The historiography of western and post-Soviet Ukrainians has generally taken a dim view of the early Soviet period. This includes the utopic mid-1920s, the heyday of state-sponsored Ukrainization, which promoted Ukrainian language and culture while promising to reverse the oppressive legacies of Russian chauvinism and imperialism. Leading Bolsheviks believed that this approach would win Ukrainians over to the socialist cause, hopefully preempting a resurgence of “separatist” Ukrainian nationalism, which the Red Army struggled to defeat between 1918 and 1921. The prevalent narrative among Ukrainian researchers holds that Soviet Ukraine experienced an extraordinary literary and artistic renaissance in the 1920s, but that this renaissance was “executed” by the siloviki following the rise of Iosif Stalin, the suppression of Ukrainization's most avid supporters, and the return to Russification as state policy. Viewing the 1920s through the lens of the famine-genocide of 1932–33, which killed millions in Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian historians tend to condemn the entire Soviet project, from start to finish, as violently Ukrainophobic. Even Ukrainization, half implemented then discarded, worked insidiously to secure the Muscovite monopoly on high culture, science, and power. The Ukrainians who aligned themselves with the Soviet state and the Communist Party either had to betray something vital about their national identity or face persecution, whereas an authentic Ukrainian culture and politics could only be anti-Soviet. State-sanctioned Soviet Ukrainian culture could only be a colonial parody of Ukraine's national genius.
In Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Politics under Lenin and Stalin, Olena Palko offers a far more nuanced account of the intersection of interwar Ukrainian culture and Soviet power. Instead of treating the Communist Party's abandonment of Ukrainization as a foregone conclusion, baked into the veiled Russian imperialism of Bolshevik ideology, Palko emphasizes the agency and originality of the authentically Ukrainian and anticolonial, yet pro-Soviet, writers of the 1920s. The reorientation of our perspective that this book urges is a sorely needed corrective to Moscow-centric diffusionism and neocolonial stereotypes about Ukraine more generally, which are rife across the disciplines in Slavic Studies. Palko centers Ukrainian actors, ideas, and texts on both sides of the conflict between “Soviet Ukrainian culture and Soviet culture created in the Ukrainian language” (4)—between an autonomous and uniquely Ukrainian version of Sovietness, on the one hand, and a centralized all-Soviet ethos translated into the local idiom, on the other. Palko uncovers Sovietization and Ukrainization as bitterly contested processes that were internal to and proceeded from Ukrainian life, not mere impositions from outside. She argues convincingly that the unified Soviet Ukrainian literary canon, which emerged after the 1930s, was in fact the result of an amalgamation of these competing projects.
Combining biography, literary analysis, and a close reading of the era's polemics, Palko analyzes two renowned Ukrainian writers—the prosaist Mykola Khvyl΄ovyi (1893–1933) and the poet Pavlo Tychyna (1891–1967)—as personifications of the inner tensions and idiosyncrasies of literature in early Soviet Ukraine. Khvyl΄ovyi is famous today for his intrepid advocacy of a Ukrainian high culture finally stepping out of the shadow of Russian hegemony and taking its inspiration directly from European exemplars. Associated with the slogan “away from Moscow,” Khvyl΄ovyi championed the idea of a Ukrainian Soviet culture no longer stifled by Russian chauvinism and a colonial inferiority complex. An ardent communist who sided with the Red Army in the civil war, Khvyl΄ovyi fell afoul of the authorities for his alleged anti-Russian attitudes and “bourgeois nationalism,” faced condemnation and censorship by the Party, became disillusioned with Soviet rule in practice, and committed suicide in 1933. Khvyl΄ovyi has secured a place in the pantheon of Ukrainian national heroes, despite his loyalty to the Soviet project until his early death. Tychyna, by contrast, started out as a Ukrainian “separatist,” but then succumbed to the pressure to conform to the official line. He had a long and successful career in the Party and became essential reading in Soviet Ukrainian schools, but Tychyna does not enjoy the same cachet in the Ukrainian reading public today.
Making Ukraine Soviet is an innovative and thoroughly researched introduction to these two writers. It illuminates their biographical and institutional milieus, while offering astute analyses and lively translations of their work. The book sheds light on the broader process of Sovietizing Ukraine, parsing the entanglement and synthesis of Ukrainian nationalism, Marxism-Leninism, and Russian imperialism in the 1920s. In a time when decommunization and decolonization are often assumed to go hand in hand, Palko uncovers the hidden potentialities and seemingly forsaken trends of early Soviet Ukrainian culture, which laid the groundwork for modern Ukraine's creative and political independence as much as any other era.
