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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

Killed or died

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The Executed Renaissance The famine was merely one part of a concerted effort to suppress the Ukrainian language, culture and Ukrainian-centric religious and intellectual life. The Ukrainianization efforts of the previous decade were not only abandoned, but many of the greatest literary and artistic figures in the Ukrainian renaissance of the 1920s were repressed, arrested, or outright killed. While such repressions are typically associated with the "Great Terror" of 1937, in Ukraine they began early and continued with severe ferocity through the end of the decade.

“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).
Killed or died in internal exile

Imprisoned, repressed, or harassed
Escaped