The Executed Renaissance: how Moscow killed a culture

The renaissance of the 1920s

The 1920s in Ukraine were a time of powerful cultural upsurge. Mykola Khvylovy was, in the assessment of historian Lyudmyla Turchyna, one of the leaders — if not the chief leader — of the Ukrainian renaissance of that era^[1]. Around him and figures such as the Neoclassicists (Mykola Zerov), literary debates raged and a modern Ukrainian literature took shape.

How Moscow curtailed freedom

This upsurge unfolded under Soviet rule — and the authorities suppressed it. Khvylovy was sent abroad in 1928, his position was examined at the plenums of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, and People’s Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk gave “Khvylovism” a class-based, stigmatizing definition — supposedly the “ideological foundation of the kulak”^[2]. Free literary debate was gradually curtailed in favor of the single permitted template — socialist realism. This was not chance but policy.

The suicide of 1933

The denouement coincided with the Holodomor. In his final years Khvylovy was permitted to travel to the villages to record the consequences of the famine; according to one account, in one of those villages he saw the corpse of his own father^[3]. In 1933 Khvylovy took his own life — an act of despair against the backdrop of both the extermination of the peasantry by famine and the destruction of Ukrainian culture.

The Executed Renaissance

Khvylovy’s fate was not an exception but a symbol. An entire generation of the Ukrainian creative and scholarly elite of the 1920s was destroyed in the 1930s. The phenomenon was named the “Executed Renaissance” by the eponymous anthology of Yurii Lavrinenko (1959). Its preface states plainly: these works were banned and destroyed as a result of Moscow’s new policy of suppressing and colonizing Ukraine after 1933.

To the familiar objection that “the terror was the same for all the peoples of the USSR,” historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya, in a street debate, answers with a comparison: the Russian intelligentsia had its “mouth shut” — and many survived physically — whereas the Ukrainian creative intelligentsia was shot almost in its entirety, the nation “simply beheaded”^[4]. The difference is not in the intensity of censorship but in the method itself: there, coercion into silence; here, the physical extermination of the bearers of a culture.

That extermination has a concrete address — the Sandarmokh clearing in Karelia. Dribnytsya cites the figure: 1,111 people shot — and stresses that this is Sandarmokh alone, without counting the other execution sites^[5]. According to the documents, 1,111 prisoners of the so-called first Solovki prisoner transport were shot between 27 October and 4 November 1937; it was on 3 November, in a single day, that the core of the Ukrainian cultural elite was executed — Les Kurbas, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov, Valerian Pidmohylny, and others from the “Sandarmokh list.” Prisoners of dozens of nationalities were shot there, but the concentration of Ukrainian writers, directors, and scholars in these pits is a direct continuation of the policy that began with the persecution of Khvylovy.

What this means

The “Executed Renaissance” is a direct refutation of the myth of a Soviet “flourishing” of Ukrainian culture. In reality, the 1920s produced a surge, and the 1930s a systematic extermination of its bearers. It is the same imperial logic as the Holodomor: to physically destroy not only the peasantry but also the intellectual elite capable of keeping the nation separate. The culture that could not be subjugated was erased — but not entirely: it is precisely thanks to people like Khvylovy that we know what was destroyed.