A new Executed Renaissance?

Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina were by no means the first Ukrainian writers to fall victim to Russian colonial violence. In the 1930s, an entire generation was murdered.

Picture of the Krushelnytsky Family at the beginning of the 1930s. They were a family of Ukrainian intellectuals, activists and artists. Over the following years Volodymyra (sitting, first from the left), Taras (sitting next to Volodymyra), Antin (sitting, first from the right), Ostap (standing, first from the left), Ivan (standing in the center) and Bohdan (standing, first from the right) were arrested and executed. Mariia Krushelnytska (sitting in the center) died in Kharkiv in 1935. The stress and trauma caused by her children’s and husband’s arrest and murder (Ivan and Taras had already been shot; Volodymyra, Bohdan and husband Antin had been arrested and would be executed in 1937) likely contributed to her death at age 58.

Two days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina published an article in which she warned the world of a second Executed Renaissance of Ukrainian writers. For her personally, Amelina wrote, this would mean that most of her friends would die; for most people in Western Europe, it would simply mean another unread Ukrainian text—a text that cannot be read because its author was murdered by Russia before he or she could write it. A few months later, in September 2022, as she stood in the garden of her murdered colleague Volodymyr Vakulenko, she wrote that she finds herself "in the middle of a new executed renaissance." She is there in search of the diary that Vakulenko wrote during the Russian occupation of his village.

Ukraine’s Executed Renaissance of the 1930s

In Ukraine, a generation of often still very young Ukrainian writers and artists who were murdered in the 1930s at the behest of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin are remembered as the Executed Renaissance. The wave of terror reached its peak in the so-called Great Terror under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. This was the time when alleged traitors, "enemies of the people," "spies" and "saboteurs" were shot by the hundreds of thousands throughout the Soviet Union. In the non-Russian Soviet republics in particular, national elites who were labeled as "fascists," "saboteurs" and “nationalists" were executed. The fate of the Executed Renaissance belongs into this context. Of the 260 Ukrainian writers who had published works in the Soviet Union in the year 1930, 230 fell victim to the terror.

The fact that Stalin's terror was not only directed against social groups, but also operated with national categories, was long ignored by historians. It is also significant that it was the Ukrainian national intelligentsia that became the first target of a large-scale wave of persecution against allegedly "anti-Soviet" nationalists even before the onset of the mass terror of the year 1937. It began with a show trial in Kharkiv, at that time the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, against 45 Ukrainian scientists, artists, intellectuals and clerics, who were accused of belonging to an (imaginary) "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine."

It was no coincidence that the show trial coincided with the consolidation of Stalin's power. His ascent heralded the end of the policy of so-called korenizatsiia (“indigenization”) of the 1920s, in which the Communist Party had promoted and in some cases even created national-communist elites in the non-Russian Soviet republics. The goal of this policy was to foster a support base loyal to Moscow to secure its control over these national communities. Despite the formally federal structure of the Soviet Union, the actual center of power was still, of course, Moscow and the Communist Party, which was heavily dominated by ethnic Russians. When attempting to legitimize Russia’s aggression against Ukraine Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed that the existence of a sovereign and independent Ukraine is the artificial product of the Soviet Union.

Quite apart from the fact that it would be the end of the European peace and security order to justify attacks on sovereign and internationally recognized states with a specific interpretation of history, this claim is also simply wrong. The Bolsheviks' decision to found a Ukrainian Soviet Republic did not create Ukrainian nationalism, but was rather a reaction to its strength. This had come into full view—surprisingly for Russian intellectual, political and military elites, most of whom cultivated an imperial mindset—after the collapse of the Russian Empire in February 1917, when Ukrainians in central and eastern Ukraine as well as in western Ukraine sought to establish their own state. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October coup of 1917, the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv proclaimed Ukraine's independence in January 1918 in its fourth universal.

Despite Lenin's assertion that the Bolsheviks supported the right of peoples to self-determination, the Bolsheviks did not accept the declaration of independence and instead proclaimed a Ukrainian Soviet Republic in Kharkiv. In the ensuing post-imperial war on the territories of the former tsarist empire, the Red Army managed to conquer large parts of central and eastern Ukraine and forcibly integrate them into the Soviet Union. The decision to establish a Russian, a Belarusian and a Ukrainian Soviet republic within the newly founded state was a pragmatic (and by no means uncontroversial) departure from the Russian imperial ideology of the nineteenth century, according to which there was only one Russian nation, led by the “Great Russians” with "White Russians" (Belarusians) and "Little Russians" (Ukrainians) as subordinate subgroups. The idea behind the creation of a Ukrainian Soviet republic and the policy of korenizatsiia was to domesticate Ukrainian nationalism and to place it in the service of Moscow.

The onset of Stalinist terror against Ukraine from 1930 onwards, which was directed not only against the peasantry but also against the national intelligentsia, can also be explained by Moscow's experiences with fierce opposition to Soviet power between 1918 and 1922 in Ukraine. On the one hand, Ukraine was seen as indispensable to the Soviet Union, while on the other, the Communist Party saw Ukrainian nationalism and the Ukrainian peasantry as stubborn and dangerous. When, in the course of the collectivization of agriculture at the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin and his followers used brute force to drive the peasantry into collective farms, resistance was particularly strong in Ukraine. The state-induced famine that broke out in many regions of the Soviet Union in this period turned genocidal in Ukraine and is now remembered as the Holodomor. Especially from the second wave of hunger policies in 1933 onwards, the starvation of millions of Ukrainian farmers, the "cleansing" of Ukrainian communist elites and the mass shooting of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were intended to break the national backbone of Ukraine.

The unrecognized legacy of Russian colonialism in the West

This long continuity of Russian colonialism and imperial claims towards Ukraine and the willingness to enforce them with brute force was hardly noticed in German (and more general Western) debates about Ukraine and Russia, at least until February 24, 2022. Anyone who reads Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina, on the other hand, will recognize that they placed the Russian aggression against their country within a broader historical continuum.

Vakulenko lived in a village in eastern Ukraine. "I would never have thought," he wrote in his diary, "that my home village will one day become the epicenter of a rashist occupation. For me, with my patriotic, pro-Ukrainian views, it can be extremely dangerous to be trapped like this, surrounded by the enemy, but I have no other choice." Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vakulenko had already described what he (and other Ukrainians) considered to be "rashism" in a poem of the same name: It was the "Slavic imperialist leader" who looked down on the "borderlands" but nevertheless claimed them for himself. Vakulenko's lines also express his dislike of the "bandits" who were "nesting" in Ukraine—presumably an allusion to the pro-Russian networks that were deliberately promoted by Moscow even after Ukraine's independence in order to maintain Russia's influence. In this poem, Vakulenko also emphasized the historical continuities of violence and expulsion that accompanied the Russian domination of Ukraine by recalling the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, "our (i.e. Ukraine’s) Tatars."

They had been deported on Stalin’s orders from their homeland in 1944. 120,000 people, virtually the entire indigenous Crimean Tatar population of the peninsula, were forced into cattle wagons and sent to Soviet Central Asia under a several-week journey in inhuman conditions. Many did not survive. The Communist Party did not allow the survivors to return home until 1989—even though they had already been officially rehabilitated by the Soviet Union in 1967 (Stalin had accused them collectively of collaborating with Nazi Germany).

The longing for a free Ukraine

Vakulenko and the somewhat younger Amelina were both part of a generation that longed for a new Ukraine that would shed the Soviet legacy, free itself from Russian imperial dominance and move closer to Europe. Ukrainian civil society had already shown its strength in the Orange Revolution of 2003, when mass protests succeeded in forcing a rerun of the presidential elections, which had been rigged in favor of the pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych. The Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, of 2013/14 was an even more comprehensive, civil society mass protest with an even bigger vision: a democratic, self-determined Ukraine in Europe, in which people can live freely and with dignity, in which corruption and self-enrichment are a thing of the past. Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected Ukrainian president in 2010 (this time democratically), had ruled in an increasingly authoritarian manner. Russian influence on Ukrainian domestic politics flourished, and the corruption and self-enrichment of the ruling elites around Yanukovych reached unprecedented levels.

The non-signing of the long-planned Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013 in Vilnius was merely the trigger, not the underlying cause for the people to gather on Kyiv's Independence Square, the Maidan. What began as a protest primarily of students and younger Ukrainians soon evolved into a mass movement. It is indicative of the many misunderstandings in German (and Western) perceptions of Ukraine that what for many Ukrainians is their "Revolution of Dignity" was, in the German discourse, the "Ukraine crisis." It was in this period that Germany brought forth the so-called Russland-Versteher or Putin-Versteher (people who understand Russia or Putin). However, the Versteher were ironically not the ones who understood Russia (or Putin), but those who defended or even denied the criminal nature of Putin’s regime and Russia's attack on Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has brought into the open just how grotesque the justifications for Moscow's aggression always were. Russian elites themselves make no secret of what they want in Ukraine: the destruction of the country as a state and nation, its total defeat, the restoration of the Russian Empire, the fight against Europe. Back in April 2022, a text by Russian political technocrat Timofei Sergeytsev entitled "What Russia must do with Ukraine" appeared on the website of the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. It reads in cold and technical language as a guide to genocide. The events from the occupied areas of Ukraine show that the Russian occupiers are carrying this out consistently.

Volodymyr Vakulenko's diary and the murder of him and Victoria Amelina are a chilling testimony to what awaits Ukrainians under Russian occupation: murder, violence, torture, deportation, lawlessness. This war combines the Russian ideology of the nineteenth century, according to which there must be no Ukrainian national identity, with the genocidal Soviet methods of the twentieth century. The Ukrainian Nobel Prize winner Oleksandra Matvichuk emphasizes it again and again: occupation is a continuation of war. The deaths and violence continue. Volodymyr Vakulenko knew this when he wrote that he believed in liberation by the Ukrainian armed forces. For him, it came too late.

When Victoria Amelina warned of a new Executed Renaissance at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she pointed out that there was a "vast gap" on the European literary map where Ukraine should be. The West's overlooking of Ukraine was linked to this: literature and art were and are carriers of Ukrainian national identity. Their suppression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the resulting unfamiliarity of the West with Ukrainian culture—in stark contrast to Russian culture—proved fertile ground for colonial, pro-Kremlin narratives, particularly in Germany. This problem, the destructive nature of the traditions of a joint Russian-German imperialism at the expense of the countries, regions and people of East Central Europe, has barely penetrated German social and political consciousness to this day. Ukraine was a blind spot.

But even to this day, Ukraine is often discussed with a combination of colonial arrogance and ignorance. Yet Germany, in particular, has a historical responsibility for Ukraine—after all, it was Germany which occupied Ukraine and Belarus in their entirety and turned the two countries into the main theatres of war of extermination launched against the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, our German ancestors turned Ukraine into the scene of the Holocaust, murdered Soviet Ukrainian Jewry, dragged millions of people into forced labor, starved them to death, shot them. We will never again be able to say that we have learned anything from the Second World War if we do not now do everything we can to stop the Russian genocide in Ukraine.

This is an updated version of the afterword I wrote for the German edition of Volodymyr Vakulenko’s diary. It was first published in November 2024. I thank the Mauke Verlag for the permission to re-publish the afterword here in English translation.