7 - The ideological challenge of Ukrainian national communism

Summary

Ukrainianization and the demands of industrialization created a large new intelligentsia and new managerial and political cadres. Catapulted into important positions at a relatively young age, an important group within this new elite committed themselves both to the revolution and to the expansion of the Ukrainian identity.

Present at the creation of an unfettered Ukrainian culture, encouraged and subsidized by the Soviet state, members of the new Ukrainian intelligentsia became – in effect – cultural engineers. They would have a decisive voice in developing a new Ukrainian cultural universe, national in form, but socialist in content. Thousands of decisions, significant and insignificant, had to be made by these new cultural leaders. Most importantly, they were to decide the ends and means of Ukrainian cultural development. How should it develop? What kind of culture should it be? What models should it follow?

The new Soviet Ukrainian intelligentsia, which included the poet Pavlo Tychyna, the playwright Mykola Kulish, the theater director Les Kurbas, and the filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, pondered these questions. Other members of this new intelligentsia emphasized economic and political matters.

These new cadres now insisted that the VKP(b) treat the KP(b)U and the Ukrainian SSR as equal partners, not subordinates, within the framework of the USSR. Exemplified by the views of Mykola Khvyl'ovyi, Oleksander Shums'kyi, Mykhailo Volobuiev, and Mykola Skrypnyk, they sought to equalize the cultural, economic and political ties between the RSFSR and the UkrSSR by defending the Ukrainian cultural and historical heritage.