The destruction of Ukrainian institutional life in the Far East did not come from the Russian Empire, which had merely forbidden it, nor from Kolchak, who had arrested its leaders and released most of them. It came from the state that had spent the 1920s building it.
That is the fact this chapter has to explain, and the explanation is not local. What happened in Primorye and the Amur between 1932 and 1938 was a regional application of a decision taken in Moscow about the entire Soviet nationalities settlement, and to understand it you have to look at the whole policy rather than at the Far East alone.
Why there was anything to destroy
Soviet korenizatsiia — indigenisation — was, on its own terms, one of the most ambitious nationalities policies ever attempted. From 1923 the party committed itself to developing the languages, cadres and institutions of the non-Russian nationalities, on the theory that national grievance was a product of tsarist oppression and would dissolve once the grievance was removed. In Ukraine itself the policy produced a flowering: Ukrainian-language schooling, publishing, scholarship and administration on a scale that had never existed.
It applied to Ukrainians outside Ukraine too. In the Far East the 1920s brought Ukrainian-language schools in the settlement districts, Ukrainian newspapers, Ukrainian sections in the regional party apparatus, teacher training, and a serious proposal — discussed at the end of the decade — to constitute Ukrainian national districts within the Far Eastern Krai, on the model applied to smaller nationalities elsewhere.
The 1926 census gave the policy its statistical basis and is the best single snapshot of the community: over 300,000 people in the Far Eastern region declaring Ukrainian nationality, heavily rural, concentrated in Primorye and Amur, and in some districts an outright majority.
So by 1930 the Ukrainian Far East had more institutional apparatus than at any point before or since, all of it created by the Soviet state, and all of it consequently listed, staffed and known to the authorities. That is what made the reversal so efficient.
The reversal
The turn came in 1932 and 1933, and its origin was the catastrophe in Ukraine itself. Collectivisation and grain requisitioning produced the famine of 1932–33 — the Holodomor — in which several million people died, and the regime's response to peasant resistance was to identify it as national resistance. The decrees of December 1932 signed by Stalin and Molotov attacked "Ukrainisation" directly, ordered its reversal in the North Caucasus, and set the frame: Ukrainian national institutions outside the republic were reclassified from an achievement of Soviet policy into a channel for nationalism.
In the Kuban — the Malynovyi Klyn — the reversal was immediate and brutal: Ukrainian-language schools, press and administration were terminated within months and whole Cossack settlements were deported. In the Far East it took slightly longer and followed the same course. Ukrainian schools were converted to Russian instruction, the press was closed, the party's Ukrainian sections were wound up, and the national-district proposal vanished.
The 1937 census, which recorded results the leadership did not want, was suppressed and its organisers arrested. The 1939 census returned far fewer Ukrainians in the Far East than 1926 — a decline too large to be explained by mortality or migration, and best read as the effect of an environment in which declaring Ukrainian nationality to an enumerator had become an unwise thing to do.
The case
Soviet repression worked through constructed conspiracies, and the Far East received one of its own. In 1933 and 1934 the OGPU announced the discovery of a Ukrainian nationalist counter-revolutionary organisation in the Far Eastern Krai, variously described in the documents, with a membership drawn from precisely the people the 1920s policy had trained: teachers, cooperative officials, agronomists, newspaper staff, and the surviving veterans of the congresses of 1917 and 1918.
The charges combined separatism with espionage. The alleged aim was the detachment of the Far East from the Soviet Union and its constitution as a Ukrainian state; the alleged sponsor was Japan, and the evidentiary basis was the contacts of the intervention years, the existence of the Harbin emigration, and confessions obtained in the usual way. The Fourth Congress's resolution of October 1918 on eventual union with Ukraine was produced as proof of an intention that had been openly voted on in public sixteen years earlier.
Then came 1937 and 1938, and the case was absorbed into something far larger. The Great Terror in the Far Eastern Krai was run by the regional NKVD under Genrikh Lyushkov, and it was on a scale that is difficult to convey: tens of thousands arrested, mass shootings under the quota system established by Order No. 00447, and a parallel set of "national operations" directed at Poles, Germans, Koreans, Chinese, Latvians and Harbin returnees. Order No. 00593 of September 1937 targeted the Kharbintsy — anyone who had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway or returned from Manchuria — and some 30,000 people were arrested under it, of whom the large majority were shot.
Lyushkov, who had signed much of this, defected to the Japanese at the Manchurian border in June 1938 when he understood that he was next, and gave them the fullest account of the terror that reached the outside world at the time. He was killed by a Japanese officer in Manchuria in August 1945, days before the surrender.
What was left
By 1939 there were no Ukrainian schools in the Far East, no Ukrainian press, no Ukrainian organisations, and none of the men who had organised the congresses. Viktor Chornomaz's reconstruction of the movement's membership — assembled from the archives after 1991 — is in part a list of people arrested between 1933 and 1938.
The population remained, and this is the distinction the mythbusters in this volume insist on. Several hundred thousand people of Ukrainian origin went on living in Primorye and the Amur, farming the same land, in villages with the same names. What had been removed was every institution through which they could transmit a language or an identity to their children.
The result, over two generations, was ordinary and complete. Ukrainian in the Far East became a home language, then a grandparents' language, then a set of words for food and a way of pronouncing things. The census figures fell steadily. Nobody had to be deported for it to happen; the schools simply taught in Russian, and everything else followed.
That is the characteristic twentieth-century way for a national community to end, and it is worth saying plainly that it is much commoner than the dramatic kind. There was no expulsion of the Ukrainians of the Far East. There was a decision in Moscow in 1932, a few thousand executions, and then eighty years of school in another language.
End of Chapter VIII