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.
Some members of the 1920s Ukrainian renaissance avoided arrest by lowering their profile, going into hiding, moving to the countryside, or leaving 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”. He later learned that he was to have been arrested, but that Stalin was so fond of Bazhan's 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 Earnest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck had all been killed in the same time period. That is very much what happened to Ukrainian literature at that time.
Visualizing the toll of the Executed Renaissance
In this remarkable photograph taken in Kyiv in the early 1920s, we see a number of key figures from the Ukrainian cultural renaissance, including writers, artists, composers, and other figures in the creative ferment of that place and time.
By exploring their fates, we can gain some perspective on the scale of the cultural disaster that was the Executed Renaissance.
Of course, this one photograph does not even come close to capturing the scope of the Ukrainian renaissance that was repressed or killed in the 1930s. A bigger picture can be seen in a listing from the Ukrainian Wikipedia (Google Translate does an adequate job if you are not able to read Ukrainian).
