Revisiting the Victims (and Perpetrators) of Stalin’s Repressions

The rehabilitation of the Soviet Ukrainian narrative that characterized the Thaw included a reconsideration of the first decades of Soviet Ukrainian history and many of the Communists that had been prominent on its political stage. De-Stalinization necessitated revisiting the most famous Russian Bolsheviks who had become victims of Stalin’s purges, like Bukharin and Rykov, but also threw open the question of members of republican party organizations that had fallen victim to Stalinist repressions in the 1930s. In the case of Ukraine, this meant that figures such as Pavel Postyshev, Grigorii Petrovskii, Vlas Chubar, Volodymyr Zatons’kyi, Stanislav Kosior, and Mykola Skrypnyk would be revisited. All had occupied key party and state positions in Ukraine during the 1920s, only to fall out of official favor in the 1930s.

Because of their close association with Kharkiv, the names of these Communists appeared again in a significant way in Kharkiv as they did across Ukraine in the streets, squares, and public spaces and thus public consciousness. Apart from the wave of formal toponymic changes that came about as a result of the reconsideration of these figures’ legacies, the oblast committee and individual Communists also evinced a deep interest in their lives and sought to return them to public prominence.

The mostly secret work of rehabilitating the high-level victims of the Stalinist system in the 1930s began soon after the dictator’s death and continued on a broader scale, especially after the secret speech in February 1956. Official rehabilitations mostly took place at the center in Moscow and then instructions were sent to the republics. The case of Postyshev was one of the first to be revisited.Footnote ³ Stalin had dispatched Postyshev to Ukraine as a kind of personal representative and he carried out wide-ranging purges in all sectors of society (Kostiuk Reference Kostiuk1960). Although he was the most powerful figure in Ukraine, formally he served as second secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee (1933–1937), as well as secretary of the Kharkiv party organization from 1926 to 1930 and again in 1933–1934. In May 1955, USSR Procurator Rudenko investigated Postyshev’s criminal file and reported to the Central Committee in Moscow that the case could be closed and Postyshev posthumously rehabilitated. The Supreme Court of the USSR agreed and Postyshev was rehabilitated the following month and reinstated into the party in July (Artizov et al. 2000, 218–220, 325). In August 1955, the Procurator and KGB head Serov similarly found that the cases against Chubar, who had been a member of the Ukrainian politburo and the head of the Ukrainian government from 1923 to 1934, had been fabricated and recommended he be posthumously rehabilitated, which the Supreme Court did that same month. Chubar was reinstated into the party in November 1955 (Artizov et al. 2000, 251–252, 405, 449). Kosior had been the general secretary of the Ukrainian party from 1928 to 1937. Following an investigation into his case, he too was rehabilitated and reinstated into the party on March 22, 1956 (Artizov et al. 2000, 436). All three had been arrested in 1938 and executed in 1939.

Gradually, these historical figures from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union returned to the public sphere. In a 1958 speech in front of the Central Committee in Kyiv commemorating the 40th anniversary of the CPU, first secretary Mykola Pidhornyi mentioned Postyshev, Kosior, and Petrovskii (along with Khrushchev and Stalin) as great figures in the CPSU, and included Zatons’kyi and Chubar among a list of those who had made their careers within the CPU (Podgornyi Reference Podgornyi1958, 27).Footnote ⁴ Skrypnyk, who had been Commissar of Education during Ukrainization in the 1920s, was still left out of the pantheon at that point, most likely due to his complicated reputation as a proponent of Ukrainian interests.Footnote ⁵

By the end of the 1950s, party members as well as the families of rehabilitated Communists were pushing for more commemorations of these figures. On March 20, 1960, a group of Communists wrote to the Central Committee in Moscow asking it to allow the preparation of a monograph on Chubar’s life and work, as well as to rename the Zaporizhzhia Machine Building Institute and a street in Kharkiv in his honor. The Central Committee deferred the issue to the Ukrainian party, which replied that it had plans to restore the name Chubarivka to Chubar’s ancestral village and to rename a kolkhoz in Zaporizhzhia oblast in his honor. The Ukrainian leadership declined to pursue the monograph, however. As the 70th anniversary of Chubar’s birthday (February 23, 1961) approached, another letter-writing campaign began. This time, the idea was to have a gathering hosted at the USSR Museum of the Revolution in Moscow to be attended by Chubar’s family and party colleagues. The letter did not arrive in time for the anniversary, however, and the date passed without the Central Committee’s formal approval. By April 1962, the head of the division on propaganda and agitation for union republics reported to the Central Committee, as some consolation, perhaps, that materials about Chubar’s life had been added to the exhibition at the Museum of the Revolution and a biographical brochure was in the works (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History [RGANI] 5/33/197/23–24).

The XXII Party congress in 1961, which more thoroughly de-Stalinized the country while simultaneously scaling back certain reforms, provided a further impetus to rehabilitate Stalin’s victims (Dobson Reference Dobson, Miriam2009, 189–214). Newspaper articles began to appear in Pravda and Izvestiia, usually in connection with an anniversary of a historical figure’s birth or death dates. The Central Committee formally approved the publication of these articles and ordered Republican newspapers to publish corresponding articles of their own. It gave its imprimatur to articles about Postyshev in August 1962 and Chubar and Petrovsky (who had actually survived the purge but had died in 1958) in December of that year (RGANI 5/33/197/50–52, 123–27, 127a).

The Pravda article on Postyshev appeared in September 1962 on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of his birth and referred to him as a “staunch Leninist” and talented propagandist. Though it focused mostly on his contributions to the revolution, victory in the Civil War, and the party, the article also called attention to his efforts on behalf of Ukrainian culture and his dedication to young people (he had been instrumental in building the Palace of Pioneers in Kharkiv, for example) (“Stoikii Leninist” 1962). Obviously, little mention was made of the central role he played in terrorizing the Ukrainian Party leadership as well as members of the cultural and academic elites of Ukraine prior to his own arrest. The rehabilitation of Postyshev touched Kharkiv through the renaming of Avangardnaia street in his honor on May 8, 1962 and later with the appearance of a 3.3-kilometers-long boulevard bearing his name in 1972. The Kharkiv oblast committee (obkom) asked the Ukrainian Soviet of Ministers to rename the Pioneer Palace in Kharkiv after Postyshev within days of the Pravda article, suggesting that his name carried some resonance locally (State Archive of Kharkiv Oblast [DAKhO] P-2/5/1219/29).

Skrypnyk’s legacy as commissar of education of the Ukrainian SSR was a bit more mixed and the party proceeded cautiously.Footnote ⁶ Just after the XXII party congress, another group of Communists wrote a letter to directly to Nikita Khrushchev lauding Skrypnyk and asking for his rehabilitation in connection with the 90th anniversary of his birth. In this letter, they explained that he committed suicide not in protest of Stalin, but in despair at the arrests of his subordinates for alleged spying. They also played up two instances in which Skrypnyk disagreed with Stalin, perhaps hoping to take advantage of the blackened reputation of the former leader. Finally, they suggested that the rehabilitation of his name would strengthen the party and prevent Skrypnyk’s name from being used by “Petliurites and the Ukrainian nationalist emigration” against the Soviet Union (Artizov et al. 2003, 370–371; Dobson Reference Dobson, Miriam2009).

The Presidium of the all-Union Central Committee issued instructions on January 22, 1962 to mark the upcoming anniversary of Skrypnyk’s birth with articles in Pravda, Izvestiia, Pravda Ukrainy, and Radians’ka Ukraïna, and asked the Ukrainian party and government to look into honoring his memory and publishing his collected works (Artizov et al. 2003, 815). The Central Committee in Kyiv also issued an order regarding Skrypnyk and on January 27, 1962 the biuro of the Kharkiv oblast party committee followed suit, ordering articles about Skrypnyk to be published in both Krasnoe znamia and Sotsialistychna Kharkivshchyna. They also asked the city soviet to clean up the site of Skrypnyk’s grave and to rename a street in his honor (DAKhO P-2/5/1157/35). That day, a lengthy biographical article appeared in Krasnoe znamia extolling Skrypnyk’s revolutionary activities and closeness to Lenin, arguing that he had been unfairly maligned as a result of the “cult of personality” (Bludov Reference Bludov1962). The article is noteworthy for the fact that author Yakiv Bludov—a former rector of Kharkiv University—had himself been repressed in 1934. He had only returned to work at the university’s philosophy department in 1957. On February 13, the city council changed the name of Public Education Lane to Skrypnyk Street, a symbolic choice given Skrypnyk’s close association with education.

In the new climate, the republic’s party organization decided to move ahead with plans to write a new, ideologically correct history for itself, to which each oblast would contribute its own volume. The rehabilitation of Postyshev, Kosior, and Chubar in newspapers during 1962 demonstrated that the legacies of these leaders were open for research, at least partially. In May 1962, the Kharkiv obkom issued a decree on writing and compiling a history of the Kharkiv oblast party committee. It connected this effort to the upcoming 60th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and established a group of authors and an editorial collegium that would be responsible for writing it (DAKhO P-2/5/1171/60–61). The project’s authors included G. M. Okladnoi and Yuri Kondufor, and Yu. F. Bukhalov became the main editor (DAKhO P-2/5/1171/106–107). In October 1962, Bukhalov, who was then a secretary of the Kharkiv obkom, appealed to the Central Committee in Moscow to grant Kharkiv University professor A. D. Perevozov access to archival materials about the activities of Postyshev, Chubar, and Kosior (RGANI 5/33/199/82–83). Although the Central Committee punted on this specific request, it referred Bukhalov to the Central Party Archive and the Ukrainian Central Committee. This letter demonstrates the centrality of these figures to the historical narrative the Kharkiv obkom was trying to articulate.

The project of writing a second edition of a history of the Ukrainian party caused disputes between the chief party history institutions in Moscow and in Kyiv. In August 1962, Petro Shelest, who was then a secretary for machine building at the Central Committee in Kyiv, met with a professor who complained about the falsifications of early Party history that accompanied the project. Shelest noted in his diary that, in disputes with the “Muscovites” (moskvichi), the director of the Ukrainian Institute for Party History Ivan Nazarenko “defends the correct positions,” but the “Muscovites” Snegov and Mints are doing all they can to “minimize the role and significance of the CPU” (Shelest Reference Shelest1995, 156). In spite of the support of both Pidhornyi and Shelest, the project languished for several years.

The rehabilitation of Ukrainian party activists during the Thaw was a negotiated and contingent process that was aimed at legitimating the party, state, and new Soviet leadership in the post-Stalin era. The memory of the 1920s in Kharkiv was strengthened during this period by the official focus on individual victims of Stalinism, just as it was strengthened by a focus on the history of the CPU. Within the party, the return of these individuals represented a genuine (if inherently flawed) attempt to find historical justice and reaffirmed the Ukrainian Party’s place within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It also strengthened the association of Kharkiv with this era of Soviet history as its streets and public squares were renamed in accordance with the new politics of memory.

Kharkiv as a Site of Memory

The Soviet Union celebrated a series of anniversaries in the mid- to late-1950s that drew on history in order to legitimize the regime in the new political and ideological dispensation. The 300th anniversary of the “Reunification of Ukraine with Russia” was observed with Union-wide pomp and circumstance in 1954. On a more local level, Kharkiv Communists marked the 150th anniversary of Kharkiv University in 1955 and the 300th anniversary of the city itself in 1956. The republican party organization, for its part, celebrated the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1957 and the 40th anniversary of the CPU in 1958.

The party had been working at the highest levels since the summer of 1953 on the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia.Footnote ⁷ Commemorations lasted several months over the first half of 1954. In Kharkiv, Andrii Skaba, the obkom secretary of ideology and propaganda, was at the center of preparations on the local level. On November 26, 1953, he met with the chairmen of the party organizations of the city’s colleges and institutes and chided them for their overly historical approach to commemorations. He emphasized that the anniversary celebrations should stress the anniversary’s contemporary political importance and that preparations should avoid dry historical facts (DAKhO P-2/4/1027/1–21). Two days later, the city committee issued a decree (hewing to the patriotic spirit of the time, it was in Ukrainian), which called the friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples “the foundation of foundations of the Soviet multinational state and the source of the strength and invincibility of our great, socialist fatherland” (DAKhO P-69/14/45/134–41). As the oblast’s chief ideologist, Skaba set a tone for the rest of the party by speaking Ukrainian almost exclusively in these meetings. Many, though far from all, of his interlocutors reciprocated. Although the theme of Russo-Ukrainian unity might seem to underemphasize Ukraine’s distinctiveness, in the context of the time it reinforced Ukraine’s importance in the Soviet Union as a junior partner rather than simply one non-Russian republic among others.

The party mobilized Kharkiv’s cultural institutions. To commemorate the 1654 Pereiaslav Rada, the Kharkiv State History Museum revised, expanded, and added material to the section of its permanent exhibition devoted to the “War of Liberation of the Ukrainian People against Feudal Poland and for the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia.” It added, among other things, busts of Cossack leader Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi and his lieutenants Bohun and Kryvonos, which were manufactured in the Kyiv sculpture factory. It also organized a traveling exhibit titled “On 300 Years since the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia” to be displayed at factories, houses of culture, and collective farms throughout the oblast (DAKhO R-5942/1/140/1–3). The months-long celebration of the Pereiaslav Agreement included visits to Kharkiv from major party leaders, including Ukrainian Party first secretary Kyrychenko. In February 1954, Kyrychenko read a speech in front of a Kharkiv oblast party conference in which he highlighted the role of Kharkiv in the development of the economy in Soviet Ukraine and the Soviet Union as a whole, themes that were a continuation of Stalinist-era narratives about the importance of Soviet economic development (Central State Archive of Civic Organizations of Ukraine [TsDAHOU] 1/24/3691/1–26).

An occasion of notable local importance took place a year later in 1955: the 150th anniversary of Kharkiv University. While the commemorations of Russo-Ukrainian unity were still well underway, university rector Ivan Bulankin and party committee secretary Pluzhnikov wrote a joint letter to obkom secretary Vitalii Titov in April 1954 asking for the obkom’s support in petitioning the central committees in Kyiv and Moscow for permission to mark the anniversary. The letter emphasized the university’s contributions to the development of Ukrainian national culture in the 19th century, its popularization of enlightenment under the tsars, and its dramatic growth under the Soviets (DAKhO P-2/5/178/8–13). With feedback from the obkom, the letter eventually was sent to Kyiv on May 20. The only substantive change the obkom made to the letter was the removal of references to the university’s jubilee being “a significant event in the life of the Ukrainian people and fraternal Russian people, as well as all the peoples of the great, multinational Soviet Union” and a “continuation of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the reunification of Ukraine and Russia” (TsDAHOU 1/30/3595/13–18).

On April 19, 1955, the day of the anniversary, a plenary session of the university was held in the opera theater. Bulankin, who was an ethnic Russian originally from the Volga region, gave a speech in what contemporaries recall as memorably Russian-accented Ukrainian.Footnote ⁸ A banquet followed the plenary session. Another detail from the banquet suggests that a new atmosphere existed in Kharkiv. According to chemistry professor Boris Krasovitskii’s recollections, Bulankin insisted on inviting former rector Yakiv Bludov to the banquet commemorating the university’s founding. Bludov had been arrested in 1934 and would not be rehabilitated until 1956. Inviting him to the banquet prior to his official return to good graces, in Krasovitskii’s view, risked the displeasure of the city’s political leadership (Krasovitskii Reference Krasovitskii2004, 41–42).

The following year, the Kharkiv obkom marked the 300th anniversary of the city by creating local sites of memory that connected the city to the revolution in a general way as well as to its own revolutionary heritage specifically. It approved the creation of plaques to Communist activists who had spent time in the city or were otherwise connected to it, including Artem, Frunze, Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Dzerzhinskii, Sverdlov, and Gorkii. The list of plaques also included Ukrainian cultural figures from the 19th century, such as writer and Kharkiv University professor Petro Hulak-Artemovs’kyi, writer and dramatist Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov”ianenko, composer Mykola Lysenko, and writer Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi (DAKhO P-2/5/393/2,30, 85–86). Notably, this prescription for marking Kharkiv’s symbolic space created a pantheon of heroes to which city residents could feel connected, but it did not yet include any of the Ukrainian Communists who had been repressed in the 1930s. The oblast publishing house also released a detailed guidebook covering the city’s history under the byline of the chairman of the city executive committee Oleksii Mykhailyk, which became a standard reference work for local historians (Mykhailyk Reference Mykhailyk1956).

The following year, after the XX Party congress, was a watershed for the historical profession in Ukraine, with the appearance of Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, a full-fledged scholarly journal dedicated to generating Soviet Ukraine’s historical narrative. The editorial from the journal’s first issue credits the XX Party congress with giving historians the chance to correct numerous problematic aspects of historical study in the Soviet Union. It also suggested that the framework of Soviet statehood was indeed the theme that ought to be explored in more depth: “Only as a consequence of the victory of the Great October socialist revolution did the Ukrainian Soviet state appear and did it become possible for the reunification of all Ukrainian lands” (“Vid redaktsiinoï kolehiï” 1957, 6). The story of Soviet Ukrainian statehood was the story of the transformation of Ukraine from “the half-colony, which it was under tsarism” into the “leading industrial-collective farm republic with a highly developed and distinctive national culture” (“Vid redaktsiinoï kolehiï” 1957, 6).

The Kharkiv oblast committee took the opportunity of the 40th anniversary of the revolutionary year of 1917 to mark historically significant spaces in the city. There is little evidence to suggest that the local party was taking risky initiatives of its own to press for the rehabilitation of repressed local Communists in this context, but it did propose an expansion of historical commemorations. Obkom ideology secretary Skaba submitted a list of recommendations to the Central Committee in Kyiv on September 20, 1956, including a statue to Lenin to be built on Dzerzhinskii Square, an obelisk on the spot where the first All-Ukrainian Soviet had declared a Soviet Ukrainian republic in December 1917, and a monument to those who had died in the Civil War defending Soviet power on a hill near Tevelev square (TsDAHOU 1/70/2325/69–70). The Civil War monument was built for the commemorations, although the Lenin statue would not be built until 1963 and the proposed monument to the declaration of the Soviet Ukrainian republic took even longer (1975). The obkom planned to publish seven books at the oblast printing house, including books by Ivan Rybalka, Kondufor, V. Astakhov, and Okladnoi on various aspects of the October Revolution in Ukraine and in Kharkiv, specifically (TsDAHOU 1/70/2325/70). Rybalka published an article in Sotsialistychna Kharkivshchyna in December under the headline “The Flowering of Soviet Ukraine in the Fraternal Family of Peoples of the USSR” to mark the 40th anniversary of Soviet Ukraine (Rybalka Reference Rybalka1957).

The obkom also published 8,000 copies of a handbook for propagandists and agitators under the byline of Vitalii N. Titov, the oblast committee’s first secretary. In the introduction, it gives an outline of how Kharkiv fit into the historical narrative of October, calling Kharkiv an “all-Ukrainian revolutionary center,” listing names of local activists in the Communist movement like Artem, and calling attention to the December 1917 Congress of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants Deputies, which proclaimed the first Ukrainian Soviet government. The book identified Kharkiv as “the cradle of Ukrainian Soviet statehood [gosudarstvennost’]” (Titov Reference Titov1957).

The 40th-anniversary celebrations also coincided with the fall of the “Anti-Party Group,” which meant the political downfall of Georgii Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich, and Vyacheslav Molotov. The historical profession blamed the Anti-Party Group for being against strengthening the rights of union republics, which was slowing down the development of the “friendship of the people” (“Vid redaktsiinoï kolehiï” 1957, 5). Political changes required a widespread renaming campaign across the Union and this affected Kharkiv in its turn. The city renamed the Kaganovich district after the republic’s capital, Kyiv (though the Stalin district remained for several more years). The square in front of the train station also dropped Kaganovich’s name and reverted to the nonideological Train Station Square.

The most noteworthy changes in the historical narrative of Soviet Ukraine became evident in the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the CPU, which was observed in 1958. Communists with a connection to Kharkiv were crucial in shaping the festivities, particularly former Kharkiv obkom first secretary Pidhornyi as well as Ivan Nazarenko, an ideology specialist who had moved from the Kharkiv committee to the Central Committee in Kyiv in 1945. During World War II, Nazarenko had published an ode to Taras Shevchenko called The Bard of the Freedom of the Slavic Peoples (Spivets’ svobody slov”ians’kykh narodiv). The pamphlet develops an image of Shevchenko as a revolutionary and an internationalist who fought for the interests of all of the Slavic people and opposed this image to anti-Slavic German policies (Nazarenko Reference Nazarenko1943).

On July 5, 1958, the Ukrainian party held a celebratory plenum at which Pidhornyi explained the nature of Soviet Ukrainian patriotism to the audience and set the tone for commemorations of Soviet Ukraine’s early history. “Since time immemorial, the Ukrainian people has walked shoulder-to-shoulder with the Russian people, and together with him, with his assistance, goes from victory to victory,” he noted (Podgornyi 1958, 4). “For a Ukrainian, just as for a Belarusian or Georgian, for every citizen of the USSR, the idea of ‘fatherland’ is not limited to his republic,” he continued, approvingly quoting Ukrainian poet Maksym Ryl’s’kyi (Podgornyi 1958, 26). While paying tribute to the Friendship of the Peoples and the crucial friendship between Russians and Ukrainians, the fact that a major party anniversary was being celebrated on the republican level is noteworthy. The speech was significant for another reason: because it mentioned the names of leaders of the CPU who were victims of Stalin’s purges, such as Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior, and Vlas Chubar, on a very high level (Podgornyi 1958, 27). Being mentioned in a speech at the Central Committee meant that these figures had officially been approved for veneration (after already being rehabilitated by the Central Committee in Moscow, of course). The speech was published in a Russian edition of 15,000 and a Ukrainian edition of 50,000 (Podgornyi Reference Podgornyi1958; Pidhornyi Reference Pidhornyi1958).

As part of the 40th-anniversary celebrations, the Ukrainian party passed resolutions to more fully study its own history, prioritizing the study of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. In connection with this, the apparatus began to lobby Moscow for increased resources for its historical institutions. On July 26, 1958, Pidhornyi appealed to the ideological section of the Central Committee in Moscow for permission to create two additional subsections at the Institute of Party History, one on the Civil War and one on the Great Patriotic War, and to hire two additional typists (RGANI 5/33/64/114–15). When this request fell on deaf ears, Nazarenko, who became the Institute’s director in 1956, tried writing to Oleksii Kyrychenko, who had been promoted and was then a secretary of the all-union Central Committee in Moscow. Nazarenko reminded the former Ukrainian Party boss that, while he had worked in Kyiv, he had supported the idea of creating scholarly, multivolume histories of these conflicts. Ukrainian land had been at the center of these struggles, Nazarenko argued, and thus Ukraine’s experience of them deserved special study (RGANI 5/33/64/116–117). The Central Committee did not budge, however.

The CPU’s initiatives did not always run into resistance. At the same July 5 plenum, the CPU issued a secret decree, “On Putting Up Memorial Plaques in Places Related to the History of the Communist Party of Ukraine.” The decree required the Kharkiv and Poltava oblast governments as well as the Kyiv city government to fund the creation of memorial plaques dedicated to historic party meetings in their cities. A plaque was to be built in Kharkiv on Feuerbach Square, where in December 1917 the Kryvyi Rih and Donets basin party organizations of the RSDRP declared themselves in favor of the creation of a Congress of Bolshevik organizations of Ukraine. The list of plaques also included one dedicated to an April 1918 party meeting in Taganrog, which had supported creating a Ukrainian Bolshevik party. This latter plaque was to be funded by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and required the approval of the Central Committee in Moscow (RGANI 5/33/64/104–6). The plaques in Ukraine were to contain Ukrainian-language texts, while the one in Taganrog (in Rostov oblast of the RSFSR) was to be written in both Russian and Ukrainian. After coordinating with the Rostov oblast committee, the Central Committee in Moscow approved the initiative (RGANI 5/33/64/107).

Of course, party leaders could not go very far in publicly implying that Kharkiv was “more equal among equals” compared to other Ukrainian cities, even if these emotions were clearly circulating. Obkom secretary Vitalii Titov received a letter in the summer of 1958 from Kharkivites living in Moscow. The letter writers were veterans of party work (their signatures indicated they had all joined between 1905 and 1918). They congratulated Titov on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the CPU and indicated their pride that socialist Kharkiv had become a “fortress” of the socialist fatherland. They noted that Kharkiv had been the site of the declaration of the Ukrainian Soviet republic and its capital city for 20 years and went on to wish “their countrymen [zemliaki] and fighting party comrades further successes…. May Socialist Ukraine and its leading frontline Kharkiv oblast continue to flourish, grow, and strengthen!” Secretary Skaba found the letter noteworthy enough that he ordered it to be circulated among members of the obkom biuro (DAKhO P-2/5/721/26–27).

In the late 1950s, party leaders and ideologists from Kharkiv played a leading role in generating historical knowledge about the Ukrainian republic and about Kharkiv oblast in particular. They sought to integrate the many regions of Ukraine tightly into the Soviet Ukrainian historical narrative, negotiate the delicate balance between local and national in historical studies, and excavate new meanings from the early decades of post-1917 history in Ukraine. In their revalorized narration of the history of Soviet Ukraine, Kharkiv was placed at the center of revolutionary events due to its “proletarian” reputation and its status as the city where the Ukrainian SSR was first created. Its historical centrality to the Soviet Ukrainian narrative buttressed its status as a political and economic bulwark of the Soviet system within the Ukrainian republic.

Recently, scholars have begun to move away from an understanding of the Thaw as a liberalization of politics and have rather begun to understand it as a strategic reconsideration of Soviet history that rejected Stalinism and sought a forward-looking movement toward Communism under the new leadership (Jones Reference Jones2013; Jones Reference Jones2006; Bittner Reference Bittner2008; Donovan Reference Donovan2015). My argument about the activities of Ukrainian Communists during this period fits this interpretive framework and extends it into the provinces. Far from being a revival of autonomous sentiments meant to expand the rights of Ukraine at the expense of the Soviet whole, the movement within the party to recover its own history was meant to strengthen the legitimacy of the republic as well as the union.

Into the 1960s

As the Soviet Union moved into the 1960s and looked toward the 50th anniversary of the 1917 revolution, the Soviet Ukrainian foundational mythology of statehood continued to be a centerpiece of propaganda. In 1962, the 45th anniversary of Soviet Ukraine was marked in December. The Kharkiv newspaper Krasnoe znamia published an editorial in which it connected the city to the establishment of Soviet rule in Ukraine (“Soviets’koi Ukraine – 45 let”). Sotsialistychna Kharkivshchyna issued an editorial titled “In a New and Free Family,” echoing a famous line from Shevchenko’s poetry (“V sim”ï vil’nii, novii” 1962). A short book on Skrypnyk was published in Kyiv as part of the “Fighters in a Great Cause” series (Babko Reference Babko1962).

By the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, many of the local Kharkiv Communists that had been responsible for organizing historical commemorations had moved on to more prestigious roles in Kyiv. Skaba and Kondufor, for example, both occupied high-level posts within the ideological section of the Central Committee apparatus and Kharkiv oblast native Petro Tron’ko became deputy head of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR. Rybalka and Okladnoi remained at Kharkiv University. These party workers collaborated in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution as well as the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Soviet Ukraine.

In preparation for these anniversaries, the Kharkiv newspaper Krasnoe znamia addressed historical topics. In a 1967 article, the newspaper gave an overview of Skrypnyk’s biography, focusing on his revolutionary activities and his service in high-level positions in the state and the party. The article carried the byline of Yakiv Bludov, who was listed as a party member since 1917 and a professor at Kharkiv State University (Bludov Reference Bludov1967). Information about Bludov’s background did not appear in the newspaper, but the fact that a victim of repression and a personal acquaintance of Skrypnyk had published another article on him was not lost on the city’s intellectuals. Krasnoe znamia mentioned Skrypnyk that year in an overview of Soviet Ukraine’s history on the occasion of the republic’s 50th anniversary, written by Stepan Korolivs’kii, who was at that time the head of the Department of the History of the Soviet Union at Kharkiv University (Korolivskii Reference Korolivskii1967).

The commemoration did not stop at newspaper articles. The Ukrainian party leadership in Kyiv approved and published a 200-page biography of Skrypnyk in 1967 (Babko and Bilokobyl’s’kyi Reference Babko and Bilokobyl’skyi1967). The following year, a statue of Skrypnyk was built in the center of Kharkiv on Pushkins’ka street (Leibfreid, Reusov, and Tits 1987, 73). Skrypnyk’s name and image was now firmly integrated into the Soviet Ukrainian historical narrative in Kharkiv, although there were no statues to him in other Ukrainian cities, which suggested that his veneration was localized (Tron’ko Reference Tron’ko1987).

As was the case five years earlier, Skrypnyk’s and Postyshev’s anniversaries were celebrated in 1967. Krasnoe znamia returned to Postyshev’s life story, publishing a biographical article on him the day after it ran a front-page report on a Moscow academic conference dedicated to him (Melekhin Reference Melekhin1967; “Pamiati P. P. Postysheva” Reference “Pamiati1967). Notably, the laudatory article by Melekhin credited Postyshev with initiating the tradition of lighting up a pine tree for the New Year, which had become an enormously popular Soviet tradition. Postyshev became a well-known figure among Communists and was even the subject of a film which members of a political education group in the Saltivka district of Kharkiv reported particularly enjoying in 1969–1970 (DAKhO P-69/42/24/1–8). A monument to him was finally built in Kharkiv in 1977, although its construction dragged on for years after the Ukrainian Central Committee and the Soviet of Ministers ordered it in May 1967 (DAKhO P-2/168/161/16–18).

Across the republic, the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution led to a flurry of monument construction. In its joint resolution on May 16, 1967, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers ordered the creation of numerous monuments and memorials that commemorated revolutionary events in Ukraine. In addition to the Skrypnyk monument in Kharkiv, the republic built monuments honoring Kosior, Petrovskii, and Chubar in Kyiv in 1970. Finally, a monument to the declaration of Soviet power in Ukraine was built in Kharkiv in 1974 (TsDAHOU 1/32/1058/13–15). The latter monument eventually won the Shevchenko award for visual art and architecture in 1977 (DAKhO P-2/171/122/174–174a). Although it was built after the dismissal of Shelest and the purge of his allies within the Ukrainian party, the project itself represented the apotheosis of the Ukrainian party’s efforts to tell its own national version of the foundational revolutionary narrative of Soviet Ukraine before the political ground shifted.