PERSPECTIVES: Poets and their executioners (07/27/97)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Poets and their executioners

The article was buried deep in a recent edition of the Washington Post. It said that on July 1 investigators discovered a mass grave in a pine forest near St. Petersburg with more than 1,100 bodies. Each skull had one of the NKVD's signature bullet holes. Among those murdered, were 300 "Ukrainian nationalists and intellectuals," victims of Stalin's terror.

Who were these Ukrainians, I wondered, buried so far from home? The article didn't say, but the truth is it could have been anyone of thousands upon thousands who fit the description: nationalists and intellectuals murdered in the 1930s and '40s.

They were people like Mykola Zerov, a poet and professor of literature at Kyiv University, known for his neo-classical sonnets, literary criticism and translations. Zerov was arrested in 1935 and sent to a concentration camp in the Solovky Islands north of the Arctic Circle where he was murdered sometime in 1937-1938 - a bullet to the back of his head.

Another victim was Mike Johannsen, a Swedish-Ukrainian from Kharkiv who wrote wonderful lyric poetry about the changing of the seasons, trees, sunshine and an occasional lullaby. He was arrested in 1937 and also shipped to a Siberian concentration camp. There, it was said, he went insane before being shot to death.

Another poet, Oleksa Vlyzko, was arrested in 1934. Deaf from the age of 14, his verse evoked the sounds of the ocean, a symphony, the beating of his own heart. The unfortunate man wasn't able to hear the charges leveled against him and 28 other writers and intellectuals in a Kyiv courtroom, and he didn't hear the gunshot that took his life the next day. Vlyzko was 26 years old. His body and those of the other 28 victims, in all likelihood, were dumped in the same kind of pit that was exhumed in St. Petersburg last month.

Similar pits have been discovered in the Bykivnia Woods near Kyiv, in Vinnytsia, in Lviv ... Who knows how many others lie undiscovered, undisturbed.

Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s was an exciting place to be. Kyiv and Kharkiv were vibrant cities where political leaders like Education Minister Mykola Skrypnyk encouraged writers, film-makers, musicians, dramatists and every other kind of artist to aspire to world-class status using the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian idioms, Ukrainian themes. The culture, it was felt, had a lot of catching up to do. After all, from 1863 to 1907, it was forbidden by tsarist ukase (decree) to use the Ukrainian language for any literary purpose. While Russian culture produced giants like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, Ukrainian culture was stagnant. Without the genius of Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka and others in western Ukraine, there would have been nothing.

And so Ukrainian artists in post-revolutionary Ukraine responded. Film-maker Oleksander Dovzenko showed the world how to use the new art form. Writer Mykola Khvyliovy worked to raise the urban proletariat to a level of literacy and self-awareness capable of placing them in the mainstream of European culture. Short story writer, Hryhoriy Kosynka aspired to do the same with the rural peasantry.

When I read the poetry and stories of 1920s Ukraine, my imagination works in color and it's a bright, sun-shiny day. The 1930s are black and white and it's usually nighttime. Virtually nothing relieves the bleakness of that era. As the decade began in 1930 there were 259 Soviet Ukrainian writers who regularly published. By 1938, only 36 of those were still around. With the exception of seven who died a natural death, all the rest were murder victims, suicides or inmates in far-away concentration camps where they died of exhaustion, starvation or an anonymous bullet.

The other arts were equally devastated. The Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, relates the story of the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirnyky and Bandurysty, held in the mid-1930s. Hundreds, most of them blind, came from villages and towns all over Ukraine. Ostensibly, it was to discuss the future of their profession. In fact, they came for their own execution. Nearly all were shot.

It's impossible to define the depth of evil during that era, to measure the universe of suffering, to assess the extent of what Ukraine lost and how devasting those years were to Ukrainian culture and society. We can lament the poetry that was never written because Vlyzko was killed at 26, but consider also how his death affected anyone else who thought about writing poetry. Who would want to be a master of the Ukrainian language when Vlyzko and scores of others were killed for that reason alone? Would you have picked up a bandura if you knew that the finest masters of the instrument were shot to death precisely because they were so good?

Where would American culture be if all the poets and writers of the '20s - from Robert Frost to Ernest Hemingway - had been killed because they could compose a good verse or structure an interesting novel? Would country music be a multi-billion dollar industry today, if all the banjo players and guitar pickers had been murdered during the Roosevelt administration? It's a ridiculous question in the American context, but that's what happened to Ukraine. There's a sandpit near St. Petersburg with just a tiny fraction of the victims.

Ukraine, however, was victimized not only by what was lost, but also by the way "The Terror" transformed society. If the state took food from successful farmers and left them to die, it was better to be a poor farmer. If entrepreneurs were killed for "profiteering," who in his right mind would want to make a profit? Why speak Ukrainian, when that only attracted attention and kept you from getting a good job, maybe even arrested, perhaps killed? It's much safer to speak Russian. And so, everything positive, natural and productive was punished: evil was rewarded.

Independent Ukraine is having a lot of trouble moving from a command economy to free enterprise, from collective farms to independent homesteads. Ukrainian citizens with initiative, with entrepreneurial skills are as likely to emigrate to America or Canada as they are to start a business in Ukraine. Russification in Ukraine's cities remains a jarring reality. Somehow independence is not working out quite as brilliantly as many had imagined.

It doesn't excuse things, but perhaps the reason for these problems is related to the horrible experience of the '30s when millions of free farmers were starved to death and thousands upon thousands of Ukraine's leaders, artists and thinkers were cruelly and systematically killed, their bodies buried in forgotten pits.

Remembering the past, commemorating the victims is one of the ways to begin to cure what ails Ukraine. Those of us fluent in Ukrainian might begin by reading a few poems by Mike Johannsen or Oleksa Vlyzko. They're delightful.

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