If we were to compile a list of countries where communists are least welcome, Ukraine would probably stand a good chance of leading it. We are not only talking about the left-wing radicals seeking the destruction of the capitalist system but also about those for whom the names of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, or Ernesto Che Guevara are associated with dreams of a fairer and just society. Studying Karl Marx in Ukraine is, of course, allowed, but sharing and publicly displaying communist symbols can lead to serious legal consequences, including imprisonment.
In the eyes of the Western audience, this may appear as a triumph of right-wing radicals successfully leading the ‘crusade’ against their ideological opponents. Is it maybe the dogmatic liberals who have comfortably settled in Kyiv and are seeking to remove the question of social justice from the agenda as such in the interests of large corporations? To an ordinary observer, both of those versions seem pretty believable, and yet they couldn’t be any further from reality. Whoever wants to understand the true nature of Ukrainian anti-communism must stop theorising and start looking back at Ukraine’s history.
It would certainly be an exaggeration to claim that Ukrainians have always opposed left-wing ideas. Ukrainian intellectuals, such as Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and many other prominent figures of the Ukrainian national movement of the late 19th to the early 20th century, took some interest in socialism and communism. This was the way out of national and social oppression, the misery of Ukrainian people, they thought. Ironically, this idealistic generation was fortunate enough to die before the Bolsheviks grabbed power and attempted to put Marx’s ideas into practice under Lenin’s leadership.
The next generation of Ukrainians, who sheltered similar hopes and expectations, experienced a bitter disappointment. For instance, the distinguished Ukrainian poet Mykola Khvyliovyy, being a national-communist, enthusiastically welcomed the revolution. He shot himself in 1933 upon seeing its results. In a way, he was lucky enough because soon after that, the Bolsheviks’ repressive machine annihilated a whole generation of Ukrainian artists; this generation is commemorated today as an ‘Executed Renaissance’.
Today, one can engage in a lengthy debate about whether Lenin’s followers were ‘true communists’ and whether it is fair to condemn Marx along with Soviet totalitarianism, which emerged decades after Marx’s death. Such a discussion could be fascinating but entirely pointless. Instead of engaging in scholastic fencing, I would like to share with you the history of my own family.
On the eve of the 1917 revolution, my great-great-grandfather Pylyp lived in the small village of Romanivka in eastern Ukraine. He earned a living through honest work, owning a windmill, while his sons worked in the field from dusk till dawn. In the 1920s, when Bolshevik power in Ukraine was consolidated, my great-great-grandfather’s mill and the house where the entire family lived were confiscated. Though he had no hired workers, according to the Soviet ideology, he was what Bolsheviks called a ‘kulak’, a class enemy. The only reason he wasn’t sent off to Siberia was that there was nobody else capable of operating the mill in the newly formed collective farm. Therefore, he was allowed to dig a pit-house and remain in his native village, working on the windmill that no longer belonged to him.
His son Ivan, my great-grandfather, was mobilised to the Russian army in 1916 during World War I and later to the Soviet Red Army. He returned to his native village in the 1920s, got married, and decided to start his own farming business. However, this did not last long. When the Soviet government began its collectivisation policy when the peasants were forced to give up their farms and join large state-owned and run collective farms, the young farming family was forcibly incorporated into the newly created collective farm in Romanivka. All their property was confiscated. In the early 1930s, a hunt against the so-called ‘class-alien elements’ began. Ivan, as a former private farmer, faced the threat of deportation beyond Ukraine’s borders, so he had to flee—first to Kuban and then to the mines region of Donbas. This effectively saved his wife Afanasiya, my great-grandmother, and their children from exile. However, Afanasiya’s sisters, who lived in the neighbouring village of Plastunivka, were less fortunate—they and their entire families were forcibly sent off to Siberia. They all died.
Those who remained in Ukraine had to endure a terrible torment—the Holodomor of 1932-1933, during which over 3 million Ukrainians perished. Nowadays, the causes of this tragedy are well-known: the Soviet authorities intentionally inflated grain procurement plans, condemning Ukrainian peasants to famine and death. Soviets confiscated grain, and food stockpiles from Ukrainian peasants; people had to resort to catching and eating mice, tree bark, grass, and roots; there were even cases of cannibalism documented. There was no famine in the cities, but escaping from villages to cities was impossible—armed patrols blocked the roads and allowed no one to pass. Therefore, in the winter of 1933, my great-grandmother Afanasiya dared to take a desperate trip. There were rumours that in the nearby villages located on the Russian territory, there was no famine; hence, she decided to get to these villages at any cost in order to get some food. Luckily, the border between the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian SFSR was near, no more than 20-25 kilometres. Travelling this distance was not easy, though: Afanasiya had to stay away from the main roads, making her way through the steppe, waist-deep in snow, and battling severe frost. Fortunately, Afanasiia succeeded: she didn’t freeze to death, Soviet patrols didn’t notice her, and she brought home a sack of flour that allowed her and her children to survive until spring. Not everyone was this fortunate: during the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine, 155 out of 500 residents of the village of Romanivka died. In the neighbouring village of Plastunivka, famine killed half of its inhabitants.
But the suffering of Ukrainian peasants did not end there—they still had to endure decades of collective farm slavery ahead of them. Formally, collective farm workers were considered free Soviet citizens; however, they have only had their ID cards (or passports, to be precise) issued to them since 1974 — an entire 13 years after Yuri Gagarin made his space voyage. Until then, collective farm workers had no right to free movement, choice of residence, or even a choice of profession—all of this strictly required permission from the collective farm administration to which these peasants were attached. My grandfather Mykola, the son of Ivan and Afanasiya, also went to work on the collective farm in the village of Romanivka soon after finishing school. He had no other choice but to forge his permit in order to move to the neighbouring village of Bilolutsk and get a job as a driver in one of the Soviet institutions. He would have faced criminal punishment if caught.
Mykola succeeded—he wasn’t caught; he received a technical education and even built a small career. By the mid-1960s, he had his own family, two children, and his own house. But what were their real standards of living? According to the official Soviet standards of 1965, the subsistence minimum was 40 karbovanets per person monthly. Mykola worked as a driver, and his wife, Hanna (my grandmother), worked as a nurse in a hospital. If you put the salaries of the driver and the nurse together, then there were 42 karbovanets per family member (including children); this was barely enough to survive. Mykola’s parents, Ivan and Afanasiya, were already retired, receiving 14 and 7 karbovanets, respectively. In fact, the Soviet system typically condemned old collective farm workers to a meagre existence far below the poverty line. Of course, the son couldn’t abandon his elderly parents, so he brought them to live with him in Bilolutsk. After that, just 31 karbovanets per month were allocated for each of the six household members, considerably less than the bare minimum necessary for survival.
Today, complaining about poverty is somewhat frowned upon because there are many ways to improve one’s financial situation. For example, a person in need can take on a second job, change jobs and even professions, move to work abroad, and so on. For Soviet collective farm workers, however, none of these were an option. The Soviet economy derived additional resources not from innovation but from brutally exploiting its own citizens, primarily the peasants. They worked hard, and they worked long hours, but even those who managed to break free from the collective farm trap were unable to achieve real prosperity. At the beginning of the 20th century, peasants comprised nearly 80% of Ukraine’s population. By the late 1950s, this number was nearing 55%. That effectively answers the questions of how the Soviet Union funded its space program, expanded its nuclear arsenal, and sponsored the loyalty of countless authoritarian regimes across the globe.
However, even urban Soviet residents did not thrive. Stalin’s mass repressions began with the infamous Shakhty Trial—a bloody crackdown on engineers working for the Donbas coal industry. Soviets launched several such repressive campaigns against various professional groups – this later became known as the Great Terror. Brutal repressions were launched against the clergy and artists; there were constant arrests of dissidents; it is safe to say that there was no social or professional group in Soviet society that did not suffer from the totalitarian machine of violence and fear. In the 1950s, this machine lost its momentum, but the next generation of Ukrainians still lived in the suffocating reality of totalitarianism until the collapse of the Soviet Union. My father, the son of Mykola and Hanna, the grandson of Ivan and Afanasiia, became the first in the family to obtain a university degree. In the late 1970s, he worked as a teacher in rural schools but eventually had to change his profession and take on manual jobs in Luhansk. Why? Because he grew tired of having to lie to children every day about the greatness of the Communist Party, the wisdom of its leaders, and the all-powerful teachings of Marxism-Leninism.
This is why Ukrainians hate communism. We are not interested in debating how utopian the ideas of Marx and his followers were or were not. We are not interested in speculating about who betrayed the ideals of Marxism— was it Lenin, Stalin, or maybe Khrushchev? For us, communism and everything associated with it are the hallmarks of a totalitarian regime that killed, tortured, humiliated, and exploited our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Perhaps the history of communism in Western Europe is a story of idealism, radicalism, and the fight against injustice. But the history of communism in Ukraine is a story of deceptive propaganda, mass terror, death, and cruel, brutal discrimination.
