A Palace for Pioneers in Kyiv

Officially created in 1934 by a mandate of the Kyiv city council on what had been renamed, in 1919, the “Plaza of the Third International,” the first site of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers (KPDU) abutted the desirable “Proletarian Park” in central Kyiv (Figure 1).Footnote ⁷ A historic building located at the terminus of Khreshchatyk, the main boulevard of central Kyiv, was designated for the Pioneers, and news of the Palace was reported in the newspaper Bilshovyk on October 2, 1934:

Figure 1.

A view of the original Kyiv Palace of Pioneers and the adjoining Proletarian Park, 1934. KPDU archive, used with permission.

Throughout 1934, newspapers reported on the progress of the palace’s reconstruction on a near daily basis, detailing which children’s group had started to meet. On December 2, 1934, “Proletarian Pravda” reported that the next day would see the opening of a “musical studio” (музична студія) at the Palace, inviting three classes to take place: in violin, piano, and cello. Mid-December would bring the opening of a choreography program, and January 1935 heralded the beginning of a vocal program.Footnote ⁹ The bandurist capella was formed in late 1935 or 1936.Footnote ¹⁰ By 1941, the Palace’s offerings would include departments of artistic education, “education of the masses” (masova robota), science and technology, young naturalists, tourism, physical education, and military-sports training, serving some 6,500 of the city’s schoolchildren.Footnote ¹¹

In the Stalinist period, when the Palace served to incubate new Soviet culture and instill the values of communism in young citizens, KPDU also—paradoxically—contributed to the entrenchment of a stylized and folklorized vision of titular Ukrainian culture, a narrowly construed ethnic particularism. Images from the various performance ensembles at KPDU depict children in vyshyvanky, the embroidered shirts that many Ukrainians today consider to be exemplary symbols of Ukrainian regional identities. In various ensembles that performed repertoires marked as “folkloric,” boys are dressed in billowing sharovary (pants) and stereotypical Kozak hats; girls appear in flower crowns with flowing ribbons, peasant aprons, and skirts (Figure 2).Footnote ¹² Institutionalized at Palaces of Pioneers, children’s music ensembles, with their emphasis on technical skill, performance, and entertainment, exemplified the somewhat ambiguous relationship between the abstraction of political ideology and its lived enactment.

Figure 2.

The cover of the program for the 1957 Olympiad, featuring children in the characteristically stylized folkloric garb associated with the titular Ukrainian nation. KPDU archive, used with permission.

Children’s Music and the Soviet Future

What kind of future did the children’s bandurist capella promise? The creation of the bandurist capella at the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers was part of a broad push to institutionalize children’s musical culture in the first decades of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At KPDU, children’s musical ensembles included mass choirs, noise orchestras (shumovi orkestry), folk orchestras, song and dance ensembles, the ritual ensemble of fanfarists (child buglers) and drummers, and, in the post-war era, popular music groups modeled on Vocal Instrumental Ensembles (VIAs). Similar to the Thaw-era mass children’s choirs described by Maya Mayofis, ensembles like the children’s bandurist capella at KPDU offered a “sociobehavioral model of disciplined emotional solidarity.”Footnote ¹³ Through its large share of arranged and “improved” folk music repertoires, the capella also became an important vector for patriotic education, much like the summer camp songs collectively sung at Pioneer camps such as Artek.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, the attempted assimilation of the bandura into the world of Soviet children’s musical practices—where it could never supersede its national connotations—demonstrates confusion about how to redirect pre-Soviet cultural heritage towards the goals of socialism. Similar to the fraught politics that undergirded music pedagogy and practice in the GDR as described by Anicia Timberlake, it should come as “no surprise that such fraught ideological questions about how a socialist citizenry could be produced and sustained ultimately focused on the education of children.”Footnote ¹⁵

The KPDU bandurist capella built upon existing trends in bandura repertoire and ensemble-playing; many of these trends preceded the advent of Soviet communism in Ukraine. As I will detail, the instrument associated since the seventeenth century with itinerant, male, often blind and elderly minstrels had by the late nineteenth been drafted into various “modernization” initiatives that brought bandura performance from solo into ensemble contexts and expanded the musical capacities of the instrument. But the transference of this (already vastly transformed) musical instrument associated with adult men to the bodies of Young Pioneer boys and girls was part of an explicitly ideological Soviet program. In a society obsessed with the future, children would help carry forward relics of the past, like the bandura, and find a place for them in nationless, classless, communism.

That Stalinist policy elevated Russian culture and language to its center throughout the USSR has been thoroughly documented, but the place of children’s culture in advancing such a politics has been largely overlooked, especially from the perspective of the non-Russian Republics.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, the burgeoning scholarly literature on Soviet children’s culture in recent years has largely reinscribed Russia at the center of the Soviet project, rarely taking up children’s experiences in the other fourteen republics that comprised the USSR, with a few notable exceptions.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, the strong emphasis in studies of Soviet children’s culture has been on literature, seldom touching on musical culture.Footnote ¹⁸ Musical practices allow us to see how the ideological projects of the Stalinist period were mapped onto children’s bodies, as they were disciplined into carrying forward the revolutionary promise of Soviet communism. Costuming, bodily comportment, and entrainment (correct posture and body movements, stylized gestures, inter-personal coordination), instrumental techniques that demanded specific ways of manipulating the instrument, musical pedagogy that emphasized specific ways of listening and playing; all these elements are available through the examination of Soviet children’s musical practices. That one trajectory of the Soviet-era bandurist capella unfolds in the context of children’s music—specifically, at KPDU in the late 1930s and early 40s—is important precisely because of the way that children were constructed as “the symbol of the nation,” and appointed as “independent, rational, and powerful agents of revolution,” guarantors of the utopian internationalism to come.Footnote ¹⁹ As the state invested in Pioneers and their Palaces in Kyiv and many other Soviet cities in the mid-1930s, musical practices became an essential place through which the twinned Pioneer virtues of discipline and happiness were cultivated.Footnote ²⁰

Pioneers Making Music: On Disciplined Happiness

In the USSR, childhood happiness was intimately linked to the state’s pastoral care. As Catriona Kelly has noted, “One of the most visible aspects of the Stalin cult was its link with an idealized childhood.”Footnote ²¹ This is evident through the once-ubiquitous slogan, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!”Footnote ²² In the secular theology of the communist party-state, children were anointed to perform rituals to uphold this politics of happiness, most prominently through their inclusion in organizations like the Young Pioneers. Balina and Dobrenko, in the introduction to their volume on Soviet happiness, note that “Social Utopia is always aimed towards the pursuit of happiness, but contrary to individualistic bourgeois ideals, socialist Utopia (much like a nationalist or religious Utopia) is rooted in the impossibility of achieving individual happiness without first embracing collective happiness.”Footnote ²³ The tension between the individual and collective pursuits of happiness could be sublimated into the state’s utopian ideology, which in turn, would only further motivate its citizens to work harder to achieve the communist dream. In this way, the happiness linked to the pastoral care of the Soviet state further consolidated the power of the state. The construction of a “caring society…[that] is integrated into the government itself and culturally constructs the relationship between the ruler and the ruled” made children a key demographic targeted through the ostensibly benevolent pastoral care of the state.Footnote ²⁴

Invested with the hopes of the future, children-as-musicians were interpellated as agents of revolution through musical practices. The scientistic evolutionary approaches applied to music were reinforced by the supposedly scientific Bolshevik approach to child-rearing.Footnote ²⁵ Musical pedagogy in this context was rigorous, premised on the discipline of musical achievement. This included not only the skill of mastering the instrument, repertoire, or style, but also extended to modes of bodily comportment, and expectations around performance competency. Children, for whom a full-size bandura may be too unwieldy, would require an altered instrument to accommodate their smaller hands and bodies. The bandura’s translation to the context of children’s music would also support the codification of a standardized technique that emphasized accessibility.

Such decisions at the level of children’s pedagogy contributed to the elimination of some strands of bandura technique and pedagogy, and the suppression of earlier histories of play, experimentation, and meaning in the service of a modern instrument that could swiftly facilitate children’s achievement of disciplined happiness. By the late 1930s, the Soviet Ukrainian musical establishment’s consolidation around one form of the modern bandura and one method of modern play would demand a cleaving of the bandura from historical continuities of musical tradition, and from nineteenth century romantic nationalist projects that had elevated the bandura as a symbol of Ukraine.

The Bandura and National Mythmaking

The bandura looms large in the Ukrainian national imagination, first and foremost through its association with The Kobzar, Taras Shevchenko’s 1840 book of poems, regarded as an essential literary tome of the modern Ukrainian language, and which articulated a vision of Ukrainian modernity through a lens of anti-imperial romantic nationalism.Footnote ²⁶ Kobzari were the poor, traveling, male, and usually blind peasant minstrels who gathered and narrated the history of people living on the territory of Ukraine in epic songs, or dumy. Footnote ²⁷ (Many of these songs told of the exploits of the Kozaks (Cossacks) who defended the “wild field” from foreign occupation, a history later exploited by Ukrainian nationalists, Russian nationalists, and Soviet propagandists alike.) The kobzar took his name from the instrument he played, known as the kobza, or sometimes the kobza-bandura, a vernacular old-time precursor to the modern bandura.Footnote ²⁸ The first edition of Shevchenko’s Kobzar includes an illustration by Vasilii Shternberg of a man who resembles Shevchenko (but may be the kobzar Ostap Veresai), sitting outside and playing a kobza-bandura while a peasant boy and his small black dog listen at his side (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Shternberg’s drawing from the original 1840 edition of Shevchenko’s Kobzar. Used in original form with permission under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the romantic poet-hero of Ukraine, Shevchenko occupies a similar place in the national imaginary as Adam Mickiewicz or Aleksandr Pushkin do in their respective countries. In contrast to these petty aristocrats, however, Shevchenko was born into serfdom in the Russian empire. He therefore saw a powerful analogy between his own biography—freed from bondage at age twenty-four, an outspoken critic of Russian tsarism, and a champion of Ukraine—and the figure of the impoverished kobzar as an anti-imperial truth-teller and chronicler of Cossack “free men.” Shevchenko’s romanticization of the figure of the kobzar tethered the history of the kobza-bandura to the struggle for Ukrainian national identity, and the fight for the emancipation of serfs in the Russian empire.Footnote ²⁹

It should be no surprise, then, that in the generation following the publication of Shevchenko’s Kobzar, the bandura emerged as the foremost icon of Ukrainian musical nationalism within the Russian Empire.Footnote ³⁰ Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912), a prominent Kyivan Ukrainophile often described as the father of “Ukrainian national music,” played a key role in elevating the kobza-bandura to its status as “national instrument.” Lysenko heard the blind kobzar Ostap Veresai (1803–90) perform in August of 1874 at the Third Archeological Conference held in Kyiv. That year, Lysenko published the first transcriptions of Ostap Veresai’s dumy, laying a cornerstone in the ethnographic study of Ukrainian vernacular music. In this and other work, Lysenko constructed Veresai as the “Homer of Ukraine,” suggesting an archaic link between the historical tales embedded in Veresai’s songs and the plight of the Ukrainian people (Figure 4). Such gestures are fully in line with nineteenth century discourses of primordial nationalism that were emerging throughout the region at the time, and which built upon the Herderian tenet that folk music embodied the “soul of the nation.”Footnote ³¹ In March of 1875, Lysenko presented an “Ethnographic-Slavic Concert” in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg featuring Veresai alongside artists from the imperial theaters and Lysenko himself; luminaries including the composer Pyotr Tchaikovskii attended the concert, prompting acute interest in the vernacular music of the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian empire. From there, the kobza-bandura was adopted as an object of fascination for many Ukrainian cultural and intellectual elites and would become swept into various processes of urbanization and “modernization.”Footnote ³² “Improvements” to the instrument included early experiments in ensemble play, enabled by expanding the bandura’s range and standardizing its tuning.Footnote ³³ Through many fin de siècle changes, the bandura remained core to Ukrainian national mythmaking, bringing along the attendant principles of anti-imperial nationalism and emancipation from tsarist autocracy.

Figure 4.

Ostap Mykytovych Veresai (1803–1890) and his wife Kulyna, photographed at the 1874 Archaeological Congress in Kyiv. Public domain image.

Decades later, the intransigence of these national myths would become especially inconvenient as Soviet policy shifted from the politics of Leninist korenizatsiia to the internationalist aesthetic of socialist realism. As such a highly charged symbol of Ukraine, debates about the proper future trajectory for the bandura’s development were marked for a time by lively dissensus, but ultimately settled through a series of violent acts and discursive erasures. Contestations about which version of bandura art should become dominant in Soviet Ukraine unfolded first among adult bandurists and then the Pioneer Palaces. In the increasingly repressive climate of Stalinism in Soviet Ukraine, struggles over which modernized bandura practice should be adopted took on severe, sometimes life-and-death, stakes.

Bandura Wars: Modernization and the Kyiv vs. Kharkiv Styles

Although there were many figures who contributed to the transformation of the bandura in the early twentieth century, none was more fascinating, impactful, tragic, and illustrative than Hnat Khotkevych (1877–1938) and his “Kharkiv bandura.” Khotkevych’s contributions to bandura development epitomize the nagging problem of Ukrainian “national music” in Soviet internationalist life; his brutal demise shows how violence punctuates the story of the bandura along its path to the hands of children at the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers. In 1934, four years before his execution by Soviet agents, Khotkevych summarized his life’s work as enacting the “dream of raising a national musical instrument, with its genius of simplicity, to the level of a world recognized instrument. An instrument that can claim the title of being a national instrument and the symbol of Ukrainian culture.”Footnote ³⁴ It was Khotkevych, a flamboyant polymath—railway engineer, ethnographer, writer, raconteur, theater director, translator, composer, bandurist, impresario—who organized the first ensemble of kobzari at the Twelfth Archaeological Congress, held in 1902 in Kharkiv, when he was only 25 years old. In the Soviet period, it was Khotkevych who, through his modernized Kharkiv style bandura, would show how one could “transcend the tradition from within,” instead of “imposing change on it from outside.”Footnote ³⁵

Khotkevych’s childhood fascination with the kobzari who traveled through his home Kharkiv region motivated him to popularize the instrument and elevate it from regional to national status and international fame. Exiled to Galicia (Halychyna) after leading a railway workers’ strike in 1905, Khotkevych introduced the post-Hetmanate tradition of kobzarstvo to Hapsburg Ukraine, where he also founded an important vernacular Hutsul Theater in the Carpathian Mountain village of Krasnoillia. In 1909, Khotkevych published his Manual on Playing the Bandura (which was banned after his death but later revived as a touchstone for bandurists today). Another period of exile drove Khotkevych to Voronezh, where he lived from 1915–17, before returning to Kharkiv on the heels of revolution.

After 1922, when the Ukrainian SSR was established with Kharkiv as its capital, Khotkevych was invited by the rector of the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute to develop a modern Soviet bandura program. This was during the heady period when policies of Ukrainianization were supported and funded by Communist Party leaders like Mykola Skrypnyk, who served as People’s Commissariat for Education from 1927–33, in addition to holding many other posts.Footnote ³⁶ Beginning in 1926, Khotkevych taught a new generation of bandura players at the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute, where he innovated techniques and introduced his vision for an “improved” instrument called the Kharkiv bandura, which he designed in collaboration with his student Leonid Haydamaka. Himself a pivotal figure in this history, Haydamaka had started his own bandurist capella (which eventually transformed into the first orchestra of Ukrainian folk instruments) in 1922 at the Metalist Club of Kharkiv. This was part of the rapid expansion of amateur and professional adult bandurist capellas throughout the Ukrainian SSR, supported by the Bolsheviks as a tool of political education and developed in parallel to new designs for the instrument.Footnote ³⁷

A 1927 article published in Muzyka made plain the plans for expanding the ambit of kobzas (here, understood as a synonym for bandura) as instruments of Soviet propaganda:

Small grants were made available to musical instrument builders and practitioners, and Khotkevych and Haydamaka’s Kharkiv style bandura benefitted from this state support. The 31-string Kharkiv bandura was blueprinted by Haydamaka in 1926; in 1928, he received a 3000 ruble grant from Skrypnyk towards the instrument’s development. Its serial manufacture began shortly thereafter.Footnote ³⁸

At the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute, Khotkevych directed a professional bandura quartet to showcase the Kharkiv bandura and its technique. In 1928, Khotkevych was appointed to supervise the Poltava Bandurist Capella, where he converted the musicians to the Kharkiv style bandura. He also codified new pedagogical approaches to the Kharkiv bandura in a textbook published in 1929–31; composed instrumental and vocal works for the instrument; transcribed a study by G. F. Handel; and, with Haydamaka, worked closely with instrument makers to standardize the Kharkiv bandura by boosting its low range and reinforcing the instrument structurally to accommodate the tension needed for modern steel (rather than old-fashioned gut) strings.Footnote ³⁹

By 1933, after this period of experimentation and expansion, the political tide turned decisively against the leaders of Ukrainization efforts. The zealous Ukrainianizer and Communist leader Mykola Skrypnyk committed suicide in July 1933. Khotkevych, accused of bourgeois nationalist activity, was soon dismissed (along with the rector who had hired him) from his position at the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute. His protege, Haydamaka, took over Khotkevych’s post but worried about being condemned as a nationalist, too.Footnote ⁴⁰ Haydamaka moved his bandurist capella to the Kharkiv Palace of Pioneers as a means to protect the Kharkiv instruments: in the hands of children, perhaps, they would be safer. Haydamaka further modified the Kharkiv bandura and introduced it in three sizes for the Pioneer capella: piccolo (for the youngest players), standard, and bass.Footnote ⁴¹ Working with children, Haydamaka was able to continue teaching the Kharkiv bandura style until he himself fled from Ukraine in 1942.

Khotkevych and Haydamaka’s Kharkiv bandura contrasted meaningfully with contemporaneous attempts to “improve” the bandura, most visibly in contrast to the Kyiv style. Vigorous debates characterized the years 1933–34 as bandura players convened to argue over which emerging systems to adopt. Khotkevych’s deep knowledge of and ethnographic commitment to the old-time kobzar styles and all that they connoted meant that the Kharkiv style marked continuity across centuries, whereas the Kyiv bandura embraced a more aggressive Soviet vision of what might be called organological modernity: a redesign that made instruments more generic, but also more systematic, and therefore better suited for play with any other modernized instruments.

For practicing bandurists such as Petro’s son Julian Kytasty, Khotkevych’s attempt to bridge the past and future of the instrument was admirable. In an interview, Julian Kytasty described to me how “Khotkevych was trying to evolve contemporary instruments organically out of the tradition rather than creating something radically new,” something he was able to do “because he knew the tradition very well.”Footnote ⁴² In contrast to the Kyiv style bandura, Khotkevych’s Kharkiv bandura was a more versatile instrument in terms of repertoire, one that “could play old kobzar stuff which you can’t play on the Kyiv style bandura,” but also allowed for complex contrapuntal work since both hands were freer to take a more active role, in contrast to the more passive, accompanying role assigned to the left hand in the Kyiv style.Footnote ⁴³ The 1936 Soviet Ukrainian film “Nazar Stodolia,” based on a play by Taras Shevchenko, featured Khotkevych in the role of a kobzar, showcasing his virtuosity on an old-time kobza, the pre-modernized bandura. In the scene, Khotkevych holds the instrument flat against the torso so that the strings face directly outward instead of perpendicular to the body. This manner of holding the instrument was typical for the sightless kobzari—for whom being able to see the strings was of no importance. The Kharkiv style maintains this posture for grown-ups and children both, while the Kyiv style positions the instrument perpendicular to the body—making it so that sighted musicians can watch their fingers but also inhibiting the range of motion on the player’s left hand. Khotkevych, in this astonishing film scene, enacts the historical connection from earlier centuries of kobzarstvo and the twentieth century modernized trajectory he envisioned for the musical tradition.Footnote ⁴⁴

As Stalinist paranoia about Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism escalated in the era of purges, Soviet Ukrainian cultural canons too underwent sometimes-radical revision. Yet as Shevchenko remained secure in the Soviet Ukrainian literary canon, so too did the bandura retain its place in the Soviet Ukrainian musical pantheon. But unlike Shevchenko’s literary work—a stable body of work, if subject to shifting paradigms of interpretation—the bandura was an object in the real world, actively undergoing processes of physical transformation and symbolic resignification through daily practice.

Articles published in the Soviet press in the volatile years of the early 1930s accused Skrypnyk and Khotkevych both of “bourgeois nationalism.” One especially vicious article, published in the Kharkiv-based, Ukrainian-language journal Радянська Музика (Soviet Music) went so far as to identify the kobza and bandura as “class-hostile” instruments, thereby condemning these vernacular instruments—until recently, the archetypal instruments of Ukrainian blind peasant minstrels—to a future of apparently intractable Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. That article systematically pilloried Skrypnyk, Khotkevych, and other prominent cultural workers of the korenizatsiia era, including Les Kurbas, arguing that they were “poisoning” Ukraine with bourgeois nationalism using the “sharp weapons of musical ideology.” The author makes the chilling call to action to “roll up our sleeves and pull the nationalist weeds from the musical field of Soviet Ukraine.” Footnote ⁴⁵

Condemnations such as these spurred the reorganization and ideological reformation of the bandurist capellas that had been so recently institutionalized. In 1934, the center of bandura innovation, historically grounded in the eastern region of Slobozhanshchyna, was dislodged and moved, along with the capital of the Ukrainian SSR, from Kharkiv to Kyiv. The Kharkiv style, so closely connected to Khotkevych, was condemned alongside Khotkevych’s “openly nationalistic textbooks and handbooks,” and both the Poltava and Kyiv Bandurist Capellas were defunded and disbanded in October 1934.Footnote ⁴⁶ The following year, the adult male Ukrainian State Exemplary Bandurist capella was reconstituted in Kyiv from the remnants of those regional professional bandurist capellas disbanded during the preceding years of zealotry. In October 1938, Khotkevych met the same brutal fate as so many other Ukrainian leaders of the korenizatsiia era and was executed by firing squad in Kharkiv on charges of spying for Germany.Footnote ⁴⁷ Khotkevych’s legacy, which had already fallen into disrepute in the preceding years, was suppressed. His compositions and publications were purged. Of the four bandurists in Khotkevych’s Kharkiv quartet, three were repressed. Only the fourth, Haydamaka, managed to remain in Kharkiv after 1938.

Even in this stark moment of violent erasure, things were not entirely black and white: knowledge about the Kharkiv bandura and Khotkevych’s legacy were not fully eradicated from Soviet memory. Khotkevych would be posthumously rehabilitated in 1956, and one of Haydamaka’s former students—a Karaite bandurist trained in the Kharkiv Pioneer capella who adopted the name Perekop Ivanov—even published a set of etudes for the Kharkiv-style bandura that same year.Footnote ⁴⁸ But Khotkevych’s place in this lineage was hard to decipher: akin to a manuscript, drafted in pencil and erased, but leaving the faint imprint of the pencil’s sharpened point. It was not until 1991 that a fuller rehabilitation of Khotkevych took place, along with attempts to revive his vision of modernized play, with its thick connection to pre-Soviet kobzarstvo. In sum, Khotkevych’s execution was accompanied by procedures of discursive cleansing. In the space of this erasure, the Kyiv-style bandura became the dominant Soviet bandura form, ushering along with it a less historically informed practice of play. Khotkevych’s biography is the most prominent example of how, by the end of 1930s, the link to the “old ways” of the kobzari was effectively destroyed.Footnote ⁴⁹

In 1940, an article written by Mykhaylo Polotay in Soviet Music articulated a new philosophy that would shape bandura art going forward:

In the void opened by the near total decimation of the old style so mythologized in nineteenth century Ukraine and so critical to encoding history as narrated by people who inhabited that territory, a new form of the Soviet bandurist capella proliferated. The dominant Kyiv bandura was heavier, incompatible with the old method that enabled minstrels to travel with their songs. The Kyiv bandura was intended for other venues: concert halls, conservatories, factory auditoriums, and Pioneer’s Palaces. The late 1930s kicked off the era of the mass bandura ensemble, a phenomenon that would proliferate throughout Soviet Ukraine, engaging the adult survivors of the 1930s bandura wars and a new generation of child bandurists alike (Figure 5). The institutionalization of children’s bandurist capellas in the late 1930s represented a politically charged innovation that was then nurtured at Palaces of Pioneers.

Figure 5.

A page from the 1957 Olympiad program booklet, showing the Bandurist capella at the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers (below), and the Ukrainian folk dance group of KPDU (above). KPDU archive, used with permission.

The Engineers of Children’s Fingers

When the call came for the formation of the flagship children’s bandurist capella at KPDU, it was the Kyiv style bandura that was adopted. Notably, the ensemble invited both boys and girls to participate, changing the terms of access to the bandura not only by age but also by gender. While it may not have been financially within reach for the average Soviet Ukrainian citizen to purchase such an instrument, the Palace of Pioneers funded instruments, miniaturized for young children, for the bandurist capella at KPDU. (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

A photo from the late 1930s showing a boy bandurist in front of a line of girls in vyshyvankas and flower crowns. Note the manner of holding the instrument perpendicular to the body. KPDU archive, used with permission.

Yuriy Bartyshevsky, a member of the Radio Committee’s Kobzar Ensemble in Kyiv, auditioned children at his apartment for the first bandurist capella at the Palace of Pioneers and recruited approximately a dozen boys and girls. Bartyshevsky directed the Pioneer capella from 1935–40, before disappearing for three unaccounted years in the thin biographical accounts of his life.Footnote ⁵¹ Petro Kytasty remembered the lockers designed to house the banduras for the Young Pioneers, and the master who would come once or twice a week to tune the notoriously fickle instruments.

Meanwhile, in Kharkiv, the Pioneer capella under Haydamaka continued its work by attempting to distance the Kharkiv style bandura from potentially damaging Ukrainian national connotations. Until 1942, Haydamaka’s capella, the Orchestra of Ukrainian National Instruments, was able to preserve the Kharkiv style instruments designed by Khotkevych and Haydamaka. Including the banduras as one instrument among many in an “orchestra of Ukrainian National Instruments” was the first move Haydamaka made to lessen the intensity of the bandura’s national flavoring. Marked as “All-Union folk instruments” (загальносоюзні народні інструменти) such as the domra, bayan (a type of button accordion adopted as the instrument of the proletariat), the hammered dulcimer known in Ukrainian as tsymbaly and widespread throughout eastern Europe, and the balalaika, such arrangements sought for the bandura to recede into an international tapestry of folk instruments detached from any specific location on the map.Footnote ⁵²

As a second strategy to mitigate against potential condemnation from the Soviet government, many of the Young Pioneer musicians whom Haydamaka recruited to the bandura were not ethnically Ukrainian, but rather Jewish or Karaite. Seeking to avoid the deadly fate of his teacher Khotkevych, Haydamaka understood that playing this superficial game of identity politics might help him avoid accusations that he was seeding ideas of (ethno)nationalism through his musical pedagogy.Footnote ⁵³ Haydamaka made strategic choices in the realm of repertoire as well: since the compositions of Khotkevych had been removed from the list of state-endorsed works, and because he was not a singer, he opted to teach a style that de-emphasized singing—thus divorcing the traditional context of the kobzari, for whom text was inextricably linked to melody and rhythm. Instead, Haydamaka emphasized arrangements of classical compositions by non-Ukrainian composers such as Jean-Philippe Rameau, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Johann Philipp Kirnberger that he hoped would float above the realm of reproach in the repressive Stalinist climate.Footnote ⁵⁴

In Kyiv, the repertoire taught to Pioneers juxtaposed the explicitly ideological against the “national.” In addition to arrangements of innocuous Ukrainian folk songs and newer popular songs, Petro Kytasty remembered learning an arrangement for bandura of a Song to Stalin. By 1941, the bandurist capella of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers was woven into large-scale performances that extolled the cult of Stalin and his nurturing beneficence to Soviet children.

In Kyiv as in Kharkiv, the bandura adapted to the hands of Pioneers as it could. But it never achieved the symbolic pliability of instruments like the domra. A long-necked, plucked lute, held across the body like a mandolin, smaller in size and with many fewer strings than the bandura, in the Stalinist period the domra stood in not only as an “All-Union folk instrument,” but became emblematic of the fraternal unity of the three East Slavic nations incorporated into the USSR.Footnote ⁵⁵ Analogous to the kobza-bandura in Ukraine, the domra in nineteenth century imperial Russia was engaged in “modernizing” musical projects. Like the bandura to Ukrainian ethnographers, the domra became an object of fascination for nineteenth century Russian folklorists and those wishing to construct an unbroken link to a glorious Russian past. The domra, in the context of Andreev’s “Great Russian Folk Orchestra,” was an “object modified to manifest Russianness in music within and outside the Russian Empire.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet by the 1930s, this essentially “Russian” instrument was reimagined as a musical icon of internationalism, while the bandura retained its sticky association with the Ukrainian nation—and, most threateningly, with the blind minstrels and Kozaks who, let us not forget, sometimes traitorously sided with those against the Russian tsars. Where the bandura continued to represent Ukraine specifically within the pantheon of Soviet children’s musical practices, the domra was readily adapted from exemplary Russian object to prototypical Soviet folk instrument, and in its symbolic malleability could smooth out the glide path to a Soviet internationalism premised on Russian culture.

Stalin’s Flowers

The dream-turned-chimera of Soviet internationalism in Ukraine was poignantly thematized in the Kyiv Palace of Pioneer’s 1941 Olympiad performance of a new Stalinist fairy tale called Мрія (The Dream). That spectacle featured the Pioneer bandurist capella in a musical variety show built around the metaphor of Stalin’s magical flowers.

By the late 1930s, flowers had become literally and metaphorically linked to Stalin and Stalinism. The literal connection is most prominently captured by an iconic photograph that splashed across Pravda’s front page on June 29, 1936, in which Stalin grins while holding a seven-year-old girl on his lap. The girl’s hands encircle Stalin’s neck. She smiles broadly. Stalin holds two bouquets of peonies, gifted to him by the grateful little girl. The Soviet press reported that the girl was named Gelia Markizova. She was from Buriatiia. Gelia’s haircut became popular among children across the vast territories of the USSR. The exuberant hug was printed widely, reproduced on posters and even made into a famous bronze sculpture. The nature of children’s encounters with Stalin himself, the guarantor of childhood happiness, became codified in forms of “ritual exchange” that frequently involved flowers. As Catriona Kelly observes, “the icons and texts published in the Soviet press did not merely illustrate the flower giving ritual; they were part of the process of making it canonical.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Propaganda posters with the ubiquitous slogan, “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our Happy Childhood!” exploded with flowers. Though the allegorical image of Gelia and Stalin is haunted by the Stalinist violence that would soon murder her parents, the potency of the associations that semiotically linked the leader to children’s happiness to flowers endured through the 1940s and until Stalin’s death.Footnote ⁵⁸

Beyond the realm of ritualized exchange, flowers made a perfect metaphor for Communist futurity and its teleological logics. The metaphor of children-as-flowers was present in Soviet Ukraine already in 1925, when Grygoriy Petrovsky, the Communist Party leader who served as Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee from 1919–38 proclaimed that “children are the flowers of society, and their correct development would be the most stable fundament for future citizenship.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Children signified fertility, and mapped onto potent ideas of the fecundity of the Soviet Motherland, with its leaps of modernizing progress and its soaring productivity.Footnote ⁶⁰ Children as flowers became a powerful trope of the state’s pastoral care: a 1936 cartoon depicted Pavel P. Postyshev, a Communist Party leader, as “a gardener surrounded by a flowerbed of children.”Footnote ⁶¹ By the late 1930s, the semiotic chain was forged in steel: Soviet children were Stalin’s flowers, seeds that were rooted, tended, nurtured, and cultivated to achieve their beautiful flowering under the watchful eyes of the paternal leader. In the same year that Gelia hugged Stalin with his fistfuls of peonies, and Postyshev tended to his cartoon flowerbed of children, the Children’s Council of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers named their newspaper, written in Ukrainian, Stalin’s Flowers. It published regular issues on the life and happenings of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers until the Nazi occupation of Kyiv in the fall of 1941.

The front page of the April 5, 1941 issue of Stalin’s Flowers featured a “diary” of “Five Days at the Olympiad,” written by two Young Pioneers (Figure 7). We learn from this newspaper that the Olympiad began on Saturday, March 29 at 2 pm with a speech from the Palace’s director, O.M. Blahodelsʹka, who reported on the growth of the Palace in the previous year. The diary described the Pioneers who stood “backstage with joyous excitement…waiting for their performances” while the director spoke. The entries offer overviews of each day of performances, often with rather blunt critical appraisals. From the opening day’s choir and the staging of a children’s opera called “The Wolf and Seven Goat Kids” (“Sioma…has little of the wolf’s predatoriness”); to the second day’s theatrical performance (“Dima…offers good words about the happiness of Soviet children, about their responsibility to those who created for them such a wonderful life”); to the third day’s “terrible play that could not be rescued by the excellent play of the performers;” to the fourth day’s reading of Ivan Franko’s poem “The Village Lies in the Valley” and an apparently “brilliant” performance of a cantata about Stalin by the Orchestra of Folk Instruments; to the fifth and last day’s grand finale presented by the large-scale Song and Dance Ensemble.Footnote ⁶²

Figure 7.

“Five Days at the Olympiad,” reported in the April 5, 1941 issue of Stalin’s Flowers. KPDU archive, used with permission.

While the bandura ensemble is not singled out in Stalin’s Flowers, it merited special recognition elsewhere, and appears prominently in an undated document from the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers archive.Footnote ⁶³ The document narrates the history of the Palace of Pioneers in Kyiv during the turbulent years 1934–43: from the Palace’s opening days, through its occupation by Nazis in September 1941, to its reopening on November 6, 1943, a mere six days after Kyiv’s liberation from German occupation.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this document, the unknown author describes the 1941 Olympiad as a major occasion in the early life of the Palace:

In the next paragraph, the unknown author notes that the “performance of the bandura capella was distinguished by its especially high level of musicality.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Petro Kytasty (Julian’s father, b. 1928), was a key participant in the KPDU bandura capella’s performance. Eighty-two years after he appeared on the stage in “The Dream,” Petro Kytasty shared his memories of participating in the Pioneers’ Olympiad with me. Kytasty recalled moments from his boyhood vividly: born into a family of bandura players, Petro’s father had moved himself and his young son from Donbas to join Hryhoriy Kytasty (Petro’s uncle) in the Exemplary Bandurist Capella recently formed in Kyiv, the premiere ensemble comprised of survivors of the bandura wars. The Kytastys lived in monk’s cells at Kyiv’s eleventh century Monastery of the Caves, and the young Petro Kytasty auditioned for Bartyshevsky as soon as the Pioneers’ bandurist capella was announced. Petro admitted, with a bitter laugh, how “from the position of a 10-year-old boy, we loved Stalin: all of Ukraine sang about Stalin, all the USSR sang about Stalin.” In 2023, he recalled a couplet of the Soviet Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna’s lyrics from a “Song for Stalin”:

Kytasty recalled his performance in the musical variety show spectacular at the Kyiv Pioneer’s Olympiad in 1941. He explained how the Olympiad’s theme of “The Dream” was partly woven together through a loose narrative about a magical flower.

This was the plot, according to Kytasty: a young Ukrainian girl goes to visit Stalin in the Kremlin. Stalin gives her a magical red flower to take back to Ukraine. It is meant to fulfill the dreams of the children of Soviet Ukraine. The girl returns to Kyiv, as Petro recalled, “all beautiful in her flower crown, with an exceptional singing voice.” She plants the red flower in the middle of the stage to test its potency. She wishes that the stars in the sky would dance, and they do: cue the dancing children, dressed as stars. Petro Kytasty, age 13, eventually gets his turn to have a wish granted by Stalin’s magical flower. In his scene, Petro Kytasty began as a soloist, playing and singing the Ukrainian folk song “Chornobryvyi Korolʹok,” center stage. (The folk song, played in the G key, and with its highly repetitive lyrical form, was at an appropriate level for young bandura players.) Lonely on the stage, Kytasty wishes that the magical flower could conjure many friends, people “just like himself,” to help him complete the song. His wish “triggered the ascent on stage machinery of the rest of the Pioneer bandurist capella,” who joined the folk song. The moralistic conceit is blunt enough for any child to apprehend: the collective is greater than the soloist, and children’s dreams will be realized through Stalin’s generous magic.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Kyiv Pioneers were preparing to take the show on the road, to Moscow, when on June 22, 1941, war came to Ukraine with the first German bombing raids. The same archival document that praised the young bandurists relates this history matter-of-factly:

Petro Kytasty offered his more personal impression of the time. He recalled having tickets to attend a Dynamo-Spartak soccer match with his mother when the war arrived in Kyiv; he was upset that the game was off. His participation in the Pioneer bandurist capella ended abruptly.

With the outbreak of war, many of Stalin’s flowers were uprooted, transplanted, and exposed to different elements, Petro Kytasty included. In 1942, the teenaged bandurist—along with his bandurist father, uncle, and other adult members of the Exemplary Bandurist Choir—was sent to Hamburg by the Nazis and enlisted in forced labor at the Schuppen 43 camp. After six months, the bandurist capella was repurposed for propaganda purposes, and deployed by Nazi authorities to shore up morale among Ostarbeiters (many of them Ukrainian) scattered throughout the Reich. After the war, the bandurist capella existed in the liminal category of “displaced peoples” and eventually migrated to Detroit, where they continued their musical activities while assimilating to new ideological realities in the US. Along with Petro’s sudden coming-of-age—from Soviet Pioneer to junior member of the adult capella in Nazi captivity, to key figure in the bandura culture of the diaspora, where his own son would learn the instrument—the moment of dislocation from Ukraine marked the further splintering of the symbol of the bandura in the second half of the twentieth century.

To those who left Soviet Ukraine the bandura would accrue new meanings in the post-war diaspora as a symbol of Ukrainian national continuity, where some pre-Soviet repertoires and modes of play, including Khotkevych’s Kharkiv style, were recuperated. To those who remained in Soviet Ukraine, including the child bandurists of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers, the bandura developed its Soviet Ukrainian form, repressing memories of the uncomfortable business of constructing internationalist Soviet futurity on the wreckage of the recent past.

Over generations, the seeds from Stalin’s flowers propagated in unexpected ways. Petro’s son, Julian, became a key player in the revival and repatriation of nearly forgotten pre-Soviet kobzar repertoires from his vantage point in the Canadian and North American diasporas. In 1989, it was Julian Kytasty, as a representative of the North American diaspora, who performed a seventeenth-century duma that had been out of circulation in Soviet Ukraine at the first Chervona Ruta music festival. But Julian, a legendary bandurist today, stretched the tradition in multiple directions on the timeline. As an innovator, Kytasty took part in a range of experiments that pushed the bandura form from avant-garde chamber music to cross-fertilizations with downtown New York jazz luminaries, to collaborations with klezmer musicians, to Central Asian improvisatory traditions, to anti-folk pop songs. The Kytasty dynasty of bandura players has a legacy of students who would further seek to recuperate the vernacular, “unimproved” style of pre-twentieth century kobza while also carrying the instrument into new contexts.Footnote ⁷⁰

Notably, the disciplining technologies of Soviet music institutions, and the political education that came along with Petro Kytasty’s bandura instruction were lessons largely unlearned. Not only did the diaspora bandura culture elevate the Kytasty family as leaders who recovered suppressed pre-Soviet practices, but some of these techniques literally remade the way fingers had been taught to move. The diaspora culture of the bandurist capella would coalesce on vehemently anti-Soviet politics that doubled down on the idea of the bandura as exemplifying Ukrainian nationhood across centuries. The Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America, the group reconstituted in Detroit that traces its history to revolutionary Kyiv, writes on their website today that “because its development closely reflects the history of the Ukrainian nation, the bandura is more than a national musical instrument: it is the voice of Ukraine.”Footnote ⁷¹

Russified Internationalism, and What Remains

What would it have looked and sounded like if the bandura had been allowed to develop free from the clashing ideological pressures of the twentieth century; to consent to the nation-state’s withering away in the name of communism, or to prove the anti-imperial nation-state’s unbroken continuity? On the one hand, the bandura’s involvement in projects of modernization was of its time, part of a broad global fad of aligning musical practices with ideas of progress. Yet the specific expectations placed on children to enact communist revolution—and the idea that one could engineer not just young fingers, but also young souls to this end—was exceptional for its time. The children’s bandurist capella is perhaps best understood as an experimental site in which attempts to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable imperatives of anti-imperial nationalism and internationalism collided. The children’s bandurist capella allows us to ask, through the stubborn materiality of musical instruments, how the discourse of Soviet internationalism masked the project of Russification: successfully reconstructing late nineteenth century symbols epitomizing “Russianness,” like the domra, as the desirable and flexible portals through which one could access the emancipatory future, while marking the analogous symbols of Ukrainian culture as potentially dangerous weapons of nationalism and altering their morphologies, capacities, and historical inheritances to inhibit the threat. How could the korenizatsiia-era champions of the bandura have proceeded otherwise, without becoming ensnared in the Stalinist trap of “bourgeois nationalism”?

The obduracy of the Ukrainian national problem in Soviet history is not unique to the period of Stalinism, however. The Donbas-born Ukrainian dissident Ivan Dzyuba’s Internationalism or Russification? illustrates the cyclical return of this problem in his 1967 samovydav text, where he surgically reviewed the history of 1920s debates on “Ukrainianization.” Drawing heavily and rather ingenuously on the writings and speeches of Lenin in particular, Dzyuba addressed his concerns to Ukrainian Communist Party leaders in a letter that makes up the opening pages of the tome:

Dzyuba’s apparent faith in the potential of an emancipatory Marxist-Leninist politics animates the book as he seeks an anti-imperial Ukrainian politics oriented towards the future.

The striking parallels Dzyuba identifies between the era of Skrypnyk and Khotkevych, and the “political arrests” and state’s harassment of prominent cultural workers in August and September of 1965, names an apparently irreconcilable ideological tension (what Dzyuba calls the “phantom of ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’ and the reality of Russian Great Power chauvinism”),Footnote ⁷³ which prompts a bedeviling set of questions relevant to the case of children’s bandurist capellas: how could the specificity of Ukrainian culture have been defended against the assimilative, Russifying project of Soviet internationalism if any attempts at such defense were to become immediately condemned for being “nationalistic” and therefore antithetical to communist state-building? Could the fingers of children have been engineered otherwise, so that the modified musical instruments they were taught to play fully disconnected from distinct and non-hegemonic histories of practice, place, language, and political thought?

“Engineers,” Maxim Gorʹkii stated in a 1935 speech, “work according to a plan.” Therefore, the charge to “we, people of the arts” to be engineers of souls was “a title given to us as an advance. We are not engineers yet.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Much like those tasked with engineering human souls, the engineers of children’s fingers worked without a plan, and were never very successful engineers; at best, they produced ambiguous results. Adults may go on to reverse engineer the lessons they learn as children: they may reinvent the meanings of “national instruments,” make them more than relics of backward-looking nationalism; they may, even, discover renewed uses for them as durable anti-imperialist tools.