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(I have had big problems with Timothy Snyder's anti-Communism in the past but this article expresses a somewhat surprising affinity for Ukrainian Marxism before Stalinism sank in.)
In the 1920s, under the leadership of the Ukrainian proletarian writer and poet Mykola Khvylovy, Ukrainian communists established an exemplary set of cultural institutions promoting experimental culture. Khvylovy’s main idea as a critic and sponsor of new literature was that Ukraine could leap forward to what he called a “psychological Europe” by way of a new Ukrainian high culture that offered fearless meditations on the predicaments of modern life. By “Europe” he meant the embrace of Europe but also the attempt to transcend its genres. He saw this as the appropriate task of Ukrainian and Russian literature, separately, and rejected the idea that Russian culture had forms beyond the European and that these should guide Ukrainian writers. Some of the best novels of the period, such as Valerian Pidmohylny’s The City, are about the experience of socialism in Ukraine’s great cities. Khvylovy himself described living in Kharkiv in a way that is hard to experience as romantic: “In a faraway church a fire is burning and forms a poem. I am silent. Maria is silent.”
But then, as Shevelov saw it, came Joseph Stalin and a new ideology of Russian provincialism. Soviet socialism was no longer a universal project that could begin from nations building a new European culture, but rather a highly centralized economic transformation, directed from Moscow, whose failures could be blamed on the satellite nations, above all Ukraine. The collectivization of agriculture, begun in earnest in 1930, was supposed to transform the agrarian population of places like Ukraine into modern proletarian societies. Deprived of their land and of its fruits by collectivization and requisitions, peasants in Soviet Ukraine starved and sent their children to the cities to beg. The Kharkiv police were expected to remove two thousand hungry children from the streets each day in early 1933. Khvylovy and the other Ukrainian writers saw this with their own eyes.
Stalin blamed the failures of collectivization on Ukrainian nationalism and punished the leaders of the new Ukrainian avant garde. In March 1933 Khvylovy killed himself. In 1934 the capital of Soviet Ukraine was moved to Kiev. In 1937 and 1938 Kharkiv became one of the centers of Stalin’s Great Terror. An entire generation of artists and writers (including the novelist Pidmohylnyi) were murdered by the NKVD. After the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, Polish prisoners were transported to Kharkiv to be shot. The idea of communism as international liberation everywhere was replaced by the Stalinist conceit that communism was a specific system of political control directed from Moscow.
From this perspective it is easier to see how many Ukrainians today understand their own most recent revolution in 2013 and 2014. For Ukrainians, the promise of Europe is not only as a common market for Ukrainian goods and a spur to political reform; it also figures as an idea of reciprocal recognition of European states and civil societies that could bring Ukraine out of the shadows of Russian provincialism. But the revolution—though its activists came from throughout the country—was concentrated on the Maidan in Kiev. In the postwar decades, Kiev was the Soviet capital; in the post-Soviet decades, Kiev has become a proudly European metropolis. In the eastern city of Kharkiv, where Sovietization after 1930 meant provincialization, the atmosphere is much more post-colonial. During the revolution, opinions in Kharkiv were very much divided, with a large number of people joining an “Anti-Maidan” against the pro-European movement. This was an encounter between violent and non-violent methods of protest, as the Anti-Maidan specialized in beating and humiliating their political opponents. Serhiy Zhadan, Kharkiv’s best-known poet and novelist, had his skull broken by the anti-Europeans in early 2014.
full: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/jul/21/ukraine-kharkiv-edge-of-europe/
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