{"id":2400,"date":"2026-09-08T13:03:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T17:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/?p=2400"},"modified":"2026-09-08T13:03:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T17:03:30","slug":"war-and-on-culture-from-1921-to-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/2026\/09\/08\/war-and-on-culture-from-1921-to-today\/","title":{"rendered":"War and (\/on) culture, from 1921 to today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As terror continues to rain down on Ukrainians after the pseudo-effort of Donald Trump’s two real estate mogul “diplomats” to negotiate “peace,” it’s helpful to think of how this wartime might compare with the wartime of a century ago, and how culture relates to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wartime period of 1917-1921 was messy, characterized by multiple proclamations<\/a> of sovereignty and independence even as rival armies clashed across the countryside: the Ukrainian People’s Republican army, the Bolshevik Red Army, the Russian White Army, German and Austro-Hungarian forces, the Polish military, and the anarchist and Free Cossack units of Makhno<\/a>, Hryhoriv<\/a>, Nikiforova<\/a>, Chornousov, Kotsur, Chuchupak, and others. When relative calm came to prevail after the Bolsheviks took control and proclaimed Kharkiv their capital, the cultural intelligentsia came, either enthusiastically or grudgingly (since some had been allied with the republican cause), to align with the Communist state-building project. Some of its leading figures became vocal and eager supporters of the building of a proletarian Ukrainian culture, with “Ukrainization<\/a>” being temporarily allowed as part of the Leninist korenizatsiya<\/em> policy (the “indigenization” or “rooting” of communism within national cultures).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1920s became a time of revitalization, a “Red Renaissance” by many assessments, with a variety of artist and writer groups contending for recognition at a time when state support for the arts was substantial. Groups like Hart, MARS (Workshop of Revolutionary Literature), ARMU (Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine), Pluh (Plough), Komunkult, and perhaps the most influential of them, VAPLITE (the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature), provided the organizational links supporting the creative work of a generation of writers, filmmakers, and visual and theatrical artists, only a handful of whom are widely known today: Oleksander Dovzhenko, Les Kurbas<\/a>, Mykola Khvylovyi<\/a>, Mykola Kulish, Maik Yohansen, Pavlo Tychyna, Vasyl Ellan-Blakytny, Mykola Bazhan, Valerian Pidmohylnyi, Kazimir Malevich, Oleksander Arkhypenko, Mykhailo Semenko, Vadym Meller, Dokiia Humenna, Mykhailo Boichuk, Viktor Petrov\/Domontovych, and so many others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason why they aren’t known is, of course, because by the end of the decade they were subject to the Stalinist strangulation of the arts, especially intense in Ukraine, which was carried out in tandem with the collectivization of the countryside. In 1932-33, the latter resulted in the artificial hunger known as the Holodomor<\/a>, with its several million victims, and by 1938 the cultural intelligentsia was also decimated \u2014 not just physically destroyed (so many of them executed in the purges) but mostly erased from the historical record. The Red Renaissance became the Executed Renaissance<\/a>, a term coined by Paris-based publisher Jerzy Giedroyc and popularized by emigr\u00e9 literary critic Yuriy Lavrinenko. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, as yet, no widely-known, general-audience, English-language historical account of Ukraine\u2019s 1920s cultural renaissance and its nightmarish aftermath. But fortunately there is an excellent open-access essay that details the broad contours of it quite well. Published in 2021 by the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien, Bohdan Tokarsky’s roughly 100-page volume “Un\/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies<\/a>,” should be required reading for anyone who thinks they know world culture of the 1920s or the early Soviet period, but who doesn’t know Ukraine’s contributions to it. (Note that both the above terms, including “renaissance” itself, get problematized in Tokarsky’s text.) More on the book below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

A good reason to think about all this is because the arts in Ukraine today are actually flourishing, more so than they were in 1917-21, which bodes well for the post-war period when it (ever) comes. But that’s also perhaps a reason why Russians appear to be targeting book publishers<\/a> in several recent attacks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it’s worth comparing these two wartimes \u2014 1917-21 and the current one \u2014 to the one in the middle of the last century. After World War Two, cultural life in Ukraine stagnated under Stalinist constraints up until the dictator’s death in 1953, suggesting that war on Ukrainian culture continued until that year. The Khrushchev “Thaw” led to the next mini-renaissance of the “Sixtiers<\/a>” (Shestydesiatnyky<\/em>) generation, but that, too, culminated in repressions, albeit less draconian than in the 1930s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The point of these comparisons is that Ukraine’s cultural life has for too long labored under its dependence on Moscow. That makes Mykola Khvylovy’s 1926 slogan “Away from Moscow!” \u2014 and Khvylovy was an avowed communist, leader of the writer’s organization VAPLITE, and in many ways the “voice of a generation<\/a>” \u2014 the slogan that all of Ukraine labours under today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s more from the publisher of Tokarsky’s book, which I highly recommend: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“The Ukrainian culture of the 1920s proved to be not only the most effervescent and seminal creative period in Ukraine\u2019s twentieth-century history, but also a distinct phenomenon in the landscapes of both modernism and Soviet culture. Ukrainian Soviet modernism enjoyed the intertwining of various aesthetic sensibilities, combining the exploration of selfhood and engagement with mass audiences, the making of urban literature and drawing upon rural culture, and the radical break with artistic conventions and continuity with (national) cultural traditions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“At the same time, the Ukrainian culture of this period fermented at the intersection of several aspirations, primarily between the assertion of national culture long suppressed in the Russian Empire, participation in the shaping of the nascent Soviet project, and a more intensive dialogue with Western European cultures. This crisscross brought about a sui generis multifaceted culture. In the climate of increasing political pressure in the Soviet Union, this rich hybridity went hand in hand with a multi-layered yet fragmented self, which was caught between different projects of identity-in-the-making: communist\/socialist, Soviet, Ukrainian, and European. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This essay provides an innovative reading of the Ukrainian Soviet culture of the 1920s and its legacies in contemporary Ukrainian culture and politics.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can access the book from the link here: https:\/\/european-times.eu\/en\/publication\/the-un-executed-renaissance-ukrainian-soviet-modernism-and-its-legacies<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As terror continues to rain down on Ukrainians after the pseudo-effort of Donald Trump’s two real estate mogul “diplomats” to negotiate “peace,” it’s helpful to think of how this wartime might compare with the wartime of a century ago, and how culture relates to it. The wartime period of 1917-1921 was messy, characterized by multiple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdPO21-CI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2400"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2406,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions\/2406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}