Poliuvannia na Val´dshnepa: Rozsekrechenyi Mykola Khvyl´ovyi (Hunting for "Woodcock": Mykola Khvyl´ovyi Declassified) (review)

The Ukrainian historian Iurii Shapoval's recent volume of previously unpublished documents from the archive of Ukraine's security service, the Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy (SBU), attests to the involvement of the secret police in the life of the Soviet Ukrainian writer and Communist Mykola Khvyl´ovyi (1893-1933). The volume includes the majority of documents from file S-183, the State Political Administration (GPU) file on Khvyl´ovyi kept in the archives since the 1930s. Shapoval has worked for a long time to gain access to this file, and the documents are well worth the wait. They both confirm and complicate our understanding of the relationship between artists and officialdom in the early Soviet period. Shapoval's introductory essay and commentary, however, present an analysis of this relationship that I would like in this review to contest.¹

Iurii Shapoval has written extensively on the mechanisms of Soviet rule in Ukraine and published numerous collections of archival documents. This particular volume is of especial value to researchers because it contains material not widely available elsewhere, either in Ukraine or in Russia. While only accessible to family members of the "repressed" in Russia (or those with privileged access), investigation files (sledstvennye dela) are, in general, open to researchers in Ukraine, whether at the SBU archive (including its local branches) or the central party archive in Kyiv. These files, however, begin only with an arrest warrant and include statements from the arrested, notice of sentencing, and, when applicable, documents on rehabilitation. Nowhere can one read the files that led to these files. The Khvyl´ovyi file is so valuable precisely because it constitutes that extraordinary pre-story: information gathered from local informers, internal memoranda, and other documents that could have led to the printing of an arrest warrant and opening of an investigation file.²

Shapoval's contribution, then, differs from previous collections of documents relating to Soviet culture and Soviet artist-official relations. Andrei Artizov's and Oleg Naumov's volume of documents (translated and edited for the Annals of Communism series by Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko) illuminates the relationship between the Soviet party-state and the arts with memoranda and letters from the GPU-People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Central Committee, and Stalin himself in order to focus on the party-state's decision making in cultural policy. The file on Khvyl´ovyi, by contrast, illuminates less high-level decision making and more the world in which artists and officials lived and worked.³

Although this volume centers on only one file, that file belonged to Mykola Khvyl´ovyi, a writer, card-carrying Communist, and figure central to the early years of Soviet Ukraine. Volodymyr Panchenko's background essay gives thorough biographical detail (46-79). Born Nikolai Fitilev in the Sumy region to a teacher's family, the future Mykola Khvyl´ovyi acquired a modicum of education and joined the Russian Imperial Army in 1914. He continued his military service during the Civil War, ended up in the Red Army (from 1917-18 his exact military affiliation is unknown), and found himself demobilized in Kharkiv in 1921. Within several years, he was the leading cultural figure in Soviet Ukraine thanks to his polemical pamphlets and personal magnetism that attracted other writers and party officials. The major cultural figures gathered at his apartment, the journals with which he was involved constituted the major publications, and everyone who was anyone was either his friend or his enemy. Very quickly, friends included Commissar of Enlightenment Oleksandr Shums´kyi, and enemies included General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Lazar´ Kaganovich—and, through him, Stalin himself. Khvyl´ovyi's perhaps most famous pamphlet, "Ukraine or Little Russia," was never published, but a marked-up copy in...