Chapter 3

Trial

Bolsheviks started social engineering with repressions and deportations of intelligentsia through GPU special operations in the 1920s, and persecutions and eventual destruction of nationally conscious intelligentsia in the 1930s. According to Raphael Lemkin, teachers as members of intelligentsia were victims of the first prong of attack against the Ukrainian national group. As Lemkin argued, the “brain” of the nation was being removed first to de-intellectualize and demoralize the nation.¹ In this aspect, experiences of teachers in Ukraine paralleled the fate of teachers in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied countries of Europe,² as well as Armenian teachers³ in the Ottoman Empire. Intelligentsia were unreliable social partners for Bolsheviks and had to be kept under surveillance, with gradual transitioning from preventive control to annihilation.⁴ When it became clear that intellectuals could not be easily silenced, Soviet leaders forced dissenters into desolate places devoid of intelligentsia throughout a vast wintry mineral-rich Soviet terrain. Marx’s law of survival of the most progressive class dictated that those who stood in the way of Bolsheviks were “enemies” of history and unfit to live. After a temporary retreat under the cover of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the government quietly grouped “enemies” by category (intellectuals, priests, merchants, those in political disfavor or under suspicion) and deprived them of civil rights (no right to vote, no right to pursue higher education, no right to buy in government shops). Total control of the means of production meant that farmers had to turn over their land and farm animals to collective farms voluntarily or be deported. Opposition to compulsory collectivization aroused a wave of protests in early 1930 that swept Soviet power out of hundreds of villages. Responsibility shifted to the Ukrainian national intelligentsia for organizing these protests. Instigated by the Communist Party, the GPU arrested thousands of intellectuals, teachers, writers, and artists and put them on trial for “plotting” to overthrow the Soviet regime. Terror intensified. Laws were drafted so that, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “before its court, all concerned are subjectively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the system, and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal.”⁵

DEPORTATIONS

Immediately after the introduction of the NEP, which allowed liberty in economic and civic life, in a telegram to TsK KP(b)U, Viacheslav Molotov and the GPU’s first chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, emphasized the need to boost vigilance. The authors of the telegram proposed setting up a “militant apparatus for the struggle against counterrevolution,” which would enlist “staunch party comrades with experience in this struggle.”⁶ In May 1921, on direct orders from the TsK KP(b)U, the GPU fabricated one of the first show trials of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries.⁷ A correspondent for the newspaper Kommunist on May 5, 1921, commented that “after the trial the Ukrainian intelligentsia should feel like after a cold, not very pleasant, but refreshing bath.”⁸ The sword of Damocles was suspended over their heads.

Political atmosphere in institutes of higher education in Soviet Ukraine, above all the teaching of social sciences, began to be closely monitored by the Communist Party. The focus of the party’s attention was professors and lecturers who did not wish to change methods of teaching demanded by Bolshevik rulers. To overcome resistance from the “old” professoriate, Bolsheviks in Ukraine organized a network of research departments in Kharkiv, Kyїv, Odesa, and Katerynoslav⁹ to train “red” professors. In 1922, they allocated funds to recruit a thousand graduate students. Deputy Commissar of Education Ian Riappo wrote to the TsK KP(b)U, “It is completely understandable that these candidates should be vetted as thoroughly as possible by Ukrholovprofos (Ukrainian Directorate of Professional Education) and its regional branches; furthermore, it is crucial to mobilize as many Communists as possible to research departments.”¹⁰

Bolsheviks were little disposed to tolerate independence of the “old” professoriate. However, the Soviet government could not crush old cadres immediately because preparing “red” professors would take years. In order to make professors and lecturers compliant, the government installed a position of political commissar in all institutes of higher education. Such innovation was unwelcome. Some professors and lecturers resigned; others protested. In February and March 1922, lecturers in Kyїv went on strike in protest against the reduction in the number of teacher training institutions. The unrest also spread to Kharkiv, Kam’ianets′-Podil′s′kyi, and Odesa.¹¹ In response, Lenin recommended to “lay off 20–40 professors . . . hit hard.”¹² Rubach, director of the Katerynoslav regional Communist Party committee’s propaganda and agitation department, reported to his leadership that “during lectures on innocent apolitical topics lecturers reveal their political face, with clear traces of Menshovism, Socialist Revolutionarism, or Kadetism,” referring to non-communist parties of Mensheviks, SRs, and Constitutional Democrats. The next step was to liquidate all party organizations in institutes of higher education, except communist; otherwise, students would be “falling under petty bourgeois influence of the old professorial staff.”¹³ On March 17, 1922, the Politburo of the TsK KP(b)U ordered propaganda and agitation departments¹⁴ to circulate a directive banning all open debates because they could provide the opposition with an opportunity to freely challenge the Soviet government.

The Politburo instructed the Commissariat of Education and the GPU to closely monitor the conduct of the professorate. On June 23, 1922, following a speech “On Political Statements of Professorate” by Soviet Ukraine’s Commissar of Education Hryhorii Hryn′ko, the Politburo of the TsK KP(b)U passed the following resolution whose text read in part:

To propose that the People’s Commissariat of Education implement a planned deportation of those professors who are introducing the greatest upheaval in academic life. To propose to regional party committees to ensure that local economic organs in no way impede this transfer, which should be implemented with maximum steadfastness. To propose to the People’s Commissariat of Education and the State Political Directorate [GPU] to apply deportation outside the borders of the federation, as one of the repressive measures against activist elements of the professorate. To propose to the People’s Commissariat of Education and the State Political Directorate to act by mutual agreement . . . by informing the Central Committee in advance.¹⁵

This resolution was sent as a secret circular to all regional party committees for implementation.

Responsibility for the preparation and implementation of the plan to deport Ukrainian intelligentsia was placed on the GPU. In 1921, the GPU completed a major counterinsurgency operation to suppress the last vestiges of struggle for liberation in Ukraine and disarmed the countryside. From 1919 to 1921, the GPU liquidated 6,000 “bandit” formations and arrested 40,000 insurgents in Ukraine. The Bolshevik secret police confiscated 43 cannons, 1,812 shotguns, 31,788 rifles, 2,312 sabers, and 3,902 revolvers.¹⁶

Red Terror¹⁷ swept throughout Soviet Ukraine, dissuading any volunteers or sympathizers still willing to join ranks of insurgents. A witness recalled how special detachments of the GPU took fifty hostages in a village, forced them to draw at random “life” or “death” slips, and pitted them against one another: the fortunate one who drew “life” had to kill the unfortunate other who drew “death.”¹⁸ In villages suspected of harboring rebels, hostage taking¹⁹ and summary executions of civilians,²⁰ signed into law in 1921, were effective methods to suppress opposition to the Soviet regime. Alongside the system of hostage taking (zaruchnytstvo), occupying Bolshevik authorities legalized summary executions of civilians (vidpovidachi) selected at random and blamed for harboring or aiding “bandits.” The decree issued on May 30, 1921, signed by Volodymyr Zatons′kyi, then head of the council on combating bandit activities in the Kyïv military district, provided instructions on how two plenipotentiaries have to select one civilian from every twentieth household in a village or at least one civilian from every independent farmstead to be executed as responsible for carrying out acts of “banditry”; the number of civilians executed doubled if a Soviet government official was murdered. The cynicism of Bolshevik extrajudicial killings was based on forcing civilians to carry out executions of their neighbors. Even the staunchest supporters of Ukrainian liberation movement were left without moral strength and firearms to continue their fight.

In 1922, Soviet security police was reorganized and its functions expanded. New legislation gave the GPU authority to crush “counterrevolutionary actions” and adopt immediate measures aimed at exposing them in a timely fashion; to combat espionage; to guard railway and sea routes; to guard borders, combat contraband, and illegal border crossing; and to carry out special tasks assigned by the Presidium of the VTsIK and the Council of People’s Commissars to safeguard the revolutionary order. The GPU as well as plenipotentiary representatives of the Communist Party at the district level were granted rights to conduct searches and arrests. Arrests of suspects could be conducted without a special resolution from the GPU or special orders issued by political departments, but it was mandatory to obtain a sanction from the GPU within forty-eight hours. Within two months of the day of arrest, the GPU was obligated to release detainees or request the Presidium of the VTsIK to prolong the term of arrest, if circumstances so demanded. The GPU did not have a right to hand down sentences. All cases, both political and civilian, were transferred to courts.²¹

In the 1920s, when financial crisis lowered morale of the Soviet security police rank-and-file, many were deserting the profession. Economy was in ruins; industrial enterprises could not transfer money to the state treasury because of the lack of currency in circulation. By April 1922, the number of security police cadres had dropped from 34,000 to 18,000. On July 4, 1922, Felix Dzerzhinsky requested the TsK RKP(b) to ensure that GPU personnel receive appropriate financial remuneration and food. Scholars argue that it was a large-scale deportation of Ukrainian intelligentsia that boosted the sagging reputation and revenues of the GPU.²² In this case, interests of the GPU coincided with those of the Communist Party.

Within one month, by August 3, 1922, the GPU in Soviet Ukraine had compiled a list of candidates for deportation. Among seventy-seven members of intelligentsia on the list were Serhii Iefremov and Volodymyr Chekhivs′kyi, who served in the government of the Ukrainian National Republic in the 1920s, and a large number of professors and lecturers from institutes of higher education in Kyїv, Kharkiv, Katerynoslav, and other cities of Soviet Ukraine.²³ The order came from the Central Committee at the Twelfth Conference of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), held on August 4–7, 1922. Grigorii Zinoviev gave a speech about anti-Soviet parties arguing that, under the conditions of the NEP, the Communist Party cannot make political compromises as it did in the economic sphere. Zinoviev argued that repressions were “dictated by revolutionary advisability, with respect to crushing those groups seeking to capture the old positions that were seized from them by the proletariat.”²⁴ The speaker pointed to a targeted group without defining it in ethnic terms.

Legal basis for deportations was established three days after the conference, when the VTsIK issued a decree on August 10, 1922, “On Administrative Exile.”²⁵ This legislative act led to the creation of a special commission to deport “counterrevolutionaries” abroad²⁶ or to distant locales of the Russian SFSR. It was believed that deportation of the intelligentsia from Soviet Ukraine abroad would consolidate anti-Soviet sentiments among the Ukrainian émigré community in the West; thus, the Russian Far North and Siberia became their destinations. In the second half of August 1922, mass arrests of candidates for deportation began. Soviet Ukrainian leaders had to report to Moscow about the progress of the operation in the republic. For this purpose, a secret commission in charge of political censorship was created within the Commissariat of Education to fight petty bourgeois ideology, first headed by Stanislav Kosior, later by Volodymyr Zatons′kyi.²⁷

Scholars argue that the real reason behind deportations of intelligentsia was Bolsheviks’ fear of losing control over society after the introduction of a liberal economic policy which, from their perspective, would inevitably lead to political demands for freedom of speech and thought and eventually an overthrow of the government.²⁸ Deportations of Ukrainian intelligentsia along with suppression of the national liberation struggle, requisitions of church property and gold, purges of Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox clergy, and the trial of Socialist-Revolutionaries—all of these were measures to prevent and suppress any opposition to the Bolshevik regime. Meanwhile, the “Moscow Gold,” a shorthand for looted church jewelry, was used to subsidize revolution and Communist International and conduct intelligence activities abroad.²⁹

Dzerzhinsky’s writings provide further insight into the rationale for targeting intelligentsia. His secret directive No. 333/G, signed on March 16, 1923, stated that the Soviet government was hampered by its 99.9 percent reliance on “old” intelligentsia’s expertise in most of its administrative functions. He proposed practical measures to create a “truly SOVIET” administrative apparatus by purging “old specialists” and exiling them to “colonize the [Russian] North and sparsely populated and devoid of intelligentsia places (Pechora, Arkhangel′sk, Turukhanka).”³⁰ This measure was supposed to kill two birds with one stone: to solve the problem by purging undesirable cadres as well as to intimidate and force the rest of intelligentsia to work diligently for the regime.

Although an ambiguous policy of Ukrainization³¹ was proclaimed in 1923, the rhetoric behind it masked the real goal of removing those who believed in cultural distinctiveness and national statehood, an approach that Iurii Shapoval called “double book-keeping.”³² In November 1923, a secret circular from Moscow instructed its local GPU offices to establish total control over professors, lecturers, and students, their activities in associations, meetings, and publications, by installing a network of informers to report about public sentiments, private comments, and anti-Soviet clandestine activities in Ukraine.³³ Observers called this policy a “mousetrap”³⁴ because a good number of Ukrainians who had immigrated abroad came back to Ukraine in 1925 at the invitation of the Soviet government. Moscow dispatched “Ukrainian diplomats” Iurii Kotsiubyns′kyi and Oleksandr Shums′kyi as representatives of Soviet Ukraine to the largest diaspora centers in Vienna and Warsaw, respectively, to lure Ukrainian émigré scholars and writers, as well as to extradite Symon Petliura and his generals under an “amnesty,” and eventually to put an end to Ukrainian political activities outside the Soviet borders.³⁵ Some contemporary scholars disagree with the “mousetrap” argument.³⁶ They agree, though, that most active members of the nationally conscious intelligentsia lured back to Ukraine later disappeared, were exiled, or executed.

CATEGORIES FOR LIQUIDATION

Classification into categories for liquidation started less than a year after the introduction of the Soviet korenizatsiia policy when in February 1924, in preparation for a crackdown on the Ukrainian intelligentsia, in a secret circular, the OGPU provided instructions for keeping records on “suspected counterrevolutionaries” in Ukraine in three broad categories³⁷:

Political Parties and Organizations

1. All former members of prerevolutionary bourgeois political parties.

2. All former members of monarchical unions and organizations (Black Hundreds).

3. All former members of the Union of Independent Grain Growers (at the time of the Central Rada in the Ukraine).

4. All former members of the gentry and titled persons of the old aristocracy.

5. All former members of the youth organization (Boy Scouts and others).

6. All nationalists of all shades of opinion.

Officials and Employees in the Active Service of Tsarism

1. Officials of the former Ministry of Internal Affairs: all officials of the Okhranka [secret political police], police and gendarmerie, secret agents of the Okhranka and police. All members of the frontier corps of gendarmerie.

2. Officials of the former Ministry of Justice: members of the district and provincial courts, jurymen, prosecutors of all ranks, justices of the peace and examining magistrates, court executors, and heads of county courts.

3. All commissioned and non-commissioned officers, without exception, of the former tsarist army and fleet.

Secret Enemies of the Soviet Regime

1. All former commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted men of the White movements and armies, the Ukrainian Petliurist formations, and various rebel units and bands who actively resisted Soviet rule. People amnestied by the Soviet authorities are not excluded.

2. All those employed in a civil capacity in the departments and local offices of White governments, the armies of the Ukrainian Central Rada, and the Hetman’s state police.

3. All servants of religious bodies: bishops, Orthodox and Catholic priests, rabbis, deacons, churchwardens, choirmasters, and monks.

4. All former merchants, shopkeepers, and “Nepmen.”

5. All former landowners, big land-leasers, well-to-do peasants (who formerly employed hired labor), big craftsmen and proprietors of industrial establishments.

6. All persons having someone among their near relatives who at the present time is in an illegal position or is conducting armed resistance against the Soviet regime in the ranks of anti-Soviet bands.

7. All foreigners, irrespective of nationality.

8. All those with relatives or acquaintances abroad.

9. All members of religious sects and communities (Baptists in particular).

10. All scholars and specialists of the old school, particularly those whose political orientation is undeclared up to this day.

11. All persons previously convicted or suspected of contraband and espionage.

As is evident from these lists, a substantial portion of the population was marked for annihilation. On September 17–25, 1924, the OGPU launched a series of operations, arrested and imprisoned 19,670 opponents of the regime in Soviet Ukraine.³⁸ A secret OGPU instruction of October 1924 drew attention to the growing influence of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The local OGPU officers were instructed to increase the number of secret informers among the faithful and to recruit priests themselves for secret service work in the OGPU.³⁹

In his letter to the TsK RKP(b) on the punitive policy of the Soviet state, Dzerzhinsky outlined basic principles of the policy. He particularly stressed, “Repression cannot be merciful toward the accused and cannot be expensive either: they have to cover expenses for their upkeep with their own labor. They have to be exiled into desolate places with no roads, such as Pechora, Obdorsk.”⁴⁰ These places in the Russian wilderness were to be settled by exiled Ukrainian intelligentsia and expropriated Ukrainian farmers, together with their families in the years to come. By some estimates, by the end of 1932, nearly 2.4 million Ukrainians were exiled to distant places in the Russian Far North and Siberia,⁴¹ but official statistics would not be compiled until 1934, when the VChK–OGPU reappeared in its third incarnation as the NKVD.

Perceived “passivity” of the OGPU during the NEP was temporary. As historian Valentyn Moroz noted, economically prosperous due to the NEP and culturally awakened due to the policy of Ukrainization, the republic presented a threat of political separation from Russia, which would mean a collapse of the communist imperial system.⁴² As a secret OGPU circular of June 1925 instructed, the secret police “should therefore not lose a good opportunity to unmask our enemies, in order to deal them a crushing blow when the time comes.”⁴³

Leading intellectuals, like Hrushevs′kyi, Rudnyts′kyi, Krushel′nyts′kyi, were lured into returning by Bolshevik promises of respectable positions in Soviet Ukraine, whereas TsK KPU(b)U and the OGPU held secret meetings on how to deal with intelligentsia. In May 1925, a closed meeting of the Politburo of TsK KP(b)U heard a report from the OGPU and adopted a resolution to create a commission to examine tactics of dealing with the Ukrainian intelligentsia, especially its Academy of Sciences and Hrushevs′kyi. The OGPU put professor Hrushevs′kyi under surveillance, while focusing on his influential colleague, academician Iefremov, in order to subvert Ukrainian intellectual elites.⁴⁴

In March 1926, a pamphlet “On Ukrainian Society” was circulated among the GPU personnel. In May 1926, Petliura was assassinated in Paris by Samuil (Sholem) Schwartzbard. In August 1926, Metropolitan Vasyl′ Lypkivs′kyi, who headed the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and had been known as “secret propagator of Ukrainian separatism,” was arrested.⁴⁵ In September 1926, another GPU circular “On Ukrainian Separatism” spelled out motives, goals, forms, and methods of fighting against a “tendency to separate Ukraine from Russia.”⁴⁶ In October, five months after Petliura’s murder, a propaganda film was released under an acronym PKP, decoded as “Piłsudski Bought Petliura,” aiming to denounce the Ukrainian national leader as a traitor and Piłsudski’s agent.⁴⁷

Assassination of Petliura was one of the tactics used by Bolsheviks to deal with leading political opponents of the regime during the 1920s. It was a high-profile case since Petliura, leader of the Ukrainian national liberation movement, enjoyed considerable popularity in Ukraine and among émigré communities in the West. Another tactic was to stage a trial of Schwartzbard, Petliura’s assassin, in Paris. Schwartzbard was viewed as an avenger by some and as a Bolshevik agent by others. The trial was meant to mar the reputation of the respected Ukrainian leader in the eyes of the international community and to stir anti-Ukrainian sentiments among the Jewish diaspora.⁴⁸ Lawyers presented several hundred documents as evidence that Petliura’s government, in circumstances of complete anarchy, discouraged and actively prosecuted those of his troops who succumbed to Bolshevik provocations to “Beat the Jews! Save Russia!” and engaged in pogroms against vulnerable Jewish neighbors. These documents did not convince the jurors of his innocence.⁴⁹ Significantly, some Jewish organizations did support the Ukrainian liberation movement, and the Directory did recruit Jewish politicians to work in the government of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic in accordance with its policy of empowering national minorities in Ukraine.⁵⁰ Taras Hunczak⁵¹ of Rutgers University reviewed published sources, written by Ukrainian and Jewish contemporaries, and concluded, “the frequently repeated charge that Petliura was antisemitic is absurd” and “to convict Petliura for the tragedy that befell Ukrainian Jewry is to condemn an innocent man and to distort the record of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.”⁵² The OGPU disinformation planted during the trial permanently besmirched Petliura’s reputation and thwarted the Ukrainian–Jewish cooperation. In Ukrainian folk memory, Petliura’s name became synonymous with the fight for freedom from foreign oppression.⁵³

Petliura was a marked man. He was sentenced to death during the trial of Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1921. The capital punishment was delayed because Petliura escaped arrest and became a fugitive. His political activities in Paris presented an ideological threat to Moscow. Piłsudski’s rise to power in 1926 sealed Petliura’s fate. Stalin would not allow a renewed Polish-Ukrainian campaign against Moscow.⁵⁴ The trial was skillfully managed by Schwartzbard’s attorney Henri Torrès, a communist. Via their embassy in Paris, Bolsheviks supplied necessary documents and witnesses to steer the process toward the desired outcome. Archival evidence substantiates the revelation that the trial in Paris was orchestrated by the OGPU in Moscow.⁵⁵

THE SVU TRIAL

The Bolshevik regime used an arsenal of tools to “reeducate” Ukrainian intelligentsia: arrests, imprisonment, torture, show trials, censure, and “self-criticism.”⁵⁶ A combination of overt public pressure via propaganda campaigns in the mass media and covert psychological pressure aimed at remolding or outright destroying the mentality of Ukrainian intellectual elites. Once categories for liquidation were established, the frequency of publications about foiled conspiracies against the Bolshevik regime increased. From 1927 to 1929, old intelligentsia were labeled “saboteurs,” “anti-Soviet,” and “socially alien elements.” The GPU developed a network of informers in all Ukrainian institutions of higher education: 732 were recruited in 1927, and their numbers doubled to 1,409 a year later, in 1928.⁵⁷ Iurii Sambros recorded in his diary that some of his colleagues at the teacher training institute lost their morality and honesty, and denounced innocent friends or acquaintances in order to survive the next call into the office by a GPU operative.⁵⁸

At the end of 1928, the first explicit Russian interference in the cultural life of Soviet Ukraine began with an attack by secretary of the All-Union Society of Marxist Historians Pavel Gorin on Marxist historian Matvii Iavors′kyi, representative of the regime’s historiography in Soviet Ukraine. Mykola Skrypnyk publicly criticized Iavors′kyi’s book. In an article, published in Pravda on February 10, 1929, Iavors′kyi was accused of treating the history of Ukraine separately from general historical dynamics.⁵⁹ The author, who headed the historical section of the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism, was forced to “correct mistakes.” However, historian’s “self-criticism” was insufficient. Iavors′kyi was expelled from the KP(b)U in 1930, arrested in March 1931 for alleged membership in a fabricated national military organization, and later executed in a labor camp during the Great Terror.

In 1929–1930, parallel to the campaign to suppress rebellions in the countryside, repressions touched all educational institutions. Periodicals manipulated public opinion, planting seeds in the minds of the people that physical annihilation of ideological opponents was justified, thus further intensifying terror. Newspaper headlines, like “Class Enemies in Soviet Schools” or “Enemies Sneaked into Our School,” became ubiquitous. Teachers were profiled for political-ideological loyalty. In Khortytsia, a German Mennonite farmers’ colony in southern Ukraine, every teacher was given a characteristic as either “a Mennonite,” “a teacher of old school,” “not a Soviet teacher,” or “a loyal Soviet teacher.”⁶⁰ Disloyal teachers could lose their jobs; and during famine, to lose a job as a teacher or a principal meant to lose shelter and a possibility of finding a job elsewhere. Ultimately, it meant death by starvation.

In 1929, to discredit pro-Ukrainian intelligentsia and garner support for his “revolution from above,” Stalin authorized repressions against Ukrainian educational leaders and teachers alleged to be members of a nationalist organization. It became necessary to discredit the Ukrainian “bourgeois” intelligentsia in the eyes of workers, the backbone of the Soviet regime, because this intelligentsia had ties to the countryside, the wellspring of Ukrainian national liberation struggle from 1917 to 1921.⁶¹ In April 1929, the GPU allegedly discovered several cells of an underground organization, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Spilka vyzvolennia Ukraïny or SVU).⁶² That same year, the Communist Party launched public attacks against historians Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi and Serhii Iefremov. The press accused both academicians, along with many teachers and their students, of “bourgeois nationalism.” In May, Borys Matushevs′kyi,⁶³ Mykola Pavlushkov,⁶⁴ and his sister, as well as several of their friends, all members of the Union of Ukrainian Youth (Spilka ukraїns′koї molodi or SUM), were arrested.⁶⁵ Among major allegations, the GPU incriminated leaders of the SUM with organizing an “illegal” requiem service in memory of Symon Petliura at St. Sophia Cathedral in 1927, during which 100 leaflets were distributed among attendees.⁶⁶ Pavlushkov’s uncle, academician Iefremov, recorded in his diary that “infanticide” had already started as arrests and searches swept through major cities.⁶⁷

The SVU show trial was conducted in Kharkiv, then the political capital of Soviet Ukraine. In his report, dated December 1, 1929, the head of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR, Vsevolod Balyts′kyi, known as “Ukraine’s guillotine” among the Ukrainian communists,⁶⁸ wrote that the “operation to apprehend SVU collaborators” was carried out in twenty-eight regions, and more than 700 people were arrested.⁶⁹ Eventually, the GPU arrested, deported, or executed more than 30,000 people—intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, and teachers—and publicly tried forty-five of them at the Kharkiv Opera House in spring of 1930 (see Figure 3.1).⁷⁰

Figure 3.1 An overhead view of the courtroom in the Kharkiv Opera House during the trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU), 1930. The accused are seated behind the bar to the right of the OGPU guard. Source: From TsDKFFAU, od. obl. 2-25997.

The GPU scrupulously selected defendants. Kost′ Turkalo, an engineer and associate member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, published a list of convicted persons in the SVU trial in the 1950s,⁷¹ long before the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine allowed scholars access to their case files.⁷² Among forty-five defendants, more than half were teachers of Ukrainian language and history, as well as professors of Institutes of People’s Education (Instytut narodnoï osvity or INO) and their students:

· Serhii Iefremov, 53, son of a priest, former leader of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Federalists, full member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences

· Volodymyr Durdukivs′kyi, 55, son of a priest, former member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Federalists, principal of the 1^st Kyïv Labor School

· Oleksandr Hrebenets′kyi, 55, son of a priest, teacher at the 1st Kyïv Labor School

· Nina Tokarivs′ka, 41, daughter of a priest, teacher at the 1st Kyïv Labor School, former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party

· Iurii Trezvyns′kyi, 43, son of a priest, teacher at the 1st Kyïv Labor School

· Andrii Zales′kyi, 44, son of a priest, teacher at the 1st Kyïv Labor School

· Iosyp Hermaize, 37, professor at the Kyïv Institute of People’s Education (KINO), former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party

· Vsevolod Hantsov, 37, professor of philology at the KINO, former member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Federalists

· Hryhorii Ivanytsia, 37, professor of philology at the KINO, former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences

· Vasyl′ Doha, 43, of peasant descent, professor of the KINO, former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences

· Hryhorii Kholodnyi, 43, son of a high school principal, associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, lecturer at the KINO, director of the Institute of the Ukrainian Language

· Borys Matushevs′kyi, 22, student of the KINO

· Mykola Pavlushkov, 25, son of a priest, student of the KINO

· Mykhailo Slabchenko, 47, graduate of the Military Law Academy, member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, professor of the Odesa INO

· Taras Slabchenko, 25, lecturer at the Odesa Workers’ University, secretary of the Odesa Scientific Association of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (son of Mykhailo Slabchenko)

· Kyrylo Panchenko-Chalenko, 42, lecturer at the Industrial Technical Secondary School in Odesa

· Kostiantyn Shylo, 50, son of a civil servant, head of the editorial department of the Kyïv branch of the State Publishing House, associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, former employee of the Department of Education during the Directory (1919)

· Petro Iefremov, 46, son of a priest, professor of the Dnipropetrovs′k INO (brother of

· Serhii Iefremov, vice-president of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences)

· Liubov Bidnova, 47, daughter of an officer, teacher at the 20th Dnipropetrovs′k Labor School

· Mykola Bilyi, 32, son of a civil servant, teacher in Dnipropetrovs′k

· Mykola Lahuta, 42, former member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, lecturer at the Mykolaïv INO

· Volodymyr Shchepotiev, 49, professor of the Poltava INO

· Iosyp Karpovych, 43, son of a presbyter, former member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists Federalists, teacher at the M. M. Kotsiubyns′kyi School in Chernihiv

Among the defendants were seven teachers, one school principal, two lecturers of technical secondary schools, six professors of INO, and two of their students; among the accused were two women (see Figure 3.2). Most teachers were sons and daughters of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church clergy, who were the educated elite, marked for annihilation. One of the most prominent was Volodymyr Chekhivs′kyi, who had given up politics for theology.⁷³ A third of defendants were from Kyïv; the rest from Poltava, Odesa, Dnipropetrovs′k, Mykolaïv, and Chernihiv “branches” of a fabricated organization. Only five witnesses were called to testify at the trial. Although the defendants’ guilt was never established, the court handed down sentences of three-to-ten years’ imprisonment.⁷⁴ Most of them were executed during the Great Terror or died in labor camps.⁷⁵ One defendant, Borys Matushevs′kyi,⁷⁶ a student, recalled hearing from his interrogator: “We have to put the Ukrainian intelligentsia on its knees, this is our task—and it will be carried out; those whom we do not [put on their knees] we will shoot!”⁷⁷

Figure 3.2 Defendants teacher Nina Tokarivs′ka (first row), writer Liudmyla Cherniakhivs′ka (second row), the former prime minister of the Ukrainian National Republic and leader of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church Prof. V. M. Chekhivs′kyi, and student Borys Matushevs′kyi, during the SVU show trial, 1930. Source: From TsDKFFAU, od. obl. 2-25995.

Methods of the GPU were brutal.⁷⁸ Viktor Petrov recalled:

Every phrase, every move, gesture, and thought is registered. A person is anatomized. A person’s consciousness is anatomized. The anatomized consciousness has become the greatest achievement of Bolshevik justice. . . . It is a frightening system of refined sadism.

After such anatomization, a person during interrogations “maniacally repeated everything that was demanded by the investigator.”⁷⁹ In a letter to the GPU, dated November 14, 1929, Valentin Otamanovs′kyi wrote that he could lose his mind, succumb to psychological torture, and thus sign any testimony.⁸⁰ In his autobiography Moie kaiattia (My Confession), Otamanovs′kyi vividly pictured the GPU method of destroying personality and intellect as crucifixion, gruesome, and humiliating.⁸¹

When Mykola Pavlushkov (pictured in Figure 3.3), a student at the Kyïv INO, was arrested, his uncle Serhii Iefremov noted in his diary, “The Ukrainization of the Narym⁸² territory has begun.”⁸³ Western Siberia was the region for resettlement of the second wave of exiled Ukrainian farmers.⁸⁴ Pavlushkov’s interrogation file contains 260 typed pages. This is a fictitious account of his uncle’s counterrevolutionary activities, drafted in advance by his interrogators, to which a frightened young man affixed his signature. Misled by promises of freedom, the nephew collaborated with the GPU in compiling a case against his own uncle. Trying to save his skin, Pavlushkov informed the interrogators about links of the organization with centers abroad and their preparation for an armed uprising. He even testified about links of his uncle with warlords during the 1918–1919 struggle for the national liberation of Ukraine, although he was a teenager at the time. Apparent contradictions and insinuations in his testimony were “unnoticed” by his interrogators.⁸⁵ His mother believed that he was driven to insanity by interrogators and under hypnosis signed incriminating evidence against others.⁸⁶

Figure 3.3 Defendant Mykola Pavlushkov, student of the Kyїv Institute of People’s Education, talks with defense counsel Semen Ratner during the court proceedings in the SVU trial, Kharkiv, 1930. Source: From TsDKFFAU, od. obl. 2-25994.

Attacks on Serhii Iefremov started in fall of 1928, when in three issues of the newspaper Kommunist, party functionary Andrii Khvylia wrote disparaging articles about the academician.⁸⁷ In November that year, Iefremov recorded in his diary, “In the academy, fortune tellers are trying to predict whether or not I will be exiled.”⁸⁸ On New Year’s Eve, the presidium of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, following a resolution of the TsK KP(b)U, censured Iefremov for “counterrevolutionary activities.” His portrait was taken off the wall in the secretariat of the academy.⁸⁹ In February 1929, Proletars′ka Pravda called Iefremov “a protégé of the kulaks.”⁹⁰ In his diary, Iefremov, the leading Ukrainian academician, recorded instances of a “witch hunt” in schools, where Communist Youth League “cavalry” were spying and denouncing sons and daughters of priests. “Unfortunate proletariat, in whose name all these disgusting things are perpetrated, and unfortunate country, in which spies and informers are ruling. Where it is heading—impossible to guess.” Rightfully, Iefremov anticipated the grim future: “famine is being made in front of our eyes. . . . Along with it, all economic life has fallen into decay.”⁹¹

Several generations from one family were put on trial and annihilated.⁹² Academician Mykhailo Slabchenko was characterized by one of his students to the investigator as follows: “[he] charmed us with his originality, his energy, talent, love for Ukraine, and his European outlook . . . Slabchenko told us that he wanted to raise us as future Ukrainian professors.” His son Taras Slabchenko, a young promising scholar, was as patriotic as his father. According to Ryleiev’s testimony, “Taras Slabchenko talked about the colonial dependence of Ukraine and the need to have an independent budget and the right to use all the republic’s natural resources.”⁹³ In his lectures, Taras Slabchenko tried to teach his students that “the history of Ukraine is a history of a separate people, with distinctive characteristics.” For statements like this, he was charged with “chauvinist indoctrination” because of his expressed desire to instill pride in national history among his students. Defense Attorney Semen Ratner recognized that Ukraine lost some of the best of its intellectual elite, but he crossed this thought out of the final draft of his defense argument.⁹⁴

Public court hearings began on March 9, 1930, Taras Shevchenko’s birthday. Choice of the trial’s opening day was no coincidence. It was meant to strike fear into hearts of every Ukrainian, for whom the Prophet’s call to freedom from tyranny remained sacred. So was the trial’s final day, when the sentencing was read on Easter Sunday under the chiming of church bells, soon to be toppled and recast into bullets to blow the “brain” of the nation. Instead of mass celebration, the GPU initiated mass persecution. Restructuring of the nation’s brain circuitry began. The renaissance, which was underway since the days of the UNR and sustained by ambiguous policy of indigenization that removed barriers to flourishing of the national language and culture, turned into the dark age of executions.

The prosecution’s charges were unbelievable: a small group of well-known intellectuals conspired to topple the Soviet government via an armed uprising. Despite the stamp of “top secret” on the case file, the leading newspaper Visti started publishing excerpts from the final sentencing statement even before the trial ended.⁹⁵ The disinformation campaign unleashed in the press targeted the population in Soviet Ukraine with such insinuations as the admission by defendant Volodymyr Durdukivs′kyi, former principal of Ukrainian Gymnasium No. 1 (renamed Labor School), that he conspired to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders, including Voroshilov and Skrypnyk among others. Durdukivs′kyi was guilty of calling Stalin the “main enemy of the people,” who kept power with “his unconquerable will.”⁹⁶

Two contemporaries, Valerian Pidmohyl′nyi and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, who closely followed press reports, decided to attend one of the hearings because they were convinced that the public was deliberately misled. In his memoirs, Antonenko-Davydovych wrote that his colleague invited him to keep him company on a train to Kharkiv. Their plan of action was to listen to the defendants stoically standing their ground, denying any allegations; then, at an opportune moment in a fit of bravery, the duo would come out on the stage and tell the prosecutors that “the trial is a veiled blow against the Ukrainian intelligentsia” and they would be willing to stand trial alongside their intellectual peers. Antonenko-Davydovych admitted that he and his friend cooled off as soon as they observed how the defendants meekly admitted their guilt, without attempting any vigorous defense.⁹⁷ The diarist did not record, but could hardly fail to notice, that armed GPU guards were put on the stage right behind the defendants, piercing the audience with their glassy eyes, ready to extinguish any spark of opposition or protest.

After the trial ended, on April 28, 1930, the Politburo of the TsK KP(b)U awarded eight GPU investigators with orders of Red Banner for exposing the SVU “counterrevolutionary” and “anti-Soviet” plot.⁹⁸ The case was reopened in August 1989, before Ukraine declared independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and all the defendants were found not guilty. All were innocent of the alleged crimes and rehabilitated, posthumously. After examining the SVU trial proceedings, lawyer Anatolii Bolabol′chenko concluded that not only was the ruling of Stalin’s court prejudiced, but the chief justice,⁹⁹ four state and four public prosecutors, and thirteen defense attorneys barely had time to finish reading all 237 volumes,¹⁰⁰ over 100,000 pages of case files in total, in the twelve days that court was in session. The defense was not effective due to the lack of time to prepare arguments and the fear of appearing too lenient toward “enemies of the people.”¹⁰¹ The outcome of the trial was determined even before it started; thus, its goal was to give the show trial an unmerited aura of legitimacy.

While the show trial was in progress, authorities also instigated a mass campaign to censure the “enemies of the people.” On March 26–31, 1930, Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk announced that, in response to the revelations about the activities of the SVU and the SUM, in many institutes students and professors “demanded the most severe punishment for the fascist agents in Soviet institutes.”¹⁰² Party cells in pedagogical institutes mobilized students to gather at meetings and publicly condemn the SVU for attempting to return Soviet Ukraine to the old bourgeois order, profess their loyalty to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Communist Party, and the GPU as its sentinel. Among them was even Serhii Hrushevs′kyi, professor of the Donets′k INO and a nephew of Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi, Ukraine’s leading historian and head of the government during the national liberation struggle. Both met tragic ends.

Ukrainian publicist Dmytro Solovey, who witnessed the SVU trial and personally knew some of the defendants with whom he shared a prison cell in the 1920s, wrote in his memoirs Golgotha of Ukraine: “When I was listening to radio broadcasts of SVU trial proceedings, I became convinced that the process was not real but staged deliberately according to the GPU plan with all attendant ‘facts’ assembled into a case.”¹⁰³ According to Solovey, Iefremov signed a self-incriminating verdict to save his students from inevitable arrests. This was how a witness justified his conduct. A personal motive to save his beloved wife by signing everything that was demanded of Iefremov had also been in play.¹⁰⁴ The theatrics of the trial diverted public attention in Soviet Ukraine and abroad from the crude methods used by the GPU to physically annihilate leading members of Ukraine’s intelligentsia and to bury aspirations of national liberation once and for all.

The spectacle was staged in the Kharkiv Opera House; thus, in folk wisdom, this show trial was dubbed “opera SVU, libretto GPU.” During preliminary investigations, most of the defendants, with the exception of three, denied all allegations of being members of the underground organization and insisted they were loyal Soviet citizens.¹⁰⁵ SVU trial documents contain no statute of the organization; its contents were reconstructed from the deposition of its alleged leader, Serhii Iefremov. For these reasons, researchers believe the case had been totally fabricated.¹⁰⁶

Shaping of a new elite had to start with blowing out the brain of the old intellectual elite. One of the investigators in the SVU case, Solomon Bruk, cynically told Holoskevych: “How we would love to kill all of the Ukrainians; alas, we can’t. But you, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, we will exterminate to the last.”¹⁰⁷ Durdukivs′kyi recalled that Bruk in his blue GPU uniform “hypnotizes and instills terror in his victims.”¹⁰⁸ Interrogators were relentless. Their victims had to write lengthy “confessions” day after day, often on weekends and holidays. They told their life stories in minute detail, disclosing names and places. When provoked to believe they were betrayed by their comrades, most, including women, withstood the pressure. Eventually, all were forced to sign a verdict dictated to them by their tormentors.

Collectivization, camouflaged under the slogan of class struggle, unraveled in parallel to the SVU trial, because the social basis of the alleged Union for the Liberation of Ukraine was in the countryside. The blueprint for extermination of Ukrainians was set in motion: independent farmers were the social base of the SVU, with the “headquarters” in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, supported by a network of “commanders” from the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and trained “militant terrorists” from the Union of the Ukrainian Youth. Cancerous growth of this process of eradicating Ukraine’s intellectual and spiritual potential had gnawed at the body of the Ukrainian nation for decades.¹⁰⁹

The SVU trial foreshadowed Moscow trials of 1936–1938.¹¹⁰ The SVU and the SUM were the first among fifteen major “underground counterrevolutionary organizations” the GPU “discovered” in Ukraine from 1930 to 1937.¹¹¹ The “discovery” of these organizations led to annihilation of pre-Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia as a group.¹¹² Decades of scholarly accomplishments of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences were wiped out, and research staff were purged.¹¹³ The trial in spring of 1930 and discovery of numerous “counterrevolutionary” groups marked the beginning of the end for Ukrainization. These “superfluous” members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia became a free labor force for industrial projects administered by the OGPU in desolate places scattered along the Arctic Circle and in the Russian Klondike.

LABOR CAMPS

As Felix Dzerzhinsky envisioned, to stimulate the Soviet economy and settle remote places devoid of intelligentsia, punitive policies had to be merciless. Leading opponents of the regime had to be ruthlessly dealt with, and then the rest of society could be turned into slaves fed by the hands of their executioners in order to be forced to behave well. For that purpose, a system of concentration camps was established by the GPU in the 1930s. At first they were located in places where Russian tsars held criminals and political prisoners, like the “Iron Felix,” who spent more than a decade in exile and escaped three times. It was the February Revolution that propelled him from a prison cell in Moscow to the Central Committee as Lenin’s right hand.¹¹⁴ The “Man of Steel,” who became indispensable to Lenin and responsible for the implementation of his directives, known by his nickname as “Comrade Index Card” for his managerial skills, also tasted Siberian exile and knew the informer’s craft first hand.¹¹⁵ The camp system Bolsheviks created would surpass tsarist prisons in scale and cruelty.¹¹⁶ Following is a list of selected labor camps of the OGPU–NKVD established in the 1930s¹¹⁷:

· Baikal-Amur camp (Bamlag), Svobodny, Far Eastern territory, Russia (November 1932–May 1938). Number of prisoners: 3,800 (December 12, 1932). Activity: construction of the Baikal-Amur railway.

· Central Asian camp (Sazlag), Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1930–1943). Number of prisoners: 2,660 (June 1, 1930). Activity: working on farms specializing in cotton and working in cotton-manufacturing plants.

· Far Eastern camp (Dallag), Khabarovsk, Russia (1929–April 1939). Number of prisoners: 9,200 (January 1, 1930). Activities: timber cutting, gold and coal mining, railway construction, fishing and fish processing.

· Kazakhstan camp, Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan (organized in 1930; reorganized as Karaganda camps (Karlag), Karaganda, in September 1931). Number of prisoners: 5,000 (July 1, 1930); 15,000 (April 15, 1931). Activities: timber cutting, agriculture.

· Northeastern camp (Sevvostlag), Nagaevo Bay, Far Eastern territory; Magadan, Khabarovsk territory, Russia (organized in April 1932; reorganized in the early 1950s). Number of prisoners: 11,100 (December 1932). Activities: serving the Dalstroi trust. Dalstroi trust was created in November 1931 to explore and exploit gold deposits along the Kolyma River. From the late 1930s, also specialized in tin production.

· Northern Camps of Special Designation (SLON), Ust-Sysolsk, Komi ASSR; Solvychegodsk (Syktyvkar), Arkhangelsk province, Russia (organized in June 1929; in June 1931 reorganized into Ukhta-Pechora, Ustvymsky, and Temnikovsky camps and the Vaigach OGPU Expedition on the Vaigach Island in the Arctic Ocean). Number of prisoners: 9,250 (October 1, 1929); 49,716 (January 1, 1931). Activities: oil exploration, timber cutting, and highway construction.

· Siberian camp (Siblag), Novosibirsk, Mariinsk, Russia (organized in the fall of 1929; still in operation on 1 January 1960). Number of prisoners: 4,592 (January 1, 1930). Activities: agriculture, timber cutting, road construction.

· Solovetsky camp, Arkhangelsk province and Kem′, Karel-Finn ASSR, Russia (organized in October 1923; reorganized in December 1931 as the White Sea–Baltic Sea camp; separated and re-created in January 1932; merged finally with the White Sea–Baltic Sea camp in December 1933). Number of prisoners: 3,049 (September 1923); 53,123 (January 1, 1930); 71,800 (January 1, 1931). Activities: timber cutting, fishing, consumer goods manufacturing.

· Svirsky camp (Svirlag), Lodeinoe Pole station, Leningrad province, Russia (September 1931–July 1937). Number of prisoners: 47,400 (December 1932). Activities: supplying lumber to Leningrad, producing consumer goods.

· Temnikovsky camp (Temlag), Moscow province, Russia; June 1931–November 1948). Number of prisoners: 25,541 (October 1, 1934). Activities: supplying lumber to Moscow, manufacturing consumer goods.

· Ukhta-Pechora camp (Ukhtpechlag), Chibiu (Ukhta), Komi ASSR, Russia (June 6, 1931–May 1938). Number of prisoners: 13,400 (December 1932). Activities: oil exploration, serving the Ukhta-Pechora trust. Ukhta-Pechora trust of the OGPU–NKVD created in November 1932 to explore and exploit mineral deposits in the Pechora basin (mostly oil and coal), and to perform related work (road and house construction, agriculture).

· White Sea–Baltic Sea camp (Belbaltlag), Medvezh′egorsk, Karel-Finn ASSR, Russia (December 1931–September 1941). Number of prisoners: 107,900 (December 1932). Activities: construction of the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal; from 1933, supporting the White Sea–Baltic Sea OGPU–NKVD industrial complex (servicing the waterway, cutting timber, constructing the Segezh pulp and paper chemical complex, Tulomsk hydroelectric power station, and Monchegorsk nickel complex).

By 1923, Bolsheviks had established the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp in the famous Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery complex.¹¹⁸ From tsarist times, the Solovetsky Monastery was not only a cloister where Orthodox martyrs sought salvation in prayer and fasting but also a place where “criminals” repented for their violations of Russian laws and beliefs. Prisoners were confined in silent cells of the cold, desolate towers of the Solovetsky kremlin.¹¹⁹ Especially “incorrigible heretics” were thrown into dungeons and fed only bread and water. In one such hole under Uspensky Cathedral, from 1775 to 1801, the commander-in-chief of the Zaporozhian Sich Cossacks, Petro Kalnyshevs′kyi, spent the remainder of his life. He was exiled to the monastery by the order of Catherine the Great. Even after Alexander I offered him freedom, the 110-year-old Cossack declined. It is said his only wish was that the tsar built a new prison because the old one was unbearable. Brigadier-General and hero of the Russo-Turkish war Kalnyshevs′kyi died in 1803 at the age of 112, and was buried beside the cathedral wall. All Ukrainian prisoners considered it their sacred obligation to bow their heads before his tomb.¹²⁰

Trains ran to the ill-famed railway station Kem′, with their cargo of prisoners destined for the Solovetsky camp. While on their way, prisoners already sensed the full impact of what awaited them on these death islands, where “a road is long, the heart is heavy, and terror crushes the soul.”¹²¹ Initially, between 1923 and 1927, it was a camp for prisoners of war. They worked mainly for their own upkeep; the terror was moderate as compared to that of the second period. In 1926 and 1927, Ukrainian prisoners were mostly officers of Petliura’s armed forces, Ukrainian clergy, and old (prerevolution) intelligentsia.¹²²

The Solovetsky Islands on the White Sea became known as the “Soviet Union in miniature,”¹²³ a symbol of the whole system where forced labor was an organic part of a new society and every individual was considered property of the state. The Solovetsky camp was followed by the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal camp. Kolyma became the third destination once the system was reaching its maximum expansion, and remained central to it for the next fifteen years.¹²⁴ Prisoners were used to construct highways, build railroads, cut timber, clear land for farming, build high-voltage electric power lines, drill for oil, mine radioactive clay used in the production of radium, mine for coal, build temporary ice roads used in winter for transportation, manufacture bricks, build barracks for themselves and homes for paid employees, process tar, rocks, gravel, mine for salt, repair equipment and instruments, load and unload cargo, work as truck drivers, chefs in the kitchen, and perform other services.¹²⁵ Thus, devoid of intelligentsia desolate places in the Russian Far North and Siberia became settled, and the use of political prisoners as slave labor was institutionalized in the first socialist state.¹²⁶ Students of history are often surprised by this fact and argue “no one could have predicted” such an outcome of Marxist humanist socialism. Actually, anarchists did predict it, long before the socialist revolution: “they thought that a society based on Marx’s ideological principles would produce slavery and despotism.”¹²⁷

A period of “savage lawlessness” in the Solovetsky camp set in during the First Five-Year Plan, when Stalin consolidated his power and launched campaigns to liquidate “all capitalist elements.” Stalin expanded the OGPU apparatus and, with the assistance of a Special Assignment Army of the OGPU, he suppressed rebellions in the villages, dispossessed well-to-do farmers, and exiled them with their families to the Solovetsky Islands. Whereas in 1929, there were six concentration camps in the Soviet Union, by February 1932 their number doubled. In 1929, the nationality and type of prisoners changed; most received ten-year sentences of hard labor. They were nearly all Ukrainian farmers (as “counterrevolutionaries”), Ukrainian clergy, writers, professors, and teachers.¹²⁸

No other camp in Russia had so many songs, verses, and anecdotes composed about it. Songs composed by Hennadii Sadovs′kyi, a graduate of Kyїv University, who used to play them on a bandura, were sung illegally all over Solovky, the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, and Karelia. One song reflected on his service in the Ukrainian Army under Petliura:

Sleep, you unknown,

In moss covered glades!

Sleep, you tortured slaves!

The Solovky pines are whispering

Over the fighters’ graves.¹²⁹

Another of his songs, composed at the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal construction camp, figured as an example of agitation in a trial of members of an organization which was preparing a mass escape of prisoners, but the OGPU could never find out who the author was.

Sentry boxes are asleep at night,

Primeval pine forests moan,

Fires burn on the canal slopes.

It’s we the tortured ones,

Who are sentenced to die,

Crumble the hard granite rock

With our chains.

We are one family,

We’ve become brothers all:

Turkoman, Uzbek, Chechen,

And a sad Georgian,

Son of Ukraine,

Karelian kaimen,*

Udmurt and Czech,

Lithuanian and White Ruthenian

We dig with picks

And pry with crowbars

And send curses

To all torturers . . .

And we the tired ones,

Sentenced to die,

Firmly believe that the time

Of revenge and punishment will come.¹³⁰

* A contemptuous name for Karelians.

Sadovs′kyi spent eight years in the ninth Kem′ branch of the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal camp. Having had a long experience of prison life, he taught others how to behave, how best to obtain a little food, and how to preserve self-respect. But his stoicism had limits: two months after he was put in an isolation cell on the third floor of the ruined Dormition Cathedral, he went insane and was seen pacing behind heavily barred windows of the lunatic ward of Solovetsky hospital.¹³¹

When Stalin decided to settle the account of the rest of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and to liquidate all “unstable elements” of its Communist Party, he inaugurated his new construction project: The White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal. The idea was conceived in February 1931. When the Solovetsky camp was overflowing with Ukrainian insurgents, intelligentsia, and farmers along with dispossessed Kuban′ Cossacks, many prisoners were sent to work on the White Sea–Baltic Sea industrial complex, where over 100,000 of them perished in its construction.¹³² Among those banished to build the canal were Slabchenko and Hermaize of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, as well as the student Pavlushkov. They joined other Ukrainian compatriots who lived among “the despairing, groaning, mocking and crying flotsam of humanity.”¹³³

Unlike the Panama Canal, 80 kilometers long and taking 28 years to complete, or the Suez Canal, 160 kilometers long and taking 10 years to construct, the Soviet White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal, 227 kilometers long, was completed in 1 year and 9 months with the use of timber, sand, and rocks—all without mechanical tools!¹³⁴ It was named after the Great Teacher Joseph Stalin and became the “school for forging active constructors of communism” out of the “incorrigible.” The construction was immortalized in a collective monograph, penned by dozens of prominent Soviet writers in 1934.¹³⁵

The use of a “labor army” was not Stalin’s idea, it was first proposed by Leon Trotsky. The “Man of Steel,” as Stalin’s panegyric goes, designed the route of the canal from the beginning to the ending point.¹³⁶ Was the canal built out of economic necessity to develop Karelian wilderness, overgrown with tall pines, as a potential source of foreign currency on the global timber market? Was it constructed out of necessity to secure the Baltic frontier and open the passage for the Soviet navy to global navigation or trade networks? Local workforce in Karelia was seasonal and unreliable. A possibility of war in the Pacific in 1931 was remote. If the canal was meant as a showcase of Soviet efficiency, the opposite was true. It turned out to be “shallow and narrow” as the designer-in-chief, Stalin, noted.¹³⁷ On opening day, all heavy equipment and even engines had to be taken off submarines which were then hauled through locks and gates.¹³⁸ Crucially, the canal was not included in the original First Five-Year Plan.¹³⁹ Then why was the construction plan pushed through in 1932 and completed in 1933?

The canal project absorbed a new wave of purges following the order, telegraphed on December 14–15, 1932, to Russify all Ukrainian institutions beyond the borders of the Ukrainian SSR and before Postyshev’s arrival to Ukraine on a special assignment from Stalin. Postyshev came to destroy nationalism at the root, which, at that time, was represented not just by Hrushevs′kyi and Iefremov of the Ukrainian National Republic but by Ukrainian communists.¹⁴⁰ All of them ended up in OGPU labor camps, except two, Khvyl′ovyi and Skrypnyk, who committed suicide in 1933.

During this period, the OGPU became its own state within a state, having administrative departments, identical with People’s Commissariats, trusts, highways and railways, as well as civilian and military public works. Old military style divisions of the “labor army” were changed into “phalanx,” “columns,” and “brigades.” Words like “tempo” and “socialist competition” were added to the vocabulary. New prisoners brought to OGPU-run labor camps were Ukrainian farmers, participants in the uprisings of 1929–1932, teachers, writers, poets, scholars, and even students.¹⁴¹ These were not hard-core incorrigible criminals, but political opponents of the regime (sentenced for “counterrevolutionary crimes”), starving villagers who gathered stalks of wheat in the fields (charged with “theft of socialist property”), as well as members of the patriotic Ukrainian intelligentsia deemed “socially dangerous elements.” They accounted for 52.8 percent combined for the three most frequently used articles of conviction as compared to only 7.5 percent convicted for “abuse of power, economic and military crimes” (Communist Party purges) during this period.¹⁴²

The situation for intellectuals from Ukraine became doubly hard in 1936–1937, when prisoners were deprived of even more “rights.” More were thrown into isolation cells. “Fascist” trials were held more often and resulted in longer sentences. All those whose terms had expired were given an additional five to ten years. At the end of 1937, two long trains were convoyed out of the Solovetsky Islands. The first transport was made up of those who formed the major part of political prisoner-slaves, the Ukrainians.¹⁴³ They were among 1,111 from the Solovetsky camp executed in October 1937—shot and buried at Sandarmokh.¹⁴⁴ Among 289 Ukrainians were theater director Les′ Kurbas, writers Valerian Pidmohyl′nyi, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, and Antin Krushel′nyts′kyi with his two sons.¹⁴⁵

Humankind’s best were wasted in concentration camps that consisted of wooden barracks, tents, or dug-outs in the ground, surrounded by a board fence, 10-feet high, secured with barbed wire, with sentry boxes at 55-yard intervals. Twice daily, at 5 in the morning and 7 in the evening, guards made routine checkups, assisted by the foremen with overseers from cultural and medical departments. Sick prisoners were forced to stand outside, in severe cold, for one-and-a-half to two hours. Political prisoners were driven by criminal prisoners with clubs. Beatings were accompanied by obscene curses in Russian. Specially trained dogs tore at victims until they died. Once a month, searches were conducted to confiscate warm articles of clothing, money, and pieces of bread weighing over 18 ounces as a precaution against attempted escape.¹⁴⁶

What historians know about living conditions in these camps can only be gleaned from descriptions and drawings left by camp survivors who managed to escape.¹⁴⁷ Wooden barracks were built to be standard 65 × 22 feet, holding around 150 prisoners. In winter, every prisoner’s “bedding” was covered with snow that blew through holes, and every morning their damp clothing or “bedding” was frozen. The bedding consisted of one cotton quilt and a slipcover for stuffing with shavings and sawdust. These “mattresses” were breeding places for bedbugs. Felt trousers and straw sandals (lychaky) were folded and used as a pillow. Shirts covered the legs, and jackets were used as extra covers.¹⁴⁸ In the evening, prisoners would crowd around a red hot “stove” to dry their wet clothing and footwear made of coarse felt and rubber. Some would take off their shirts in order to burn out lice. A survivor described the scene as follows:

The smoke and soot, the stench from the scorched rubber boots, from the old sweat-soaked coarse felt boots, the steaming foot-rags and tattered clothing taken off dead prisoners, the filthy underwear covered with crushed bed bugs and roasted lice, the continuous expulsion of excess stomach gases, from which the prisoners constantly suffered as a result of eating decayed fish, half-baked rye bread and the “balanda” made from meat refuse such as intestines—all this created the most foul and offensive odor imaginable, repulsive and unwholesome.¹⁴⁹

Clothes were issued to prisoners based on three categories: new garments to heads of different departments, cooks, pantry-keepers, technical workers, engineers, and foremen; clothes in still fair condition to the privileged few; and old clothes, taken off dead prisoners, given exclusively to prisoners assigned to do hard labor. According to OGPU regulations, every prisoner was entitled to a new wardrobe of working clothes every two years: a cotton-lined jacket, an under-jacket and under-trousers, a shirt and trousers, and two sets of underwear. In reality, prisoners wore clothes of the second or third category. The quota for each prisoner to receive footwear included four pairs of straw sandals per year; two pairs of rubber boots a year; and a pair of coarse felt boots every two years. After completing their terms, prisoners were released in the same clothes they worked in. In fact, a jacket and a pair of coarse felt trousers outlasted three or four men.¹⁵⁰ Prisoners wore straw sandals and cheap rubber boots all year round; they often suffered frostbite. Rheumatism and arthritis were prevalent.¹⁵¹

The OGPU supplied prisoner manpower for labor camps. The camp administration classified laborers into four groups:

1. Group “A”: laborers and technical personnel (85 percent) to work in industries, on construction projects, and transportation.

2. Group “B”: concentration camp service personnel (10 percent) to work in camp administration, medical-distribution branch, cultural-educational branch, in the kitchen, laundry, steam bath, stores, and distribution centers.

3. Group “C”: unemployed (5 percent) sick prisoners relieved from work by the medical staff, or prisoners on trains being transferred from one concentration camp to another, or prisoners who refused to work or who were placed in isolation cells or detained in the camp jail while their cases were being further investigated.

4. Group “D”: invalids unfit for work who were slowly coming to an end.¹⁵²

A survivor recalled that the latter were looked upon as useless because they could not be counted on to complete production quotas. Their appearance instilled fear in other prisoners who saw their own possible fate: amputated arms, legs or fingers, severe frostbites, mosquito bites or burns, rotten gums, and permanent blindness. They were on a starvation ration of seven ounces of bread and received no medical aid.¹⁵³ Prisoners daily hauled away half a dozen coffins filled with their skeletons.¹⁵⁴

On a bunk full of bedbugs in a dark cell, in which the sun never shone, with heavy air permeated by the smell of bad tobacco, wet foot rags, pants, and felt boots hanging around, cold and hungry, lived world famous geographer and academician Stepan Rudnyts′kyi. He was in charge of the Research Institute of Geography in Kharkiv, when he was arrested in 1933 and exiled to the Solovetsky camp.¹⁵⁵ In camp, he could not do any physically demanding job, and as an invalid, he was put on a starvation ration. Other Ukrainian prisoners tried to help him, but to no avail. He talked a lot about his numerous acquaintances among European scientists, especially among Germans, about his books translated into foreign languages. He was forbidden to write or have any contact with the outside world.¹⁵⁶ Rudnyts′kyi was among more than 40,000 Ukrainians¹⁵⁷ who went into an exodus following the unsuccessful struggle for national liberation in the 1920s. Why did Bolsheviks lure Rudnyts′kyi from Prague, Czechoslovakia,¹⁵⁸ to Soviet Ukraine in 1926? Did they really want him to establish a new school of Ukrainian geography? What crime did he commit to deserve such cruel and inhumane punishment seven years later? He put Ukraine on the political map of Europe.¹⁵⁹

A similar fate awaited Rudnyts′kyi’s fellow academician, Ukrainian historian and Marxist, Matvii Iavors′kyi. He became a victim of the “pogrom” of Ukrainian historical scholarship in fall of 1929, after the first conference of Marxist historians in Moscow. He was arrested in 1930 and met other Ukrainian exiles in the Solovetsky camp. In camp, he suffered from hunger psychosis. All his fellow countrymen were helping him out by bringing bits of food which Iavors′kyi ate or hid secretly at the head of his bunk.¹⁶⁰ After six months of such “treatment” he somewhat recovered. He always did the hardest jobs and preferred to be left alone. When asked why he was so diligent, Iavors′kyi would bark, “Because I am mad.” When the end of his term was in sight, he wrote a letter to Stalin. This letter was copied and read illegally by all Ukrainian exiles on the Solovky. In his letter, Iavors′kyi declared that he renounced his liberty “as long as Stalin and the Russians are continuing to rule in Ukraine.” When the letter reached the camp administration, he was transferred into an isolation cell. Three weeks later he was informed that his term of imprisonment was extended for another three years. In 1937, both Rudnyts′kyi and Iavors′kyi were executed.

Iosip Hermaize, an ethnic Jew, who authored multiple works on Ukraine’s social and political history, a professor of the Kyïv Institute of People’s Education, secretary of the historical division of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and a close collaborator of Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi, was arrested in 1929 for being a member of the fictional SVU. Despite his declarations that he was a Marxist, he was excluded from the ranks of Marxists at the first historians’ conference. Hermaize was sentenced to five years of camps, released in 1934, and then rearrested in 1937.¹⁶¹ His file contains two protocols of the troika decision. One is laconic: “Heard case No. 12727 and sentenced Hermaize to 10 years in a concentration camp.” Two days later, in December 1937, the same laconic phrase appeared—with case number and not a word about the substance of his crime. He died in the labor camp. State lawlessness was absolute.¹⁶²

The story of Vsevolod Hantsov, professor of the Kyïv Institute of People’s Education, is a reflection of the tragedy of Ukraine’s intelligentsia doomed for extermination. His eight-year Odyssey was about to expire in August of 1937, then extended for another year. In April 1938, he received additional eight years of camps, starvation rations, and lawlessness. More than twenty years of life crossed out for a law-abiding citizen, not a criminal, but rather a scholar of the Ukrainian language and editor of the dictionary of the Ukrainian language. He was exiled because, in the words of the OGPU investigator, the scholar was a “socially dangerous element.” The system marked Hantsov for annihilation. Desperation and pain are palpable in his letter to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Kliment Voroshilov: “The sentencing for my association with the organization, of which I was not a member and which did not even exist, has become the cause of my life’s catastrophe.”¹⁶³

Why is it that in the USSR innocent people get arrested? An answer given to a British reporter, who pulled off an interview with a fairly high-ranking GPU serviceman, was revealing. The man shook with laughter to the point that it was quite a while before he could get his words out to answer the reporter’s naïve but fundamental question: “Of course, we arrest innocent people; otherwise, no one would be frightened. If people are only arrested for specific misdemeanor, all the others feel safe, and so are ripe for treason.”¹⁶⁴ The reporter had stumbled upon the central doctrine of all dictatorial regimes:

[b]y making justice subjective and arbitrary, every citizen can be plausibly arrested and charged at any time, with the result that they live in a permanent state of incipient guilt and fear. They really do feel themselves to be miserable offenders, not just in the eyes of God, but of their earthly rulers as well. Hence the so easily procured confessions which do not need to be invented or extorted, but truly come from the heart.¹⁶⁵

Indeed, totalitarian law had to be vague so that each citizen could be considered a criminal whenever the authorities chose to consider him so.

At the bottom of the social hierarchy, created by the communists, the selection of food on the menu was quite different from a typical intellectual’s daily calorie intake. It included rye flour, barley, dehydrated potatoes, beets, hardly edible salted fish, meat refuse (liver, lungs, and intestines), tallow, sugar, and vegetable oil. Cheap grade tobacco (makhorka) was plentiful for smoking.¹⁶⁶ Food was stored in the open—freezing in winter and rotting in summer. Fresh vegetables, onion or garlic, considered medicine against scurvy, were never given. The menu was short. Breakfast meal: one tablespoon of porridge, or soup made from ground barley, and a mug of hot water. Lunch consisted of balanda (soup made from ground barley or dehydrated potatoes and beets with a little “meat” added) and a small piece of rotten fish, which was kept in open barrels with swarms of maggots. Dinner was a variation of breakfast: soup from barley flour and a mug of hot water. Tallow or vegetable oil, 15 grams per person, was used to cook these meals. Together with makhorka, soap, and tea, these cost two rubles and amounted to about 1,200 calories.¹⁶⁷ Kitchen personnel doled portions out according to special standing or “blat” (ability to bribe). Pleas for more soup were answered with whacks over the head with an iron ladle and obscenities, “Ask the prosecutor, you son . . . , he’ll give you more!”¹⁶⁸

Bread was given according to the amount of work done. It accounted for 80 percent of a prisoner’s diet. For this reason, the administration established a daily ritual of bread rationing. Every evening, when prisoners returned from work, they were given bread according to the percentage of daily norm completed. Political prisoners who did hard labor and completed 91 to 100 percent of daily norm were entitled to 21 ounces of bread daily. Those working on jobs not regulated by quota received 17 ½ ounces. Prisoners who completed 50–70 percent of their daily norm, were given 10 ½ ounces of bread. Prisoners who could not work received 7 ounces. No one received more than two pounds, or a kilogram of bread. It was baked from moldy flour and, according to regulation, only until it was 54 percent done. It contained 20 percent more moisture than fully baked bread, making it heavy and soggy. As a result of consuming half-baked bread, meat refuse, and salty fish, prisoners developed scurvy; their teeth and gums decayed, their limbs became weak; their bodies broke out in dark blotches.¹⁶⁹

Under duress, in an environment that was designed to dehumanize, a daily routine became a form of regimented punishment. Labor camp prisoners worked a full ten hours each day. The only rest day was Sunday, but even then they were ordered outside to be searched. Prisoners worked in brigades with a brigadier appointed by the administration, who supervised the brigade during and after work and was paid by the brigade. For instance, if a brigade of 24 tree cutters cut 7,500 cubic feet of trees, this total was divided among 25 prisoners (including the brigadier), and each was credited with 96 percent of the daily norm. Tree cutting demanded double effort because axes and saws, crosscuts, and bow saws were always dull and chipped. Ten trudging prisoners harnessed as a sled pulled logs along icy roads. Dogs were the drivers, and if a prisoner’s rope slackened, the dogs bit his legs instantly. All dirt had to be moved by spades, picks, crowbars, or heavy wheelbarrows. Boulders and rocks had to be broken with picks and hammers. Gravel was carried to the surface by hand in special containers.¹⁷⁰ The thousands of explosions and millions of kilograms of blown up rocks from the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal could have been used to build seven Cheops pyramids.¹⁷¹

Prisoner wages were determined on a scale based on the type of work and the percentage of daily quota completed. There were only three denominations in camp currency: 50 kopeks, 1 ruble, and 1.50 rubles. To compare, in timbering, cutting trees with a bow saw and sawing them into two-yard lengths, cutting off all branches and piling them, with a daily quota of 15 cubic yards, could earn 59 kopeks per cubic yard. Loading and unloading small freight from barges and carrying it on workers’ backs for a distance of 55 yards, at a daily quota of 17 ½ tons, could earn 47 kopeks per ton. Digging pits in frozen ground, 13-feet deep, with a spade and pick, and hauling it 28–55 yards with a wheelbarrow, 14 ½ cubic yards per day, could earn 61 kopeks per cubic yard. One cubic yard of rocky ground usually weighed 1.15 tons.

To take his thoughts from mindless tasks, Mykola Zerov, a graduate of Kyïv University, professor of literature and founder of the neo-Classicist school, wrote and translated Latin poets into Ukrainian from midnight till 5 in the morning. All his works perished, taken away by overseers during searches. Zerov once was given a shovel and told where and how much ground he should dig up. About noon, the professor was sitting on a rock in a pose of Rhoden’s Thinker.

· – How is today’s quota? You have not even started working?

· – I tried. Don’t you see, I dug about ten times. But, you know, it’s not earth here but rock, and it’s overgrown with some pesky weed. Then, I, my friend, remembered that Latin proverb, which says “One who was not born a hero should not be too hasty to become one” and I sat down to rest.¹⁷²

He was executed at Sandarmokh in 1937, together with other Ukrainian intellectuals.

No mechanical tools were used for building canals or highways, or for loading or unloading freight. Conditions in these so-called “corrective-labor camps,” or “Institutions for the Re-education of the Un-submissive,” as the public knew them, were grueling and led to moral debasement and speedy death.¹⁷³

Prisoners could request the administration to withdraw a sum of their earnings accumulated on their accounts. Those who worked a full month, full ten hours daily and fulfilled their quotas, could cash small sums. Those who reached 100 percent of their quota could get only 10 percent of their wages. Those who fulfilled only 70 percent of their daily quota or less received no cash. An average quota was about 87 percent for the strongest prisoners; only a few brigades were eligible to receive cash. The majority of prisoners never received cash. Thus, in “classless” Soviet society, the prisoner engineer was given 7 rubles per month, whereas a professional engineer working alongside the prisoner engineer on oil projects in Ukhta-Pechora near the Arctic Circle received 1,500 rubles per month, plus a 50 percent bonus for the distant location, plus another 50 percent bonus for the severe climate, thus earning 3,000 rubles per month gross.¹⁷⁴

Construction of the canal was projected to cost 400 million; its actual cost was slightly over 101 million rubles.¹⁷⁵ It was built on the cheap. The difference in pay between a free worker and a slave laborer was at the foundation of socialist economy and the reason behind the success of the Soviet industrialization plan. Some scholars, however, argue that these penal camps always aimed at fulfilling political objectives, but fell short on economic indicators.¹⁷⁶ Such labor camps existed until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Most important, there was no need for the Ukrainian intelligentsia to be “corrected” in these labor camps because they were innocent.

FORCED LABOR

By some estimates, from 1930 to 1938, about 400,000 farmers dispossessed of land and property, clergy deprived of ecclesiastical status, and intelligentsia discharged from employment were deported outside Ukraine, and an additional 530,000 were exiled to “corrective labor” camps—a total of 930,000 forced laborers—563,000 men and 367,000 women.¹⁷⁷ Most of them were killed, starved, or worked to death. George Kitchin, a Finnish businessman who spent four years in OGPU prisons and camps before he was freed from the Solovky with help from the Finnish government, wrote that the rate of mortality for 1929–1930 was 22 percent of the total number of prisoners employed at hard labor in timber camps.¹⁷⁸ In addition to the dead, 20 percent of prisoners became totally disabled and 30 percent partially disabled before completing their terms; the survival rate was 13 percent.¹⁷⁹

Unlike in the United States, where the exploitation of enslaved Africans and immigrant laborers boosted industrial production and propelled the country into the industrial age,¹⁸⁰ in the Soviet Union, development of the industrial economy was managed by the OGPU in labor camps. The OGPU turned into a “vast industrial organization” that herded an enormous mass of forced labor into the harshest sections of the country, where free labor could not otherwise be lured, particularly in the Russian Far North, the Central Asian wilderness, and the more inhospitable sectors of Siberia. Western observer Eugene Lyons described the nature of the institution in 1937 in his memoir:

When the civilian economic authorities could not cope with a particularly difficult industrial task . . . it was taken over by the GPU and administered with compulsory labor by “educational” methods which included brutal beatings, a diet of garbage, a fearsome mortality rate, a regime that shriveled the spirit and withered the body of the victim and degraded the masters no less than the slaves.¹⁸¹

A lot was known in the West about Soviet concentration camps, established under Lenin’s rule in the 1920s, a decade before the first concentration camp appeared in Nazi Germany.¹⁸² Articles about Soviet prisons appeared in the German, French, British, and American press.¹⁸³ In 1926, a Georgian White army officer, S. A. Malsagov, who managed to escape from Solovky, published Island Hell, an account of his experiences in the Solovetsky Islands. In 1927, a French writer, Raymond Duguet, published another book, Un Bagne en Russie Rouge (A Prison in Red Russia), where he accurately described the personalities of guards and the horrors of mosquito torture. A French senator wrote a much-quoted article based on testimony of refugees, comparing the situation in the Soviet Union to the findings of the League of Nation’s slavery investigation in Liberia.¹⁸⁴

After the expansion of camps in 1929 and 1930, however, foreign interest in the camps shifted away from the fate of prisoners, and focused on the economic menace that the camps appeared to pose to Western business interests during the Great Depression. According to the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce’s handbook, published in New York in 1936, the USSR claimed first place in the world with regard to timber resources, its vast forest areas in the Far North and Siberia, being estimated at 950 million hectares (2.35 billion acres)—making up one-third of the world’s total.¹⁸⁵ But at the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan, only about one-third of this area had been brought under exploitation. Thus, steps were taken to utilize these vast timber regions. Total deliveries of timber for industrial purposes increased from 41.1 million cubic meters in 1927–1928 to 99.4 million cubic meters in 1932—an increase of 142 percent.¹⁸⁶ Overall, in the 1930s, the Soviet Union ranked first in output of timber and second after Canada, in timber exports.¹⁸⁷ In 1931, European countries (England, Holland, Germany, France, and Belgium) took 84 percent of Soviet timber exports; England’s share alone ranged from 33 to 40 percent. The only country that prohibited the importation of pulpwood and lumber from the Soviet Union was Canada, on the grounds that Soviet industries employed a forced labor.¹⁸⁸

The timber industry grew out of domestic necessity. The Soviet paper and publishing industries collapsed when timber from forests in Finland became unavailable after the republic attained independence following World War I. The Soviet paper industry was revived in the 1930s, when virgin forests of the Russian taiga were opened to forced settlement. All the timber cutting production was coordinated by the OGPU in concentration camps, euphemistically called “corrective-labor” camps in order to camouflage their true nature: the exploitation of political prisoners as unpaid industrial slaves. Between 1928 and 1930, as many as nineteen such timber felling camps were established within the jurisdiction of the OGPU.¹⁸⁹ Living on a starvation diet, thousands of exiled Ukrainian intelligentsia and farmers were forced to cut timber at quotas beyond their physical strength.

The recovery of paper production led to a substantial increase in the publishing of school textbooks and reading materials for the liquidation of adult illiteracy, as well as various other educational resources for specialized secondary and higher educational institutions. Sadly, most of these publications were full of political propaganda. “Perhaps, there has never been a regime more voluminous than Bolshevik, when it comes to distributing basic political information about its activities and publicizing speeches of politicians of primary and secondary levels of importance,” noted a German scholar of the revolution’s impact on Soviet culture.¹⁹⁰

In Britain and the United States, pressure grew for a boycott of cheaper Soviet goods produced by forced labor. The British Labor Party opposed a ban on Soviet goods because of its concern for their socialist brethren and suspicion of the motives of companies promoting it.¹⁹¹ In the United States, however, the American Federation of Labor came out in support of a boycott. The United States Tariff Act of 1930 (section 307) prescribed that “All goods . . . mined, produced or manufactured . . . by convict labor and/or forced labor . . . shall not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States.”¹⁹² On that basis, the U.S. Treasury Department banned the import of Soviet pulpwood and matches.¹⁹³ Although the U.S. State Department failed to support the ban, which lasted only a week, discussion of the issue continued.¹⁹⁴ On May 18, 19, and 20, 1931, The Times of London printed a series of articles on forced labor in the Soviet Union, concluding with an editorial condemning the British government’s recent decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.¹⁹⁵

American Marxists in 1933 argued that surplus value extorted from laborers under capitalism, no matter how much it may seem to be the result of free labor, in essence was no different from forced labor. They quoted Marx, who proclaimed in the first volume of his Capital that “hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but, . . . the most natural motive to industry and labor.” Comparing capitalism in every country facing financial bankruptcy and speedy industrialization of the socialist USSR under the “stimulus” of the First Five-Year Plan, Walter Wilson concluded,

The fact that the producers, the workers, are deprived of the means of production, creating the whiplash of hunger, lies at the very basis of capitalism. In the Soviet system of economy there can be no hunger in this sense, as under this system all the means of production belong to the producers themselves. Here the stimulus to labor is to produce goods for the satisfaction of human needs and not for the profit of an exploiting class.

…

While the capitalist world is hopelessly stuck in the mud of an international crisis, the Soviet Union has no unemployment and marches ahead.¹⁹⁶

Walter Wilson’s theoretical contemplations on the merits of socialism over capitalism were penned while millions of Ukrainians were starved to death. The “facts” used by Wilson to support his arguments were borrowed from reports by Walter Duranty, New York Times correspondent in Moscow.¹⁹⁷ Wilson, who published his rebuttal to charges of the use of forced labor in the Soviet Union in 1933, like John Marin, the artist who painted Study, New York, 1934 (see Figure 3.4), expressed his belief in the inevitable failure of capitalism and his hope for a bright future of socialism—just as Stalin predicted.

Figure 3.4 Study, New York, 1934 by John Marin (1870–1953). Oil on canvas, 22 × 28 in. (55.9 × 71.7 cm). Source: From The de Young Museum, American Art Fund, 2002.139.

When Lenin died a decade earlier, in 1924, the communist Daily Worker portrayed with almost religious fervor its conviction—and the conviction of most American leftists—that the light of Lenin’s revolution, the “Soviet star of hope,” would continue to illuminate and inspire the world.¹⁹⁸ “The building of the Russian myth required no Machiavellian propaganda tricks,” noted Eugene Lyons in his Assignment in Utopia. “The outside world in depression years had need of it as a fixed beacon in the storm of doubt.”¹⁹⁹ In the face of Nazism, it indeed seemed like the only hope for humanity. Having observed Stalin’s government policies for two years since opening of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote a dispatch to the secretary of state, offering his assessment of the future:

There is genuine admiration in the Soviet Union for American technical efficiency and there is full realization of the fact that the Communist movement in the United States is still completely impotent; but it is believed that the people of the United States will not have sufficient political sense to cope with the problems of the productivity of the modern machine and modern agriculture and that after a series of recoveries and crises the United States too will fall (or rise) into the “heaven” of Communism.

To summarize: The aim of the Soviet Government is and will remain, to produce world revolution. The leaders of the Soviet Union believe that the first step toward this revolution must be to strengthen the defensive and offensive power of the Soviet Union. They believe that within ten years the defense position of the Soviet Union will be absolutely impregnable and that within 15 years the offensive power of the Soviet Union will be sufficient to enable it to consolidate by its assistance any communist government which may be set up in Europe. To maintain peace for the present, to keep the nations of Europe divided, to foster enmity between Japan and the United States, and to gain the blind devotion and obedience of the communists of all countries so that they will act against their own governments at the behest of the Communist Pope in the Kremlin, is the sum of Stalin’s policy.²⁰⁰

Ambassador Bullitt’s insightful predictions were received in Washington on August 2, 1935, two years after the truth about the millions of deaths from the genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine was swept under the rug and the United States granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.²⁰¹

Similar to other cases of genocide, Ukrainian intelligentsia became the first target for liquidation. Their trials and tribulations lasted from the 1920s through the 1930s, increasing in scope—until all vestiges of Ukrainian aspirations to achieve sovereignty vanished. In the 1920s, deportations of ideological opponents did not solve the problem. The solution came at the confluence of economic necessity to build the first socialist state and the punitive use of political prisoners as slave laborers. As Leszek Kołakowski noted, the Soviet variety of totalitarianism converted people into slaves, thus, bearing certain marks of egalitarianism.²⁰² The OGPU operation to liquidate “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism,” which officially started in November 1932 under the guise of yet another “grain procurement campaign,” had been a decade in the making. Those intellectuals who were candidates for deportation in 1922 were sitting on the court bench in 1929 as defendants in the SVU trial. The old generation patriotic elites had to give way to Soviet cadres. In 1933, a process of crushing the backbone of Ukrainian society was accomplished by genocidal famine. Support for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union grew during the Great Depression, when liberal ideals were challenged by the rise of totalitarian regimes.

NOTES

1. Lemkin, “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine,” 3.

2. “Arrest of Teachers Prompts Nationwide Protests,” in Oath and Opposition: Education under the Third Reich (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016), 12–14, https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20160229-Oath-and-Opposition.pdf.

3. Grigoris Palak’ean, Le Golgotha arménien: de Berlin à Deir-es-Zor (La Ferté-sous-Jouarre: Le Cerle d’Écrits Caucasiens, 2002), 87–94.

4. Koliastruk, Intelihentsiia USRR u 1920-ti roky, 166, 174; Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations,” 420.

5. Arendt, “Ideology and Terror,” 131.

6. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 178.

7. Viktor Adams′kyi, “Deportatsiia ukraïns′koï intelihentsiï v konteksti stanovlennia totalitarnoho rezhymu,” Rozbudova derzhavy, no. 8 (1996): 41.

8. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 178.

9. Katerynoslav was named after Catherine the Great in 1784, when the Russian empress annexed Cossack lands and opened the territory for settlement by German farmers. In 1926, the city was named Dnipropetrovs′k after Hryhorii Petrovs′kyi, chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union. In 2016, the last name of the Soviet Ukrainian leader was dropped. The city is currently named Dnipro after the largest river in Ukraine. It is the fourth largest city, known as an industrial and “space exploration capital” of Ukraine.

10. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 178.

11. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 45, ark. 208; spr. 1471, ark. 107.

12. Iurii Fel′shtinskii, ed., VChK-GPU: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Izd-vo gumanitarnoi literatury, 1995).

13. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 179.

14. In 1921, the Communist Party in Soviet Ukraine established departments of agitation and propaganda following Lenin’s speech at the Tenth Party Congress. Propaganda sections within these departments were in charge of schools and institutes. Regional Communist Party cells strengthened the “headquarters of the cultural revolution” by controlling local education authorities and recruiting communists into teaching and administration. In 1921, the Donets′k regional People’s Commissariat of Education had 123 communists, Poltava—87, Chernihiv—56, Katerynoslav—45, Volyn′—37, Mykolaїv—39, and Podil′s′kyi—42. See TsDAVOU, f. 166, op. 2, spr. 514, ark. 39.

15. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 6, spr. 29, ark. 98; see English translation in Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 179–80.

16. Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 23.

17. On the Red Terror and the history of the Soviet political police, see George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

18. Vitalii Iurchenko, Shliakhamy na Solovky (iz zapysok zaslantsia (L′viv: Vyd-vo “Chervona kalyna,” 1931), 85–87; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 131.

19. On April 9, 1921, a decree issued by the Central Commission to Combat Desertion at the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, signed by Christian Rakovsky and Mikhail Frunze, military commander of the armed forces of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea at the time, included instructions on taking hostages in districts where insurgents were active and where local population supported rebels. See DAVO, f. R-925, op. 8, spr. 56; quoted in L. L. Misinkevych, “Zakonodavchi zasady represyvnoï polityky radians′koï vlady v Ukraïni v 20–30-ti rr. XX stolittia,” Universytets′ki naukovi zapysky, no. 1 (45) (2013): 6.

20. V. Vasyl′iev, “Politychni represiï na Vinnychyni, 1918–1980-ti roky,” in Reabilitovani istoriieiu. Vinnyts′ka oblast′, ed. V. Vasyl′iev, P. Kravchenko, and R. Podkur (Vinnytsia: DKF, 2006), 9–92; quoted in Misinkevych, “Zakonodavchi zasady,” 6.

21. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 180. For the ideological roots of political repressions and the role of the chief prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, see Arkadii Vaksberg, Tsaritsa dokazatel′stv: Vyshynskii i ego zhertvy (Moscow: AO “Kniga i biznes,” 1992).

22. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 180.

23. TsDAVOU, f. 4, op. 1, spr. 50, ark. 262; see also Misinkevych, “Zakonodavchi zasady,” 7.

24. Adamsky, “The Deportation of the Ukrainian Intelligentsia,” 180–81; Koliastruk, Intelihentsiia USRR u 1920-ti roky, 175.

25. “Ob administrativnoi vysylke: Dekret VTsIK ot 10.08.1922 g.,” Izvestiia VTsIK, August 12, 1922. For a full text of the decree, see http://old.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/document/deport/dekret.htm.

26. For a discussion of the center’s attitudes toward Ukrainian intellectuals, see Danylenko, Ukraïns´ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 19–20; see also Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine,” 424.

27. Kas′ianov, Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia 1920kh–30kh rokiv, 28.

28. Koliastruk, Intelihentsiia USRR u 1920-ti roky, 174–75.

29. Bolsheviks had limited access to world financial markets and used confiscated church gold and jewels as a way to subsidize foreign communists. According to documents reproduced in The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), John Reed, one of the founders of the American Communist movement, had been given valuables worth over 1 million rubles. Finnish security police captured him and confiscated a large quantity of diamonds in his possession when he attempted to return secretly from Russia to the United States via Finland in 1920. See John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 72–73.

30. TsOA KGB, f. 2, op. 1, ed. kh. 1, l. 10–15; reprinted in F. E. Dzerzhinsky – rukovoditel′ VChK–OGPU: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (1918–1926 gg.), eds. N. S. Zakharov, P. G. Grishin, and A. V. Prokopenko (Moscow: Nauchno-izdatel′skii otdel, 1967), 120–21. The author located the document in HDA SBU, f. 13, od. zb. 603 with the assistance of the archive’s director Andrii Kohut.

31. Giuseppe Perri, “Korenizacija: an Ambiguous and Temporary Strategy of Legitimization of Soviet Power in Ukraine (1923–1933) and Its Legacy,” History of Communism in Europe, no. 5 (2014): 131–54. Francine Hirsch defined Soviet nationality policy to be “by its nature both a creative and a destructive process.” See Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (2002): 42.

32. Shapoval, Ukraïna 20–50-kh rokiv, 26.

33. Danylenko, Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 21.

34. This observation is supported by contemporaries as intimated by the father of Mykola Kotcherha, who was singing in a folk choir and traveling from villages to towns to perform Ukrainian choral music in concerts (personal communication, September 19, 2019). Mykola Kotcherha is president of the Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation in Chicago, Illinois.

35. See V. Naddniprianets′, Ukraïns′ki natsional-komunisty: ïkh rolia u vyzvol′nii borot′bi Ukraïny 1917–1956 rr. (Munich: Political Section of the Ukrainian National Guard, 1956), 23.

36. Arkhireis′kyi and Chentsov, “Antyradians′ka natsional′na opozytsiia,” 30.

37. The top secret circular of February 1924 was signed by the Chief of the Lubny Okruh OGPU Section Dvianinov and Chief of Counterespionage Section Zhukov. The English translation of the circular was published in the Ukrainian Review (London) in 1958 (issue 6, 149–50) and reprinted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 71–72.

38. Arkhireis′kyi and Chentsov, “Antyradians′ka natsional′na opozytsiia,” 30.

39. Ukrainian Review, no. 6, 153; quoted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 210.

40. TsOA KGB, f. 2, op. 2, ed. kh. 85, l. 56–57; first published in the journal Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 1 (1958): 23–24; reprinted in F. E. Dzerzhinsky – rukovoditel′ VChK–OGPU, 133. The document is located in HDA SBU, f. 13, od. zb. 603.

41. Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 163.

42. Valentyn Moroz, “Nationalism and Genocide: The Origin of the Artificial Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine,” The Journal of Historical Review 6, no. 2 (1985): 207–20.

43. Ukrainian Review, no. 6 (1958): 156; quoted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 71.

44. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi i GPU-NKVD, 131, 133–34.

45. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 210–11.

46. Danylenko, Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 25. For the analysis and the text of the document, see Yuri Shapoval, “‘On Ukrainian Separatism’: A GPU Circular of 1926,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18, no. 3–4 (1994): 275–302.

47. The transcript for the movie was written by Heorhii Stabovyi and Iakov Livshits in 1926. Balyts′kyi forced to cut the movie, giving as a reason that GPU methods could be revealed. A film poster, designed by A. Finohenov, depicts the Red Cavalry in pursuit of surviving soldiers of Iurko Tiutiunnyk’s army. In the center of the poster, Hryhorii Kotovs′kyi crosses off a golden Trident on a blue background with his sword. The image amplifies the concept that Bolsheviks in Ukraine are successors of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). See Lubomyr Hosejko, Ukrainian Film Poster of the 1920s: VUFKU (Kyïv: Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center, 2015), 19, 21, 34–35, 39, 58–59. See the film poster at https://vufku.org/lost/p-k-p/.

48. Serhii Lytvyn, “Vbyvstvo S. Petliury i GPU: Do istoriohrafiï problemy,” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, no. 2/4 (13/15) (2000): 404–7.

49. Arnold Margolin, The Jews of Eastern Europe (New York: T. Seltzer, 1929), 139; Iurii Kul′chyts′kyi, “Symon Petliura i pohromy,” in Symon Petliura: Zbirnyk studiino-naukovoï konferentsiï v Paryzhi (traven′ 1976), ed. Wolodymyr Kosyk (München-Paris: Ukrainian Free University, 1980), 138, 142–44, 151, 155.

50. For a study debunking the myth of Ukrainian government’s anti-Semitism during the short-lived existence of the Ukrainian National Republic, see Taras Hunczak, Symon Petliura and the Jews: A Reappraisal (Toronto: Ukrainian Historical Association, 1985).

51. Taras Hunczak, professor of Soviet, Russian, and East European history at Rutgers University, is the editor of Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution (New Brunswick, 1974); The Ukraine, 1917–1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Ukraine and Poland in Documents, 1918–1922, 2 vols. (New York, 1984); and others.

52. Hunczak, Symon Petliura and the Jews, 32–33.

53. Ethnographers recorded a dozen songs that depict Petliura as a folk hero similar to Robin Hood. An epic poem (duma) was composed in memory of Petliura. It became popular among the blind kobzars of left-bank Ukraine. See K. Danylevs′kyi, Petliura v sertsiakh i pisniakh svoho narodu (Regensburg: Filiia Tovarystva ukraïns′kykh politychnykh v’iazniv z Regensburga, 1947), 3, 8.

54. Lytvyn, “Vbyvstvo S. Petliury i GPU,” 404–7.

55. Shapoval, Liudyna i systema, 96–107.

56. S. I. Drovoziuk, “Bil′shovyts′ki tekhnolohiï ‘perevykhovannia’ ukraïns′koï intelihentsiï u 20–30-kh rr. XX st.,” in Naukovi zapysky Vinnyts′koho derzhavnoho pedahohichnoho universytetu im. M. Kotsiubyns′koho, ed. P. S. Hryhorchuk (Vinnytsia: VDPU, 2006), 196.

57. Danylenko, Ukraïns′ka inteligentsiia i vlada, 21, 25, 27, 29.

58. HDA SBU, f. 6, spr. 68805-FP, zoshyt no. 6, ark. 953–1052.

59. Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 383–97.

60. DAZO, f. 3666, op. 1, spr. 427, ark. 30–32; quoted in Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 247. See also Colin Peter Neufeldt, “Collectivizing the Mutter Ansiedlungen: The Role of Mennonites in Organizing Kolkhozy in the Khortytsia and Molochansk German National Districts in Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” in Minority Report: Mennonite Identities in Imperial Russia and Soviet Ukraine Reconsidered, ed. Leonard Friesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 211–59.

61. Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Stalin’s ‘Great Breakthrough’ and the Trial of the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine” (paper prepared for the conference, “Ukraine under Stalin, 1928–1939,” at the University of Toronto, March 2–4, 1990), 14.

62. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny.”

63. V. I. Pryluts′kyi, Molod′ Ukraïny v umovakh formuvannia totalitarnoho ladu (1920–1939) (Kyïv: Instytut istoriï Ukraїny NAN Ukraїny, 2001), 214.

64. Mykola Pavlushkov, a student at Kyïv Institute of People’s Education and a nephew of Serhii Iefremov, was denounced in the press for allegedly organizing the SUM in 1925 with the goal to establish an independent democratic Ukrainian republic. See “Pokyd′ky radians′koho studentstva (Zamist′ obvynuvachuval′noho slova na protsesi ‘SVU’ ta ‘SUM’),” Student revoliutsiї no. 9 (1930): 1–7; quoted in Komarnits′kyi, Studenty-pedahohy, 552.

65. Danylenko, Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 559.

66. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraïny,” 112.

67. Iefremov, Shchodennyky, 752, 765–66.

68. Serhii Bilokin′, Masovyi teror iak zasib derzhavnoho upravlinnia v SRSR (1917–1941 rr.): dzhereloznavche doslidzhennia, vol. 1 (Kyïv, 1999), 574.

69. Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 248; Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 131.

70. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraïny,” 44; see also Shapoval, “The Case of the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’,” 161. Iu. I. Shapoval, “Spilka vyzvolennia Ukraïny” (“SVU”), in Entsyklopediia istoriï Ukraïny, ed. V. A. Smolii et al. (Kyïv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2012), vol. 9, 752, http://history.org.ua/LiberUA/978-966-00-1290-5/978-966-00-1290-5.pdf.

71. Kost′ Turkalo, “Sorok p’iat′: Spohady z sudovoho protsesu SVU 9.3–20.4.1930 roku,” Novi dni (Toronto), no. 34 (November 1952), 4–8, 29–30; no. 35 (December 1952), 7–9; no. 38 (March 1953), 9–11; no. 39 (April 1953), 8–9.

72. K. Turkalo, “List of Convicted Persons in the SVU Trial,” in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 316–20. The age of each of the defendants was confirmed by the author with their biographical data from interrogation protocols in HDA SBU, fond 6, op. 67098-FP, spr. 215471, vol. 2, ark. 280–88.

73. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 211.

74. Shapoval, “The Case of the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine’,” 160.

75. After a protest was submitted in connection with the SVU case, a resolution handed down by the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR on August 11, 1989, closed the case because of insufficient evidence of a crime in the actions of the defendants, all of whom were fully rehabilitated. See “Protest,” Literaturna Ukraïna, August 31, 1989; quoted in Shapoval, “The Case of the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine,’” 163.

76. In May, Borys Matushevs′kyi during the first interrogation denied that he was a member of a “counterrevolutionary” organization; he insisted that he had always supported Soviet policies. After Solomon Bruk “worked” with him on the case, in October the student wrote a fifty-six-page “penitent confession” about his “nationalist counterrevolutionary worldview.” See Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 74–75.

77. Sniehir′ov, Naboï dlia rozstrilu, 110; quoted in Shapoval, 157–58; see also Applebaum, Red Famine, 99.

78. For a detailed discussion of interrogation techniques and the use of torture to confirm nationalist charges, see Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine,” 428–31. See also Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 119–25.

79. Mykhailo Orest, “Bezsmertni”: Spohady pro M. Zerova, P. Filipovycha i M. Drai-Khmaru (Munich: Instytut literatury im. M. Oresta, 1963), 310; quoted in Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 419. See also memoir written by Viktor Petrov, Ukraїns′ki kul′turni diiachi URSR 1920–1940 – zhertvy bil′shovyts′koho teroru (New York: Prolog, 1959).

80. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 426. For an eyewitness account of the use of mind-altering narcotics during interrogations to induce compliance, see Oleksa Buzhans′kyi, “Za hratamy GPU-NKVD,” Svoboda, no. 297–98, December 1950; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraїny, 127–28.

81. V. D. Otamanovs′kyi, “Moie kaiattia,” Podil′s′ka starovyna: naukovyi zbirnyk na poshanu vchenoho i kraieznavtsia V. D. Otamanovs′koho, ed. V. A. Kosakivs′kyi (Vinnytsia, 1993), 24, 27.

82. In 1930, according to the OGPU circular No. 5, nearly 6,556 Ukrainian families, or a total of 23,985 family members, were resettled in a newly created territory of Western Siberia. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. R 374, op. 28, spr. 4055, ark. 44. For estimated numbers of Ukrainian farmers and their families forcibly resettled to other regions with harsh climates to mine for gold and work on industrial projects in the Russian Far North, Urals, Siberia, Yakutia, and Kazakhstan, see I. V. Rybak, “Deportatsiia rozkurkulenykh selian druhoiï katehoriï z Ukraїny u 1930 rotsi: masshtaby, kharakter, naslidky,” Naukovi pratsi Kam’ianets′-Podil′s′koho natsional′noho universytetu imeni Ivana Ohienka. Istorychni nauky, no. 22 (2012): 329–30, http://nbuv.gov.ua/UJRN/Npkpnu_2012_22_31.

83. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 416.

84. Forced resettlement of Ukrainian dispossessed farmers and their families was conducted in four waves. Children between ages ten and fourteen were separated from their parents and returned to Ukraine, where they were placed in orphanages or joined the ranks of homeless. Children younger than eight or nine, who were not separated from their parents, died of frostbite and hunger on route or in the settlements. See Iu. G.-G. (Gorlis-Gors′kyi), Ave Dictator (L′viv: Ukraïns′ke vyd-vo, 1941), 5–6, 30; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraїny, 163–64.

85. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 72.

86. Danylenko, Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia i vlada, 596.

87. A. Khvylia, “Pid akademichnym zabralom,” Komunist, 1928.

88. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 418.

89. When a decade earlier, on March 25, 1919, the ChK arrested Serhii Iefremov as the former member of the Central Rada, the general assembly of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences appealed to the People’s Commissar of Education Volodymyr Zatons′kyi to set him free. On March 31, 1919, the president of the Academy Volodymyr Vernads′kyi also sent a personal letter of appeal to Zatons′kyi with the request to free Iefremov. In 1929, the atmosphere was different, and Iefremov’s colleagues and students shunned him.

90. Proletars′ka Pravda, February 6, 1929; cited in Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 418.

91. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 418–19.

92. For biographical sketches of Ukrainian, Polish, and German teachers in Ukraine as victims of political terror, see Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny.

93. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 422.

94. Ibid., 423.

95. Ivan Il′ienko, “Oskarzhuie istoriia,” in Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 413. Visti, a newspaper of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, started publishing excerpts from the SVU case file on February 21, 1930. That same day the newspaper published a complete text of the speech, “Shkidnytstvo ‘chystoї’ nauky: Kontrrevoliutsiina robota v Ukraïns′kii Akademiï nauk,” presented by O. Rykov, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, who spoke to engineers and scientists five days earlier in Moscow.

96. Visti, March 1, 1930; quoted in Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 413.

97. Antonenko-Davydovych, “SVU,” 42, 45.

98. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 6, spr. 184, ark. 87; see also Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 91; Bilokin′, Masovyi teror, vol. 1, 583.

99. The Chief Justice presiding over the SVU trial Anton Prykhod′ko (a former Borot′bist), one of the leading public prosecutors Panas Liubchenko (also a former Borot′bist), Prosecutor General Mykhailo Mykhailyk (real name Iosyp Abramovich), and Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR Lev Solomonovych Akhmatov were executed a decade later during the Great Terror in 1937–1939. For documentary clips and a summary of the SVU trial proceedings, see “Sprava SVU: iak bil′shovyky nyshchyly ukraïns′ku intelihentsiiu,” Istoriia bez mifiv, August 5, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEkUbQ5PQVU.

100. All 237 volumes of case file 67098-FP in Fond 6 are available at the HDA SBU for scholars to study. As Serhii Bilokin′ pointed out, historians tend to mystify state archives. He cautioned that materials preserved in the archives have been carefully selected to represent historical events; thus, they may or may not reflect the reality objectively. The most sensitive records were never stored. The records have never been complete either; they were purged systematically. See Serhii Bilokin′, Novi studiї z istoriї bol′shevyzmu (Kyïv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2006), 339–40.

101. Anatolii Bolabol′chenko, “SVU: sud nad perekonanniamy,” Vitchyzna, no. 11 (1989); quoted in Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 414.

102. M. O. Skrypnyk, Novi liniï v natsional′no-kul′turnomu budivnytstvi (Kharkiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukraïny, 1930), 52.

103. Solovey, Golgota Ukraїny, 122–23.

104. In 1992, Tetiana Il′chenko wrote a letter to the newspaper Rada, stating that she had known Iefremov when she was a child. At that time, he was living at the home of Volodymyr Durdukivs′kyi, whose sister Onysia was Iefremov’s wife. During the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, Il′chenko and her mother paid a visit to Onysia, who told them that Iefremov had been threatened. The investigators threatened that his wife would be arrested if he did not sign the papers that they were demanding. See Rada, March 27, 1992; quoted in Shapoval, “The Case of the ‘Union for the Liberation of Ukraine,’” 166.

105. HDA SBU, spr. 67098-FP, vol. 1A, ark. 425. Those who under pressure admitted their “guilt” included Zinovii Morgulis, a lawyer; Mykhailo Slabchenko, academician, professor of the Odesa INO; and Volodymyr Strashkevych, associate member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

106. Bilokin′, Novi studiї z istoriї bol′shevyzmu, 600. Pavlushkov’s sister, who later married one of the GPU interrogators, claimed on the pages of diaspora periodicals that the SVU did exist as an underground organization. See Natalia Pavlushkova, “Pravda i provokatsiia (do 40-richchia sudu nad SVU-SUM),” Misiia Ukraїny (published by the Association for the Liberation of Ukraine in Brooklyn, NY, and Toronto, Canada), no. 3 (26) (1970): 1–4; and “Pravda i provokatsiia,” Misiia Ukraїny, no. 1 (28) (1971): 10–13.

107. Il′ienko, “Oskarzhuie istoriia,” in Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 415.

108. Ibid.

109. Repressions against nationally conscious Ukrainians continued throughout the 1950s, when nationalist fighters from western Ukraine were exiled to concentration camps. The harassment of dissenters and human rights activists, among them Ukrainian poets, writers, and teachers charged with “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” lasted throughout Khrushchev’s “Thaw” in the 1960s and the dissident movement of the 1970s, when the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was established, all the way to Gorbachev’s perestroika. The last Ukrainian political prisoners were released from prison camps in 1991. Many died in exile. The survivors were rehabilitated in 1991. See Vasyl′ Ovsiienko, Svitlo liudei: Spohady-narysy pro Vasylia Stusa, Iuriia Lytvyna, Oksanu Meshko (Kyïv: URP, 1996) and Osyp Zinkewych, ed., Ukraïns′ka Hel′syns′ka Hrupa, 1978–1982: Dokumenty i materialy (Toronto: V. Symonenko “Smoloskyp” Publishers, 1983).

110. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 160–61.

111. For a list of the organizations, see Hryhory Kostiuk, Stalinist Rule in the Ukraine: A Study of the Decade of Mass Terror (1929–1939) (New York: Praeger, 1960), 85–86.

112. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 162–63.

113. A catalog of publications of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (founded in 1918, dissolved in 1929, and absorbed into the Academy of Sciences of the USSR) included 286 pages, listing 300 volumes of scientific studies, and 888 scientific publications compiled by 1,800 research associates. Six volumes of a Russian-Ukrainian dictionary, edited by linguist Serhii Iefremov, were removed from circulation. See Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 50–51. Academicians and research staff, who were purged, were stripped of their scientific titles and jobs, arrested, and prosecuted. See TsDAVOU, f. 166, op. 9, spr. 1459, ark. 18.

114. See Felix Dzerzhinsky’s autobiography in TsOA KGB, f. 1, op. 6, ed. kh. 45, ll. 94–98; reprinted in F. E. Dzerzhinsky – rukovoditel′ VChK – OGPU, 8–11.

115. Nigel Blundell, A Pictorial History of Joseph Stalin (North Dighton: JG Press, 1996), 28.

116. Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (New York: Viking Press, 1978).

117. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 358–63.

118. For a detailed history of the camp, see a database of Soviet “corrective-labor” camps, compiled by M. B. Smirnov, Sistema ispravitel′no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, eds. N. G. Okhotin and A. B. Roginskii (Moscow: “Zven′ia,” 1998), http://old.memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag.index.htm.

119. A kremlin or kreml′ is a major fortified central complex found in historic Russian cities.

120. S. O. Pidhainy, “Solowky Concentration Camp,” in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 21.

121. Pidhainy, “Solowky Concentration Camp,” 21.

122. Ibid., 22, 24.

123. Bilokin′, “Solovky,” in Masovyi teror iak zasib derzhavnoho upravlinnia, vol. 2, 268–87, esp. 277.

124. Conquest, Kolyma, 17.

125. Pidhainy, “Solowky Concentration Camp,” 42–68.

126. Michael Jakobson, Origins of the GULAG: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).

127. Kołakowski, “The Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” 175.

128. Pidhainy, “Solowky Concentration Camp,” 24, 26–27.

129. Pidhainy, “Portraits of Solowky Exiles,” in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 327.

130. Ibid., 328.

131. Ibid., 326.

132. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 22, 34–35.

133. Pidhainy, “Portraits of Solowky Exiles,” 326–67.

134. Ivan Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy: Istoriia stroitel′stva Belomorkanala v dokumentakh, tsyfrakh, faktakh, fotografiiakh, svidetel′stvakh uchastnikov i ochevidtsev (Petrozavodsk: “Kareliia,” 1990), 13, 25.

135. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 14.

136. Ibid., 32.

137. Ibid., 18.

138. “Svidetel′stvo uchastnika: S. I. Kozhevnikov, former commander of BCh 1-4 submarine ‘Narodovolets’ from Petrozavodsk,” in Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 23.

139. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 17.

140. Pidhainy, “Solowky Concentration Camp,” 35.

141. Ibid., 36, 38.

142. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 323.

143. Pidhainy, “Solowky Concentration Camp,” 40–41.

144. From August 11, 1937, to December 24, 1938, more than 9,000 victims of Soviet political repressions were executed by shooting and buried in 300 separate burial trenches at Sandarmokh. These included 289 members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. In 1997, “Memorial” Society located killing fields and burial sites at Sandarmokh near Medvezh′egorsk in Karelia (Northwest Russia). Drawing on information from a KGB archive, Russian historian Iurii Dmitriev identified men and women shot at Sandarmokh as follows: 3,500 were inhabitants of Karelia, whereas 4,500 were prisoners working for the White Sea Canal, and 1,111 were brought there from the Solovky “special” prison. Alongside loggers and fishermen from nearby villages, farmers, writers and poets, artists, scientists and scholars, military leaders, doctors, teachers, engineers, clergy, and statesmen found their final resting place there. The position of the skeletons and other remains suggested that the prisoners had been stripped to their underwear, lined up next to a trench with hands and feet tied, and shot in the back of the head with a pistol. Documents in the regional KGB archive identify among the victims 141 Finnish Americans and 127 Finnish Canadians, all of whom joined communist-sponsored migration to Karelia in the early 1930s. Membership in the Communist Party did not save these radicals from their tragic fate. See Haynes and Klehr, In Denial, 117–18. For lists of names of prisoners executed at Sandarmokh, see Yuri Dmitriev’s Mesto rasstrela Sandarmokh (Petrozavodsk, Russia, 1999) and Mesto pamiati Sandarmokh (Petrozavodsk, Russia, 2019).

145. For a list of the Ukrainian prisoners of the Solovetsky camp executed in 1937, see Serhii Bilokin′, “Rozstril′nyi spysok Solovkiv,” Literaturna Ukraïna, no. 27 (4488), July 9, 1992, 8; see also Bilokin′, “Solovky,” 283.

146. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 49.

147. Rostislav Gorelov captured the immortal scene in his painting V lagernom barake (In a camp barrack), Moscow, 1970–1979, preserved in the Museum of the GULAG History. Born in the Dnipropetrovs′k region, the artist was a student in Moscow at the time of his arrest in 1933 for his alleged participation in an underground organization. Gorelov served his prison camp term in Temlag, where he was assigned to cut timber. See Rostislav Gorelov’s biography and paintings at https://bessmertnybarak.ru/Gorelov_Rostislav_Gavrilovich/.

148. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 73.

149. Ibid., 51.

150. Ibid., 52–53.

151. For recent scholarly studies of life in the Gulag, see Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Golfo Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

152. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 59.

153. Recently, Dan Healey has examined the treatment of disabled prisoners in an article “Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 3 (2015): 527–56.

154. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 60.

155. For more on the life and academic career of Stepan Rudnyts′kyi (1877–1937), the founder of modern geography of Ukraine, see a special issue of Chasopys spotsial′no-ekonomichnoï heohrafiï, vyp. 32 (2007): 7–48, file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/Chasopys-32_2007-1.pdf. The journal Chronicle of Social-Economic Geography is published by the Kharkiv National University named after V. N. Karazin. See also a special issue of Istoriia ukraïns′koï heohrafiï, vyp. 16 (2007): 8–41, file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/IUG_16.pdf. The journal is published by Ternopil′ Pedagogical University.

156. Pidhainy, “Portraits of Solowky Exiles,” 340–41. For a biographical portrait of Rudnyts′kyi based on archival sources, see Oleksandr Rubl′ov, “Fundator ukraïns′koï heohrafichnoï nauky: Stepan Rudnys′kyi – liudyna i uchenyi,” Rehional′na istoriia Ukraïny: Zbirnyk naukovykh statei, vyp. 12 (2018): 207–304.

157. According to the official Polish registry, there were 43,000 Ukrainian emigrants in the 1920s, among them members of the UNR government-in-exile, officers and rank-and-file in internment camps, diplomats, writers, and intellectual elites. See V. P. Troshchyns′kyi, Mizhvoienna ukraïns′ka emihratsiia v Ievropi iak istorychne i sotsial′no-politychne iavyshche (Kyïv: Intel, 1994), 20.

158. The Prague period was the most prolific time for Rudnyts′kyi. After years of working as a teacher of geography and writing his doctoral thesis, he finally assumed a position of professor at a newly established Ukrainian Free University. He published works on political and military geography of Ukraine in German and Ukrainian in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and L′viv. His German-language work, Ukraina und die Ukrainer (Wien: Verlag des allgemeinen ukr. Nationalrates, 1914), was published in Italian and Hungarian translations in Rome and Budapest in 1914, and in English translation in New York in 1915. Under a pseudonym Sh. Levenko, he printed several editions of his book, Chomu my khochemo samostiinoï Ukraïny? (Why do we want an independent Ukraine?), ed. by M. Zalizniak, first in Vienna in 1915, then in Berlin, L′viv, and Stockholm in 1916–1917. Nearly seventy of his published works have been compiled and reprinted by Oleh Shablii in S. L. Rudnyts′kyi, Chomu my khochemo samostiinoï Ukraïny? (L′viv: Svit, 1994).

159. Ethnographische Übersichtskarte [der] Ukraina, 1:7 500 000 (Wien: Kartogr. Anstalt G. Freytag & Berndt, Ges. m. b. H., 1915). The ethnographic map of Ukraine first appeared in an appendix to Ukraina und die Ukrainer in 1914 and in all foreign language editions in 1915. The first Ukrainian translation of the ethnographic map was published in 1917.

160. See Pitirim Sorokin’s study of the effects of hunger on a starving individual in Man and Society in Calamity.

161. Pidhainy, “Portraits of Solowky Exiles,” 342–43.

162. Prystaiko and Shapoval, Sprava “Spilky vyzvolennia Ukraїny,” 422.

163. Ibid., 421–22. For a discussion of the letter, written in March 1957, see Serhii Shevchenko, “Vsevolod Hantsov: zhyttia pislia svyntsevoï zlyvy,” Dzerkalo tyzhnia, May 22, 2014, https://zn.ua/ukr/HISTORY/vsevolod-gancov-zhittya-pislya-svincevoyi-zlivi-_.html.

164. Malcolm Muggeridge, “Chronicles of Wasted Time,” Esquire, February 1972, 118.

165. Muggeridge, “Chronicles of Wasted Time,” 119.

166. In 1932, a new brand of cigarettes was introduced in the Soviet Union, which featured a map of the Belomorkanal (White Sea Canal) on its cover.

167. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 57–58.

168. Ibid., 58.

169. Ibid.

170. Ibid., 61–62, 72.

171. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 103.

172. Pidhainy, “Portraits of Solowky Exiles,” 350–51.

173. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, 69, 73.

174. Ibid., 67–68.

175. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 118.

176. Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev, eds., The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Palo Alto: Stanford University Hoover Institution Press, 2003).

177. Vallin et al., “The Great Famine,” in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 40.

178. George Kitchin, Prisoner of the OGPU (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1935), 334.

179. Ibid., 335.

180. Ryan Dearinger, The Filth of Progress: Immigrants, Americans, and the Building of Canals and Railroads in the West (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

181. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1937), 426.

182. David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (London: Hollis and Carter, 1948), 218–19.

183. Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 58–59.

184. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 219.

185. “Timber and Allied Industries,” Handbook of the Soviet Union (New York: American-Russian Chamber of Commerce, 1936), 176.

186. Handbook of the Soviet Union, 177.

187. Ibid., 40.

188. Ibid., 311, 341.

189. John L. Scherer and Michael Jackobson, “The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Soviet Prison Camp System,” Europe Asia Studies, no. 45 (1993): 538.

190. Plaggenborg, Revoliutsiia i kul′tura, 142.

191. Ibid., 221.

192. Walter Wilson, Forced Labor in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1933), 9.

193. Applebaum, Gulag, 60.

194. Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 220.

195. Applebaum, Gulag, 60.

196. Wilson, Forced Labor in the United States, 163, 169.

197. For more on the role of Walter Duranty in distorting the truth about the Holodomor, see S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Agnieszka Holland’s thriller Mr. Jones (Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2020).

198. “The Soviet Star of Hope,” The Daily Worker, 1924; quoted in Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 130.

199. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, 435.

200. “The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (William C. Bullitt) to the Secretary of State,” Moscow, July 19, 1935, Document 241, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Soviet Union, 1933–1939, eds. E. R. Perkins, Rogers Platt Churchill, and John Gilbert Reid (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 227, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1933-39/d241.

201. For a detailed account of the vote in support for recognition, see Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 261, 363.

202. Kołakowski, “The Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” 160.