3 - “People Are Going for the Party Who Are Forcing Us to Be Justifiably Careful”: The Reassembled Elite

Summary

Kyiv's reassembled elite found it easier than the masses to access scarce resources following the city's liberation. A letter written by a man named Bitniia-Shliakhta to the Kyiv Obkom in summer 1944 sheds some light on this situation:

On June 10, 1944, a Kyiv Obkom employee, Beregovenko, burst into our apartment at 19 Engels Street, apartment 7, where my mother and father occupy two rooms. Our big family has lived in that apartment from the time our building was built, or twelve years. From the first days of the war, my brother, who served in the army, went to the front… . From the moment he occupied part of my apartment, Beregovenko started to harass my parents and my wife. He started to threaten them and to curse at them. My father sent a declaration to the raion procurator. After a month the raion procurator refused to evict Beregovenko. My father wrote another declaration to the Kyiv City Procurator. After three weeks the Kyiv City Procurator sent that declaration to the raion procurator to be looked over again and the raion procurator then gave this answer, “Forget about your two rooms. They are no longer yours. There are people whom it is impossible to evict.”

The outcome of Bitniia-Shliakhta's efforts to recover his family's rooms is unclear. One thing that is clear, however, is that Beregovenko should never have been allowed to occupy them, considering that Bitniia-Shliakhta's brother was in the Red Army. But while procurators usually tried to enforce the laws of the land, the local Communists running the Ukrainian capital often became laws unto themselves during this period.

This chapter examines this reassembled elite, the Communists registered with the Kyiv Gorkom and Obkom. It focuses on full-time party functionaries, for they carried awesome responsibilities and encountered equally great difficulties given Kyiv's position in the war effort. As these elites secured the city's best resources for themselves, or allowed others access to the same, they also risked making enemies among the masses.