Controlled Renaissance: The Bolshevik Regime’s Takeover of the Ukrainian Literary and Artistic Milieu in the 1920s

Abstract

The paper examines the processes that took place in the literary and artistic milieu in Soviet Ukraine. The primary approach employed in this study is an assessment of this period considering the socio-political events of the 1920s. The definition of this literary and artistic generation as the «Executed Renaissance» is based on the tragic events of the later 1930s when the totalitarian regime intensified Bolshevik modernization according to the Stalinist model. The objective of this article is to highlight the main forms and methods through which the Bolshevik regime took control over the literary and artistic intellectuals in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) during the 1920s. During the period of early totalitarianism in the 1920s, artists, under the policy of «Ukrainization,» which was officially declared as a process of developing national cultures and a period of relative creative freedom, were nonetheless required — at least nominally — to declare their loyalty to the regime and create within the framework of political, ideological, and cultural compromise. The article identifies the key mechanisms used by the Bolshevik regime to establish control over the literary and artistic milieu in the 1920s, including: gathering compromising information; recruiting artists to foster fragmentation and atomization within the artistic community; exerting organizational influence over the formation or dissolution of literary associations; providing material incentives for writers and artists loyal to the regime; ideologically instrumentalizing creative output; publicly affirming support for Bolshevik power; subordinating artistic endeavors to the ideological needs of the Communist Party; and defining politically significant themes in literature and art. Thus, the Bolshevik regime employed a wide array of methods to control the literary and artistic intelligentsia, compelling them to create under conditions of ideological unfreedom.