Many political analysts and scientists from the West believed back then that the emergence of such a power would help resolve not only the ethnic problem of multinational Russia but also create a future model of humanity. Publicists described the Soviet Union as a "wonderful flower garden" but added that it would be a great pity if only one variety of flowers grew in it.
However, reality proved dismal and tragic. A cruel and merciless dictator ruled the fragile flower garden. Joseph Stalin, former commissar for nationalities in the first Soviet government, showed his uncompromising and relentless nature during discussions to create the Soviet Union.
Although born and raised in Georgia, Stalin was a centrist and so believed the Soviet Union should become a Russian Federative Republic. He insisted that other territories should be its autonomous members and be able to satisfy their cultural and legal needs. Lenin, who was severely ill, disagreed; he demanded that the future state should allow its voluntarily united republics to declare independence. Stalin conceded but said such intentions should be negotiated with the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Stalin held two offices: he was both a minister in the government and a secretary of the party. Many saw him in the latter job as an ordinary record keeper. That was their bitter mistake. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin used repressive bodies to take over the party and later the state.
In 1922, the governments of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and the Trans-Caucasian Republic founded the Soviet Union. Later Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, once parts of the Federative Russia, became separate republics and the Trans-Caucasian Republic reappeared as Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia.
Naturally, none of these republics could even think of leaving the Soviet Union. One man decided their fate, as well as the fate of its residents. The Bolsheviks had called Russia "the prison of peoples" before the 1917 revolution. Stalin made it a concentration camp. Hardly had he announced the establishment of the Soviet Union when he began, perhaps unintentionally, to gradually destroy it.
Having fabricated a few political cases, Stalin filled the Taiga [region of Siberia] with the mournful sound of axes and saws. Millions of the enemies of the people were building socialism, subsisting on gruel and living behind the barbed-wire fence. Stalin exterminated thousands of villages with famine. He moved nations from one area to another as if they had been furniture. He then filled those ethnic niches with Russian-speaking settlers.
When Stalin died in 1953, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the country's only party, led the Soviet Union. Its members did not inherit Stalin's brutality but they were as efficient as their predecessor in ruining the powerful organism of the first socialist state with ideological myths, economic injustice and ethno-
cultural nihilism. They adhered to Stalin and Lenin's main commandment: Russian nationalism is patriotism; patriotism in other Soviet republics is nationalism, hostile and bourgeois.
I was brought up in a very politicized family. Believing I was still a naive child, my relatives discussed Stalin's every word in my presence. My male relations searched for undercurrents in his neutral speeches and often could understand who would become his new victim - either someone from his entourage or even a group of people of the same profession. Although I was only 15 in 1945, I knew why everyone in my family called Stalin "our Aesop."
Many war veterans - some with burnt faces, some with artificial limbs, and some missing an eye or an arm - gathered in our house for a Victory Day celebration. The feast coincided with a lavish reception in the Kremlin, announced by the Soviet radio well beforehand.
Millions of glasses filled with water, cognac and wine paused throughout the country to listen to Stalin's toast honoring the victors. However, Stalin raised his goblet not for the victory. He worshipped the Russian people instead, describing them as the Soviet Union's prominent nation and ruling force. The leader said the Russian people were intelligent, enduring and patient.
My relatives, who had not long ago returned from the front, thought Ukrainians were "intelligent, enduring and patient" too and so seemed offended by Stalin's words. They started arguing about what exactly "our Aesop" had wanted to say in his pro-Russian toast. The guests concluded that Stalin had wanted to degrade Ukraine. Most of the marshals and top generals of the Soviet army came from Ukraine and were proud of their roots. Even suspicious Stalin never questioned their efficiency and skills.
Having taught Ukraine a lesson, Stalin made the Russian nation arrogantly chauvinistic.
After my university graduation in 1955, I visited different Soviet republics as a reporter. I did not want to visit only their capital cities, dreaming to feast my eyes on rural landscapes and take photographs. The absence of cars and good roads in the state prompted only one way of traveling and that was by train.
I still remember that the Baltics smell of apples, Middle Asia of melons and the Caucasus of tangerines. My visual memory has preserved many red letters in the white background along the country's hills and mountain ranges. These letters were energetic propagandistic slogans and informed passers-by and drivers about the Soviet Union's achievements. Rains and frosts contributed to the decay of those letters and they teased visitors with rust and indifference.
Near the Siberian city of Omsk rust ate away half of the slogan, "Long Live the Friendship of the Soviet Peoples!"
I made friends in each republic. I think my Ukrainian origins were what made people all over the country treat me kindly and want to be my friends.
In 1959, I met Gapur. He was 30 years old but lived with his parents in a traditional flat-roofed Turkmen house, fenced from the outside world with a tall windowless clay wall. No stranger was allowed to see how a Turkmen family lived. Women and children could only walk in the backyard with a small fountain and flowerbeds.
The capital of Ashgabat had very few European avenues then but its center had already been redecorated and refurbished. The main square was named after Karl Marx. Gapur liked neither the new name nor all those loud Russian builders who had come to change his country. They stressed the old locals with their jokes and guitars. Once a group of drunken Russians stopped by the wall of Gapur's house and were shouting, "Turkmen, show your harem!" while his father was secretly praying.
In 1965, I was in Georgia's capital city, Tbilisi. I was in the home of my friend, Tengiz, rather than at a hotel. Every morning I took his motorbike and rode to one of the city's markets to buy dry wine and vegetables for dinner. I smiled at a street vendor and pronounced "Good morning" in Georgian, syllable by syllable. On the second day, I wished her and her family health, which was quite a risky thing to do with my poor knowledge of Georgian. She was amazed at my phonetic success and gave me a few bunches of greens as a present. Then I heard her rebuke a Russian man who had lived in Georgia for fifty years but failed to remember the Georgian word for "onion."
During our dinner with Tengiz I heard some linguistic news. Party functionaries from Abkhazia were asking Moscow to allow their drama theatre to translate its repertoire, including the plays by Georgian playwrights, into Russian.
Abkhazia is an autonomous republic in Georgia, with 80,000 Abkhazians and 200,000 Georgians living together for centuries. Both groups speak Georgian and Abkhaz fluently.
However, the republican officials did not care about their republic's language harmony and the repertoire of its provincial theatre. They decided to outrun their colleagues from all over the country in materializing the Kremlin's top ideological priority of integrating all the Soviet peoples into a Russian-speaking nation. Tengiz's mother interpreted these theoretical innovations by the Communist Party in her own wise way. She said she had visited Moldava three years ago and saw that even hens there were different from those in Georgia.
She reassured us that the proud Georgians would never be like other nations of the Soviet Union.
Editor's Note:
The second part of this two-part contribution by Serhiy Kharchenko will appear later in the Ukrainian Observer Online.
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