cynical attitude to the traditional Soviet values was especially growing among the youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union’s impressive rate of economic growth began to slow. Per capita income, which had grown at an average annual rate of 6 percent from 1966 to 1970, experienced zero growth between 1978 and 1985. Thus, although command economy had reached remarkable results during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras (when extensive methods could be effective), it failed to advance the country into the next stages of technology. Industry and agriculture still used obsolete and wasteful production methods which kept the Soviet economy far behind that of the United States. The productivity of industry was 3.5 times lower than in the West; agriculture – 5 times lower. The Soviet leadership understood that serious reforms were necessary to avoid defeat in the Cold War with the United States.