On 13 May 1933 Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvylovy invited authors Olesya Dosvitnyi and Mykola Kulish to his home. During their conversation he said he would show them how a proletarian author should behave. He then shot himself. His suicide was during the Holodomor of 1932-33, the man-made famine that saw millions of Ukrainians murdered, and mass executions of Ukrainian intellectuals. Houses were ransacked, food thrown away, while writers were arrested on fabricated charges and shot or sent to die in labour camps. Yet Russian studies often deny that Russia meant to exterminate Ukrainians. Why? And how does this denial relate to the conflict today?
Two weeks before his suicide, Khvylovy told a friend that the famine was intended to deal with the Ukrainian question. His suicide note referred to the arrest of a Ukrainian poet as representing the “Execution of [a] generation” and it was banned from publication until the Soviet Union collapsed. Khvylovy’s comments show Ukrainians understood even then that they were being culled. Rafael Lemkin, the author of the 1948 genocide convention, noted how the Soviets destroyed Ukraine’s “leadership…” and “peasants…the repository of national spirit”. His account that described these events as the “Soviet genocide” is banned. The Holodomor was undertaken by stealth: the enforced starvation was created by measures “each of (which) may seem like an anodyne administrative measure… yet each had to kill”. Sergio Gradenigo, an Italian diplomat who worked in Ukraine at the time, noted that starvation was engineered “to dispose of the Ukrainian problem”. Similarly, Ukrainian writers were “tried” and sentenced for a variety of fabricated crimes: The poet Oleksa Vlyzko, for example, was accused of being a child soldier in the White Guard.
During the Holodomor and afterwards academics and journalists often denied that the extermination of Ukrainians was deliberate or that it amounted to genocide. Journalists such as Walter Duranty were provided with access to Kremlin insiders for writing articles supportive of Moscow. Those who told the truth at the time about the devastation inflicted on Ukraine, such as Gareth Jones, were destroyed by their peers, as Eugene Lyons noted, and the press corps conspired with the regime to conceal the famine. According to Lyons, “Forced by competitive journalism to jockey for the inside track with officials, it would have been professional suicide to make an issue of the famine.”
Today academics continue to enjoy archival and visa access and contacts with Russian experts that depend on goodwill. Hiroaki Kuromiya, a historian focused on Ukraine, notes that “Moscow believes … western scholars are easily influenced and manipulated through soft power (including access to people, documents, and lavish treatment)”.
The effect on Holodomor research has been that expressions used to describe the extermination of Ukrainians through starvation have not been properly examined. The off-the-record comments by Soviet officials admitting that, for example, they wanted to change the “ethnographic material” of Ukraine have been taken at face value. The implausibility of undertaking mass executions against Ukrainians and inflicting famine on millions of them without having malicious intentions against Ukrainians has been discounted. Notwithstanding, there is increasing international recognition that the Holodomor was deliberate.
The US Senate adopted a resolution in 2018 recognising that Stalin committed genocide against the Ukrainian people in the early 1930s. The European Parliament did similarly in December 2022.
Why is Ukraine always a problem for the Russians? The immediate reason in 1932-33 was a violent rebellion of Ukrainians against Soviet authority. However, this does not explain the repeated attempts by the Tsarist, Soviet and current Russian regime to destroy Ukraine. The motivation lies in Russia’s national myth, which is based on the notion that Muscovy, the late medieval state from which it arose, is the successor of Rus, a medieval kingdom centred in Kyiv. As a Chatham House briefing paper from 2012 by two Ukrainian professors, Alexander Bogomolov and Oleksandr Lytvynenko, noted the idea of a Ukrainian nation separate from the Russian nation “challenges core beliefs about Russia’s origin and identity”. The execution of Ukrainian writers in the Soviet period, the bans on Ukrainian language in the Tsarist era, the closure of the Ukrainian library in Moscow in 2017 are all rooted in a hatred of Ukrainian identity.
There is a literary element here too. As the authors of the briefing observed, Ukrainian culture is regarded as “second-rate or blasphemous” by Russians. On the flipside Russian authors are celebrated. Many of these authors denigrated Ukraine and their xenophobia will have been imbibed unconsciously by foreign readers.
As Peter Pomerantsev, a journalist working on war crimes who grew up in a Russian cultural environment, stresses: “Russian culture.. obscures or romanticises Russian violence as part of its literary product” whereas “mass translations of Ukrainian literature in its dynamics and development (are) sorely lacking”.
This is crucial now because the historic blindness to Russian imperialism and its hatred of Ukraine has resulted in today’s war, one which is masked with lies about “denazification” or fighting “gays”. These are the equivalent of Stalin’s falsehoods about bread quotas used to mask extermination.
It is crucial therefore that we hear Ukrainian voices. The country’s literature is the writing of rebels and no more so than Khvylovy, whose life and work can help us at last see Russia truly through the miasma of soft power that fogs our understanding. This story, published in Khvylovy’s collection Blue Etudes (1923) and translated here for the first time into English, verges at times on poetry. Despite being published in the early Soviet era it is replete with biblical imagery. The author shows a world where dreams never match reality, as fallen as the world discovered by Adam and Eve beyond Eden.
An Extract from Blue November
by Mykola Khvylovy
Salty winds cantered off the sea. They raced across the Steppe and disappeared into Transcaspia.
… The North Caucasus…
The unreachable blue heights were silent above the settlement.
The stars trembled and fled, fearful to the rim of the sky to the mountain range.
November, blue, unknowable was passing.
He roamed the orchards and gardens, entered under the thatch and left with the winds. Just as unknown, incomprehensible and silent.
The fire was not yet extinguished. It rose and Vadim’s face moved through the shadows it cast.
The house was deserted, people dispersed leaving only two or three.
Nails were thudded into the wall.
They were probably nailing up garlands.
They will swiftly pass too.
Late.
Night.
When Zimmel left, his spurs chiming, Maria asked slyly:
“So are you sad too?”
“Of course I am sad. But… you understand me.
Vadim glanced dryly and sharply at the coal.
The wind occasionally flew in and thrust the hair from under his papakha [tall, fur hat] so that it fell on his darkened brow.
Maria squeezed her head in her hands and spoke dully.
“Yes Vadim, longing. I accept these mundane days with my heart and soul. But still longing. That which comes when you abandon your positions and are unsure that you will return soon.”
He remained silent.
Maria, tensed became a block, a full stop. The coal was green in the flames and in her eyes too. Wearing an overcoat also.
They say “the last of the Mohicans” of such people. The truth: the womanhood of the revolution went to give birth to children. Only Maria and a few others did not follow.
We will listen to the salted winds when they silently go to the east, Blue November.
They spoke more of Zimmel, about the impulses of modernity and also about the commune.
Vadim was a brigade commissar and Maria, who was hunched up looking like a full stop in the night, was a PolitKom.
She still spoke dully.
“Well, yes, certainly, and yes well, uncertainly for otherwise I would search for another truth. There is longing here.”
Vadim.
“You remind me of a frog from a geological revolution which had a head wide as an arshyn [political commissar].”
Red army soldiers roamed the settlement alleys. And again through the settlement alley the salt wind cantered. The wide church pierced the silent sky with its cross.
A stack of fragrant pine, to make garlands with, and some mountain herbs, lay near Maria: Zimmel had brought them.
What the aroma was is unknown, whether it was that of pines, mountain herbs or blue November.
However, perhaps it was the Caucasus, the mountain hamlets or, perhaps, the salt winds.
It had struck her painfully that word; “Frog!”
But Maria suddenly remembered: the regimental doctor had said Vadim was living through his last few days.
She looked at his face. The heat lay near her heart now searing it.
A cough dry as a Steppe fire. It’s Vadim. And he said kindly
“Sit nearer my troubled Maria.”
She shuddered.
“Yours?”
“And why not mine? My female comrade… so: I will speak quietly so they do not hear. This is my biggest secret… thus…”
(It happens sometimes in the blue night that a cranes call creaks. When they draw water. And a crane called then)
“… I am a romantic also. But this kind of romantic: I am in love with the commune. This cannot be spoken of to anyone, just as a first love is kept secret. Only to you. These years, these millions of years! This unforgettable eternity…”
Translated by Stephen Komarnyckyj
