The Executed Renaissance
“In Ukraine 1937 began in 1933”
— Lev Kopelev, “The Education of a True Believer”
The Terror achieved its ferocity from the 1934 decree authorizing extrajudicial NKVD “troikas” to try, convict, and execute “counter-revolutionary elements”. NKVD vehicles would pull up to the homes of their victims in the middle of the night, and those arrested would be put before a kangaroo court that could act with impunity according to the whims of the local commander. Those arrested might be imprisoned, tortured, immediately executed by firing squad, or sent into internal exile in the Russian far north, where they might die of illness or in an arbitrary execution.
Given Stalin’s hostility towards expressions of non-Russian ethnic identity, it is not at all surprising that the members of the 1920s Ukrainian renaissance became particular targets of the Terror. In fact, so many of them died in the mid and late 1930s that the movement has since become known as the “Executed Renaissance”. Some of its members avoided arrest by lowering their profile and moving out of Kyiv or outside of Ukraine altogether. The poet Mykola Bazhan, assuming from attacks against him in the press that his arrest was imminent, began to spend nights in city parks and other locations, so as not to be home when the NKVD arrived. It was in a park on one such night that he read in the newspaper that he had been awarded the Order of Lenin for his Ukrainian translation of the 12th century Georgian epic poem “The Knight in the Panther's Skin” by Shota Rustaveli. He later learned that his name was indeed on a list of people to be arrested, but that Stalin had been so fond of the Rustaveli translation that he personally intervened.
The impact of these events are hard to overstate. One could try to imagine what American literature would have been like if Hemingway, ....., had all been killed in the 1930s. That is very much what happened to Ukrainian literature of the time.
We can visualize this catastrophe though one single photograph taken in 1921. In this remarkable image we see many of the key figures of the Ukrainian "Executed Renaissance", including writers, artists, composers, and other figures in the creative ferment of 1920s Ukraine. By exploring their fates, we can gain a more concrete understanding of this cultural disaster.
Killed or died in internal exile
Highlighted above are those who were executed by the NKVD, killed while under arrest, or who died as a result of their repression.
Imprisoned, repressed, or harassed
----Escaped
----
