Kyiv as Regime City

Front matter

KYIV

AS REGIME

CITY

Part Three: Relegitimization

5 “The State’s Dignity Is Higher Than His Own Dignity”: The Relegitimization of Soviet Power

6 “Tashkent Partisans” and “German Bitches”: Relationships with Soviet Power

Conclusion Notes Bibliography

187 193 213 ial

1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 3.1

3:2

3:3

4.1 4.2

4.3

5.1

5.2

ILLUSTRATIONS

The First Ukrainian Front on the Khreshchatyk, November 7, 1943.

“Kyivans Return to Their Hometown,” November 7, 1943.

Kyivans sort the ruins of the Khreshchatyk, unknown date.

German POWs are paraded down Sofiivs’ka Street, August 16, 1944.

A burnt-out apartment building on today’s Tolstoy Square, 1944.

Korniets, Korotchenko, Khrushchev, Baranovskii, and partisan leader Sydir Kovpak on the Victory Day parade viewing stand, May 9, 1945.

The people of Kyiv pass the parade viewing stand on Victory Day, May, 9, 1945.

Party Leader M. M. Pydtychenko, B. A. Gorban, General

V. I. Davydov, General I. I. Iakubovs’kyi, N. S. Khrushchev,

F. V. Mokienko, and General A. A. Hrechko at the celebrations of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the October Revolution, November 7, 1945.

“Kyivans Return to Their Hometown,” November, 1943.

German POWs cleaning up and “rebuilding” the Khreshchatyk, October 1, 1944.

Soldiers children listen to the news about the victory with the Allies over Fascist Germany, May, 9, 1945.

Kyivans on the reconstruction of the Khreshchatyk, unknown date.

Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi Square in Kyiv on Victory Day, May 9, 1945.

96 107

6.2

Illustrations

Schoolchildren from Kyiv’s Stalin Raion prepare to march in the Victory Day parade, May 9, 1945.

The people of Kyiv parade on Victory Day, May 9, 1945.

N. S. Khrushchev, F. V. Mokienko, General A. A. Hrechko, and P. H. Tychyna (far right) at the celebrations of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the October Revolution, November 7, 1945.

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic's People’s Commissar of Defense, Gerasimenko, reads an ukaz from Comrade Stalin to the troops of the Kyiv garrison during the parade of May, 1, 1945.

Behind him stand Khrushchev, Korotchenko, and party leader, M. S. Hrechukha.

143 144

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the following individuals and institutions who helped bring this project to a successful close. First, I wish to thank Hiroaki Kuromiya of Indiana University—Bloomington’s Department of History. Without his enthusiasm and patience, this project would have been impossible. Other “Hoosiers”’—whether life-long or temporary—whose advice and assistance I have appreciated along the way include James Diehl, Toivo Raun, and Jeffrey Veidlinger, as well as William Fierman, Jerzy Kolodziej, and David Ransel. I also thank the Russian and East European Institute for the Mellon Endowment Travel Grants that first allowed me to present this research at various annual conventions of the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Indiana University’s Borns Program in Jewish Studies also provided a vital stipend to travel to Moscow for a view of the Kremlin’s take on events in Kyiv. The input and guidance of my other colleagues and friends in Bloomington—particularly Heather Perry, Jody Prestia, Margaret Puskar-Pasewicz, and Matt Stanard—also helped me improve this project.

In the region, the support of the Fulbright Ukraine program was essential. Martha Bohavchevsky-Chomiak’s enthusiasm and an extension of my Fulbright award made my initial sojourns to the archives a great success. The support and friendship of my Ukrainian “advisor” Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi and his colleagues Tetiana Bykova and Tetiana Pastushenko at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ukrainian History also made my ventures to Kyiv a pleasure. At Ukraine’s Main Archival Administration, Konstantyn Novokhats’kyi provided an open ear—both in his offices and at his home in Obolon’—and assistance in gaining access to the archives of Ukraine’s Ministry of the Interior. Iryna Komarova and other reading room attendants at Ukraine’s Central State Archive of Civic Organizations were helpful and collegial along the way. Friendships with other inogorodnye among Kyiv’s Meltdown Ultimate Frisbee team made many a late summer evening along the Dnipro among the beaches and shashlyk stands of Hydropark memorable. From the very beginning, the hospitality of the late Anton Strutyns’kyi and his wife Raisa also made Kyiv’s left bank seem like home. In Moscow I thank my friend of over two decades, Dmitrii Korotkov, and his wife Anna for their hospitality. In St. Petersburg, support for this idea among the xii Acknowledgments

History Faculty at St. Petersburg State University and cooperation with Liudmila Riabova led to the presentation of my findings to a Russian audience and, later, thanks to Aleksandr Chistakov, to an opportunity to speak at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ St. Petersburg Institute of History.

My colleagues on this side of the Atlantic also deserve praise and gratitude. At University of North Georgia, Lee Cheek, Pamela Elfenbein, Chris Jespersen, Ric Kabat, Timothy May, Martha Nesbitt, Jeff Pardue, and Eugene Van Sickle helped with financial support, encouragement, and vital course releases at the end. The library staff at Sewanee: The University of the South, especially Joan Blocher, Cari Reynolds, Heidi Syler, and Courtnay Zeitler, assisted me with obtaining materials and resolving various technical difficulties. Colleagues in the field, including Karel Berkhoff, Richard Bidlack, Ron Bobroff, Chris Burton, David Brandenberger, Kate Brown, Michael David-Fox, Mark Edele, Don Filtzer, Wendy Goldman, Michael Hamm, James Heinzen, Jeffrey Jones, Victoria Khiterer, George Liber, David Marples, Michael Melancon, Matthew Payne, Karl Qualls, William Risch, Myroslav Shkandrij, Joonseo Song, and Serhy Yekelchyk, read versions of my research or provided helpful comments and encouragement. Working with University of Rochester Press, its editorial director, Sonia Kane, and my peer reviewers has also been a great experience that has left Kyiv as Regime City much improved. Any mistakes of interpretation, translation, and transliteration in the text are my own.

Finally, without the moral and intellectual support of my wife, Elizabeth Skomp, this project would not have made it to final form. Now we can enjoy the vibrant and vivacious Vivien Alice Blackwell all the more! And to those Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Kazakhs, and others who have opened their homes to me over the past quarter century across the former Soviet Union—a number far too numerous to mention here—I offer deep, deep thanks for the idea of studying what they hold to be the most important events of the twentieth century: the Second World War and its legacy. But it is my parents, of course, who provided me the initial wherewithal to undertake this project. It was their love of travel and discovery that led me to incredible places like Kyiv in the first place, and it is to them that I dedicate this book.

Sewanee, Tennessee

GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS

This list includes names, acronyms, abbreviations, and translations of foreign words that appear frequently in the text.

All-Union NKGB or Ukrainian NKGB: Narodnyi Komissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (People’s Commissariat of State Security / Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). These Peoples Commissariats were renamed Ministries (Ministerstvo) or All-Union MGB / Ukrainian MGB in March 1946.

All-Union NKVD or Ukrainian NKVD: Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs / Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). These People’s Commissariats were renamed Ministries (Ministerstvo) or All-Union MVD / Ukrainian MVD in March 1946.

All-Union TsK: Tsentral’nyi Komitet / Vsesoiuznaia Komunisticheskaia Partiia (Bol’shevikov) (Central Committee / All-Union Communist Party [Bolsheviks])

Gorkom: Gorodskoi Komitet Komunisticheskoi Partii Bol’shevikov Ukrainy (City Committee of the Communist Party [Bolsheviks] of Ukraine)

GKO: Gosudarstvennyi Komitet Oborony (State Committee of Defense)

NKZhGS UkrSSR: Narodnyi Komissariat Zhilishchnogo Grazhdanskogo Stroitel’stova / Ukrainskaia Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (People’s Commissariat of Housing and Civilian Construction / Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). This People’s Commissariat was renamed Ministry (Ministerstvo) or MKZhGS UkrSSR in March 1946.

Obkom: Oblastnoi Komitet Komunisticheskoi Partii Bol’shevikov Ukrainy (Oblast Committee of the Communist Party [Bolsheviks] of Ukraine)

Oblast: administrative region within a Soviet republic

Okruzhentsy: Communist Party members who lived on Soviet territory occupied by Germany

Orgnabor: “Organized recruitment” of Soviet citizens for work in the Soviet economy xiv Glossary and Abbreviations

OSMCh: Osobaia Stroitel’naia Montazhnaia Chast’ (a special construction assembly unit composed of Soviet citizens eligible for the draft but not physically fit enough to serve)

Ostarbeitery: “East Workers” (Soviet citizens taken by the Germans to work in Germany and other occupied places)

Partiinost: Party affiliation

Raikom: Raionnyi Komitet Komunisticheskoi Partii Bol’shevikov Ukrainy (District Committee of the Communist Party [Bolsheviks] of Ukraine)

Raion: administrative district within a Soviet oblast or city

RSFSR: Rossiiskaia Sovetskaia Federativnaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic)

SNK SSSR and UkrSSR: Sovet Narodnykh Komissarov / Soiuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublikov and Ukrainskaia Sovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Council of People’s Commissars / Union of Soviet Socialist Republics / Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both of these Councils of People’s Commissars were renamed Council of Ministers (Sovet Ministrov) or SM SSSR / UkrSSR in March 1946.

Ukrainian TsK: Tsentral’nyi Komitet / Komunisticheskaia Partiia Bol’shevikov Ukrainy (Central Committee / Communist Party of Ukraine [Bolsheviks])

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS

All transliterations of places, institutions, and people in this book use the Library of Congress system with the following rules. Names of places that were located in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic usually have Ukrainian transliteration, while places that were located in other parts of the Soviet Union are usually given in Russian transliteration. One exception is for those places (cities, towns, districts, villages, streets, etc.) found in direct quotations in the text. These are transliterated from Ukrainian if the document in question was written in Ukrainian or from Russian if the document was written in Russian. A second exception is for those places with names familiar to the western reader such as Lenin Street or Molotov Raion (District). Institutional and personal names mentioned repeatedly are transliterated from Russian because the archival documents employed were most commonly in Russian. Institutional and personal names mentioned only occasionally are transliterated from the language in which their names were found in the archives.

INTRODUCTION

On October 28, 1944, a Red Army officer named Kostenko wrote to the leaders of Soviet Ukraine’s Communist government, and stated:

A year has passed since the liberation of the city of Kyiv. About the same amount of time has passed since I started to solicit the return of my family from evacuation in Omsk [Russia] to our hometown of Kyiv. I wrote—and so did the command of my military unit on my behalf—to all organizations for them to help my family return to Kyiv. But what has been done? Nothing! At a time when I have spared neither blood nor my life itself fighting for Kyiv, and for the liberation of Ukrainian land, there are bureaucrats who have saved a few drops of ink rather than write an answer to my requests. . . . And now... I am not happy. I am malicious. My hand grips my gun with a burning hatred. I ask myself, what has been done for my family? Where is the payback for my suffering? Just let them know, then, those bureaucrats hiding within the walls of the Kyiv City Soviet, that I damn them. And when I return from the field of battle, I will find them, and I wont mind using a few of my spare bullets on them. I ask that you give them this.!

Unfortunately, Kostenko’s request had landed on deaf ears. After the Nazi occupation’s end on November 6, 1943, the Ukrainian Communists watched helplessly as ordinary people ignored formalities, and returned by any means possible to resettle a depopulated Kyiv, still a “regime city of the first category” according to Joseph Stalin’s guardians of state security—the All-Union People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) headquartered in Moscow. As a result of the Ukrainian Communists’ management of this reassembling population, Stalin’s regime stealthily adjusted its rule to satisfy the anti-Semitic interests of Kyiv’s Ukrainian majority—to the detriment of its Jewish minority. And in a situation where scarcity on all fronts ruled, the Ukrainian Communists’ best means of relegitimizing Soviet power were by capitalizing on Moscow’s public call for ideological vigilance in 1946, and arguing for their own indispensability as the leaders of a damaged—but still popular—state. This book’s goal is to examine these clues to better show why the propaganda of the Stalin regime at the beginning of the Cold War emphasized anti-Semitic and statist discourse.

The argument here demonstrates this interpretation of the history of the Soviet Union in the 1940s by studying the archival records of Ukraine and Russia. In particular, this book examines the records of the Ukrainian Communist Party at its local (city and oblast committee) and republic (central committee) levels, the Ukrainian government at its local (city and oblast soviet) and republic (Council of People’s Commissars) levels, and their correspondence with each other as well as with the Stalin regime located in Moscow. First, it focuses on the resettlement of a million-strong Soviet city after its emptying by Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. It explores why Kyiv’s Communist leaders, as the city’s population swelled to 700,000 people by the end of 1946, were unable to purge it of “socially dangerous” people, or prevent the unorganized return of others from evacuation. It also investigates why the Stalin regime’s efforts to mobilize labor toward housing reconstruction in Kyiv were unsuccessful even as it guarded the population actually resettling there from such hardships. Second, the work examines the city’s reassembled population and explains why the timing of an individual’s return was important amid the wartime scarcity of housing. It considers why the local party committees guarded access to their ranks, and why trying to satisfy the interests of the formerly occupied, returnees, conscripted laborers, and demobilized soldiers continually put these leaders in difficult positions. Third, this project studies the Ukrainian authorities’ attempt to relegitimize Soviet power as they acquiesced to powerful groups’ maneuverings through the postwar order. It explores why the government’s argument that they could lead within a partially destroyed but still triumphant state system became its most useful rallying cry, and why those in power allowed anti-Semitic “manifestations,” servicemen’s crimes, and their own rank and file’s dissipate behavior to acquire new legitimacy. In short, this book explains the state-society relationship in Kyiv, Ukraine, after the Nazi occupation to provide context for understanding how the Stalin regime promoted its hegemony, in general, by the end of the 1940s.

Kyiv before the Soviet Liberation of November 6, 1943

Scholarly studies of Kyiv’s pre-World War II history provide an introduction to the events discussed here. One portrait of the Tsarist-era city points to its undemocratic politics, which suppressed Ukrainians’ social aspirations.” Another notes its tee i Re edie mee

imperial atmosphere,” which left Kyiv’s sizable Jewish minority utterly despondent before the Bolshevik Revolution.’ The political champions of late Tsarist Kyiv were its Little Russian nationalists who successfully wooed St. Petersburg, as well as the city’s masses, by claiming Jewish capitalists and Ukrainian separatists were harming everyone else’s interests.4 Following the Red triumph in the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks’ promotion of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s, along with their modernization of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s economy, spurred both Ukrainian and Jewish hopes for the future. But while relatively urbane Jews benefited from increased career opportunities, Bolshevik leader Mykola Skrypnyk’s 1920s “Ukrainization” campaign was less successful, due to the lack of human capital necessary to teach the Ukrainian language.’ Stalin’s suppression of “bourgeois nationalism” followed during the industrialization campaign of 1928-32, and his turn toward Russian culture to guide the building of a socialist society signaled to Kyiv’s Ukrainians and Jews that falling in line with Moscow’s needs was paramount.

In the decade prior to World War II, Kyiv visibly took part in Stalin’s revolution. Newly built and remodeled factories produced equipment for the Soviet Union’s shipping, textile, and agricultural machine industries. This expansion of production—the prerevolutionary city had been a center of light industry and food processing—and of the laboring population also increased Kyiv’s importance as a transport center. New railway bridges were built across the Dnipro River, and huge depots, freight yards, and repair shops occupied prominent places on the river’s banks. After the Stalin regime made Kyiv the Ukrainian capital (replacing Kharkiv) in 1934, the city experienced the arrival of a large number of bureaucrats and scholars, and a set of extensive infrastructure improvements.

Although an ensuing housing shortage remained unsolved, huge new buildings were constructed for the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Ukrainian TsK) as well as the Ukrainian republic’s Council of People’s Commissars (SNK UkrSSR), and the city’s opera house was refurbished. All these projects highlighted Kyiv’s new status as an administrative and cultural center. By 1941, the city’s population had reached one million, and it became the third-largest city in the Soviet Union. But amid this “proletarianization” of Kyiv there was little mention of Ukrainization, as a gradual Russification had enveloped the city.° Nevertheless, such Bolshevization had produced an increasingly urbane group of Ukrainians—now over half the city’s population—willing to co-opt Moscow’s plans toward success.

Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, unleashed a whirlwind of activity in Kyiv. Within a few weeks, 200,000 of its people were drafted into, or volunteered for, the ranks of the Red Army.’ Some factories were hurriedly converted to war production, and Moscow ordered local party leaders to mobilize Kyivans to build fortification rings on the city’s western outskirts. Activity became even more hectic once the Wehrmacht approached Kyiv’s outer defense ring in early July, and the Moscow-based State Committee of Defense

(GKO) decided to begin the evacuation of right-bank Ukraine. Within the next two months, some 350,000 Kyivans left their homes for places such as Cheliabinsk and Ufa in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), as well as Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. This group included the city’s skilled workers and administrators, its scientific and artistic intelligentsia, and about half of its 37,000-strong party membership and their families. Many of these people were Russians, but Jews were a significant minority as well, for both groups were better educated than the Ukrainians at this point. With them went the full or partial equipment of two hundred of Kyiv’s industrial enterprises and as much of the city’s artistic and scientific heritage as could be loaded onto the few trains set aside for such purposes.

All of this was done just in time. In mid-September, the Germans encircled those helping the Red Army to defend the city, including a thirty-thousand-strong people's militia, the workers bonded to factories producing war materials, and school teachers instructing the workers’ children. These dramatic events occurred after the Wehrmacht diverted its Second Panzer Group south from its advance on Moscow and directed it to join the First Panzer Group now advancing northward along the Dnipro’s left bank, after the latter had skirted the city’s southern border and crossed the river at Kremenchuk. Although the last fleeing Red Army and NKVD personnel managed to blow up Kyiv’s bridges, railroad junctions, and power plants, many soon joined the 665,000 soldiers who became Soviet prisoners of war when Kyiv fell to the Nazis on September 19, 1941.

German rule in Kyiv would last 778 days, a time when the city’s population suffered under a regime of constant, barbaric terror. The liquidation of the city’s nonevacuated Jews and Communists began immediately after the remaining NKVD personnel blew up the buildings along the Khreshchatyk (Kyiv’s main street), killing many of the newly arrived Germans in the process. On September 29, 1941, 33,000 Jews were executed at the Babyn Iar ravine on the city’s western outskirts in response to NKVD actions. More than 100,000 Kyivans (50,000 of whom were Jewish) were killed at Babyn Iar during the occupation, many of them by the end of 1941.8 For those who avoided this fate, the next twenty-two months would be dominated by the possibility of sudden deportation to work in Germany. Another 50,000 Kyivans—anyone over fourteen years of age could have been chosen—became the so-called East Workers (Ostarbeitery).? Although some managed to escape due to youth or frailty, or by finding fifteen-hour-a-day jobs in the factories eventually reopened by the Germans, life in Kyiv meant tolerating a worthless salary and routine bouts of Nazi looting. Starvation was the intended fate of the city’s residents from that point onward.!° This situation continued up to the Soviet approach toward Kyiv in autumn 1943 and the remaining population's flight from the city to avoid German evacuation orders.

Introduction 5 Soviet Power's Prewar Legacy and Chapter Overview

The two chapters in this book’s first section cover Kyiv’s resettlement after the Nazis. Some background on population control in the prewar Soviet Union will help to introduce this subject. It is a truism that Stalin consolidated power in the 1930s through terror. Recently uncovered evidence shows that his belief in the inevitable invasion of the USSR by the capitalist states partly sparked this murderous “cleansing” process.!! In an attempt to eliminate threats from within, the NKVD arrested various groups of Soviet people they considered “unreliable elements.” These groups included Stalin’s former political enemies in the central party leadership who doubted his policy choices and, more importantly, the “bourgeois nationalists” of all ranks in the USSR’s outlying republics. Stalin feared that the leadership abilities some of these people had gained during the successful collectivization and industrialization campaigns of the early 1930s might lead to separatism. The NKVD arrested and sent to the Gulag some two million people in this process, while almost 700,000 others were executed.!? In Kyiv, a mass grave for tens of thousands of Stalin’s victims was secretly created at Bykivnia on the city’s outskirts. 1

Included within these larger numbers were other groups Stalin believed to be “socially dangerous” within the supposedly classless and abundant society of “socialism.”!4 This highly centralized political dictatorship viewed social disorder as its chief threat before the Second World War.'> The Stalin regime thus devised the “passportization” campaign of 1933 to rid the Soviet Union's choked urban areas of peasants avoiding the collectivization of agriculture, by requiring an internal passport for employment in the city’s economy and receipt of a ration card. In 1937, it ordered the NKVD to implement large-scale “mass operations” (massoperatsii) to liquidate the former kulaks and recidivist criminals living in the Soviet Unions major cities. In Kyiv’s case, however, the city’s population growth may have reflected a sense that the country’s bright economic future could counter tensions created by such social dislocation. On the eve of the war, in 1940, Stalin’s internal police labeled Kyiv a “regime city of the first category” where all the aforementioned transgressors of the social order were forbidden to return; in fact, they were banished to 50 kilometers beyond the city’s limits.

Why the Kremlin’s wartime focus on defeating Germany led to a resettled Kyiv that the newly arrived Ukrainian Communists found difficult to manage is the focus of chapter 1. As the Stalin regime’s need for Red Army reinforcements took precedence over the cleansing of the “socially dangerous,” and the city filled up with unorganized returnees, the local Communists realized that Germany’s attack now meant a Kyiv unlike that of the prewar era. The chapter then examines why the Stalin regime chose to keep the city open for resettlement long after these authorities voiced their apprehensions about how social dislocation in the rear might create social disorder in a damaged Ukrainian capital. It also looks at what the Kremlin’s plans to mobilize rural Ukrainians to assist in Kyiv’s housing reconstruction (even as the city filled up with hundreds of thousands of other people) say about its position in the Soviet wartime economy.

Chapter 2 maintains a focus on social dislocation as it chronicles the local authorities’ realization of their city’s second-rate status as a hyper-centralized wartime economy allocated scarce labor resources. Even the forced arrival of schoolchildren and German POWs to help with the city’s reconstruction would not help the city’s housing shortage at this point in time. Though the local authorities’ protests to their republic-level bosses against continued unorganized return were to no avail, the announcement of the Fourth Five-Year Plan in March 1946 signaled that they could now close off their city to the world. Although this came too late to prevent the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people from the east, these same leaders would, curiously, later issue a citywide “amnesty” as they prepared for the hoped-for arrival of resources. In analyzing these processes, these two chapters on the Ukrainian Communists’ management of Kyiv’s resettlement provide initial clues to help explain the Stalin regime’s efforts to maintain its legitimacy later in the 1940s.

‘The two chapters in this book’s middle section concentrate on how Kyiv’s reassembled elites and ordinary people survived amid the scarcity of the postoccupation period. An introduction to how Stalin’s Great Breakthrough of the 1930s industrialized the Soviet Union provides essential background. Bolshevik propaganda about “class war” against kulaks in the village and “bourgeois specialists” in the factories had powered the First Five-Year Plan to completion.!® Stalin’s industrial revolution also succeeded because it undermined the political coherence of the labor movement in the Soviet Union.!” But in order to meet their plan quotas and retain their privileged positions, factory managers had to insulate their workers from draconian labor laws. As a result, these managers accepted workers’ partial control over plan fulfillment.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks created a slave labor force that one day would help them to maintain and defend “socialism.” The origins of this labor force dated from 1925, when the Soviet leadership discussed the exploitation of the mineral wealth of Siberia and the Far East through the use of forced labor.!* But not until the removal of the supposed kulaks from the villages of European Russia in 1930- 31 did the “special settlers” necessary for realizing such economic dreams start to become available. Some were sentenced to terms in corrective labor camps, which were placed in the hands of the NKVD. But most importantly, the several million victims of the Great Terror sentenced to the Gulag made the Soviet east an economic force by 1940.

In Kyiv, an elite synonymous with the Ukrainian Communist Party led this totalitarian economy. This group had been formed amid Stalin’s difficulties implementing collectivization in Ukraine, a process that led to the arrest, trial, and conviction of treasonous “bourgeois nationalists.” Over the next five years, Ukrainian party membership dropped 45 percent, from 515,050 members and candidates in 1933 to 285,025 in 1938, at least 100,000 of whom were later shot or exiled.?° While Stalin purged Ukraine, his ideological henchman Andrei Zhdanov implemented a “party revival” campaign throughout the USSR.” Zhdanov believed that good Communists should concentrate on ideological purity—within their ranks and among the masses they governed—instead of micromanaging the fulfillment of the five-year plans.

Instead of recruiting workers, Zhdanov sought to attract the “best people” (a euphemism for highly educated specialists in a given sphere of employment) to membership in order to ensure Stalin’s policies would be correctly understood.” To help ensure this, the Soviet government allocated party members better housing, consumer goods, and food products through a system of centralized distribution after the official end of rationing in 1935.7? And while Stalin’s Great Terror helped to make people “believers” in the new command economy across the USSR in 1937-38, the Ukrainian Communists required little convincing in light of their experiences earlier that decade. Center-local relations were now based on “new bonds of allegiance and loyalty of a new generation of administrators, supplemented by the fear instilled by police surveillance and terror.”*4 The Ukrainian party’s ranks rose to prepurge levels (some 564,536 members and candidates) again by June 1941.”

The history of ordinary people living in 1930s Kyiv is more difficult to ascertain. Statistics reveal that, while the number of workers doubled during this period, their number relative to the city’s population as a whole was still not that significant. The amount of people working in Kyiv’s factories climbed from roughly 5 percent of the city’s population in the mid-1920s (20,000 people) to 10 percent in the late 1930s (90,000).° The majority of working people in Kyiv were involved in light industry, transportation, education, culture, or, from 1934, the bureaucracies of the newly arrived Ukrainian government. But there is no doubt that Stalin’s efforts to build “socialism in one country” also brought economic progress to Kyiv. The First Five-Year Plan in Kyiv was marked by a determination of the production profiles and an expansion of the capacities of the city’s existing factories in order to meet the needs of Stalin’s efforts to overcome “backwardness.” Lenin’s Forge (Leninskaia Kuznitsa) began building ships, Red Excavator (Krasnyi Ekskavator) started manufacturing parts for tractors, and the city’s main railway junction saw the opening of the Kyiv Steam Engine Repair Factory.”

It was the Stalin regime’s collectivization of agriculture, meanwhile, that paid for this transformation and was intended to supply cities like Kyiv with abundant food. By 1931, an “institutionalization of supply norms along geographical and social lines” had created a “hierarchy of state distribution” in the USSR where industrial workers’ needs were given top priority.” But in Kyiv, with its small number of industrial workers and terrible transport, sewer, and housing conditions (608,000 people lived on 3.8 million square meters of space in 1932), its longtime denizens may not have felt like “victors” during the Great Breakthrough.”? Many of these people probably welcomed the Stalin regime’s 1933 passportization law mentioned above.

The Second Five-Year Plan, however, brought a greater emphasis on investment in light industry, and many Kyivans benefited from this change. From 1933 to 1938, the city witnessed the building of entirely new enterprises such as the Gorky Machine Tool Factory and the Artificial Fibers Factory in left-bank Darnytsa (on the eastern side of the Dnipro River), as well as the introduction of entirely new technologies like the Bol’shevik Factory’s retooling to produce machines for the paper industry.” But when rationing ended in 1935, many ordinary citizens were forced to work harder to earn the money they needed to purchase goods from peasant markets or on the black market.4! Although some 445,000 square meters of additional housing were built (mainly to accommodate the arriving party elite), the city’s population also increased by 300,000 during these years.?” While many of these new arrivals were fleeing famine and persecution in the countryside, the economic change that characterized Kyiv before the Second World War still suggests that a modicum of hope and optimism existed there at the time.