Kharkiv and the Executed Renaissance: How Stalin Tried to Destroy Ukrainian Culture
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 30 September 2026
It is difficult to walk around central Kharkiv today without encountering ghosts. They are not merely the ghosts of the full-scale Russian invasion, although damaged buildings, boarded windows and the occasional sudden violence of missile and drone attacks ensure that the present war is never entirely absent. There are older ghosts here, belonging to a period when Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine and one of the most remarkable centres of literary and artistic experimentation in Eastern Europe.
During the 1920s, Kharkiv experienced something approaching a cultural explosion. Writers, poets, playwrights, theatre directors, artists, linguists and philosophers gathered in the city and began asking a question whose political implications would ultimately prove lethal: what might modern Ukrainian culture become if Ukrainians were permitted to create it for themselves?
The answers were exuberant, argumentative and frequently strange. Ukrainian modernists experimented with prose, futurists dismantled literary conventions, theatre directors reinvented the stage and intellectuals debated whether Ukrainian culture should orient itself towards Moscow or towards Europe. For a few extraordinary years, almost everything seemed possible.
Then Stalin destroyed much of the generation responsible.
The writers and artists murdered, imprisoned or silenced during this period subsequently became known collectively as the Executed Renaissance. The expression is more than a literary metaphor. Ukraine underwent a genuine cultural renaissance during the 1920s, and the Soviet state subsequently executed a significant number of the people who created it.
To understand what happened is to understand something fundamental about the relationship between Ukraine and Russia that remains relevant today. The struggle between them has never been exclusively about territory, armies or borders. It has also concerned the more fundamental question of whether Ukraine possesses the right to describe itself.
When Kharkiv was the capital
Kharkiv served as the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1919 until 1934. That fact can seem surprising today, when Kyiv appears inseparable from Ukrainian statehood, but it gave interwar Kharkiv an extraordinary political and cultural importance.
The city expanded rapidly. Constructivist buildings appeared across its centre, industry developed at enormous speed and intellectuals arrived from throughout Ukraine. The monumental Derzhprom complex, completed at the end of the 1920s, expressed something of the optimism of the age: enormous, geometric and unapologetically modern, it suggested that Kharkiv belonged not to the provincial past but to an industrial future.
Culture was undergoing an equally dramatic transformation. The early Soviet authorities pursued a policy generally known as korenizatsiia, or indigenisation, which in Ukraine became Ukrainisation. Ukrainian-language education expanded, Ukrainian publications flourished and Ukrainian intellectual life enjoyed a degree of institutional encouragement that would appear astonishing when compared with the repression that followed.
The reasons for this policy were hardly sentimental. The Bolsheviks understood that they needed to establish legitimacy amongst the non-Russian peoples incorporated into the new Soviet state, and permitting local languages and cultures was one means of doing so. Yet policies adopted for cynical political reasons can have unintended consequences, and Ukrainisation helped release intellectual forces that Moscow subsequently found difficult to control.
A generation discovered that it could write in Ukrainian about modernity.
A culture without permission
This point matters because Ukrainian culture was not emerging from nothing. Ukraine possessed deep literary, linguistic, religious and artistic traditions extending centuries into the past, but those traditions had repeatedly been constrained by imperial rule. The Russian Empire had restricted Ukrainian-language publishing, most notoriously through the Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876.
The cultural flowering of the 1920s therefore carried an additional significance. Ukrainian was not merely being preserved as the language of folk songs, village customs or ethnographic curiosity; it was becoming the language of modern cities, experimental theatre, avant-garde literature and intellectual argument.
This was potentially dangerous to an imperial conception of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. If Ukrainian could sustain sophisticated modern literature, if Ukrainian theatre could participate in European artistic movements and if Ukrainian writers could discuss the future of civilisation without treating Moscow as their natural intellectual centre, then Ukraine ceased to look like a regional variation upon Russian culture.
It began to look unmistakably like a country.
Khvylovyi and Europe
Few people embodied this intellectual rebellion more clearly than Mykola Khvylovyi. A communist and revolutionary as well as a writer, Khvylovyi cannot conveniently be transformed into a simple anti-Soviet nationalist. His importance lies precisely in the complexity of his position: he initially believed that revolution might liberate Ukrainian culture while simultaneously insisting that Ukrainian intellectual life should escape Russian provincialism.
His famous slogan, usually rendered as “Away from Moscow!”, has subsequently acquired an almost prophetic quality. Khvylovyi was arguing principally about cultural orientation, urging Ukrainian writers to look towards what he understood as the psychological and intellectual traditions of Europe rather than mechanically imitating Russian models.
That argument carried political implications whether he intended them or not. Culture does not remain neatly separated from politics when questions of national identity are involved, and an intellectually self-confident Ukrainian culture implied the possibility of a Ukraine increasingly capable of imagining itself without Moscow.
Khvylovyi helped establish VAPLITE, the Free Academy of Proletarian Literature, which brought together some of the most important Ukrainian writers of the period. The organisation was eventually forced to dissolve under political pressure, and Khvylovyi increasingly found himself attacked for nationalist deviation.
The space for intellectual ambiguity was disappearing.
Kurbas reinvents the theatre
If Khvylovyi represented the literary audacity of the period, Les Kurbas represented its theatrical imagination. Kurbas was one of the most innovative theatre directors in twentieth-century Europe, although decades of Soviet suppression meant that his reputation outside Ukraine never approached that of comparable Western European theatrical innovators.
His Berezil theatre became a laboratory for modern performance. Kurbas experimented with movement, staging, rhythm, abstraction and the relationship between actor and audience, rejecting the assumption that Ukrainian theatre should consist principally of sentimental historical drama or folkloric entertainment.
His collaboration with playwright Mykola Kulish was particularly important. Kulish wrote plays of extraordinary linguistic and political complexity, and together the two men explored the contradictions of Soviet Ukrainian society with a sophistication that increasingly irritated the authorities.
Their production of Myna Mazailo satirised attitudes towards Ukrainian language and identity. Maklena Grasa explored poverty and social disintegration. Most dangerous of all was Narodnyi Malakhii, which subjected revolutionary utopianism to the uncomfortable scrutiny of theatre.
The Soviet authorities increasingly understood that these productions were not behaving as propaganda was supposed to behave. Art was asking questions when it was supposed to be supplying answers.
Semenko and the Ukrainian avant-garde
Then there was Mykhailo Semenko, the Ukrainian futurist whose literary experiments demonstrate how misleading it is to imagine the Ukrainian cultural revival as essentially conservative nationalism. Semenko was interested in breaking things: syntax, conventions, aesthetic assumptions and the inherited forms of literature.
His Ukraine was not a museum. It was supposed to be modern, urban and experimental, participating in the same revolutionary transformations of art occurring in Berlin, Paris, Milan and elsewhere across Europe.
This was one of the most remarkable features of the Executed Renaissance. Its protagonists disagreed with one another constantly. Some were communists, others increasingly sceptical of Soviet power; some celebrated machines and cities, while others remained fascinated by rural traditions; some wanted Ukrainian culture to join European modernism, while others sought entirely new forms.
They did not constitute a political party. They constituted something considerably more difficult for an authoritarian state to manage: an argument.
Maik Yohansen and the joy of intelligence
Among the most appealing personalities of the period was Maik Yohansen, a writer, translator, linguist and extraordinary literary experimenter whose life reads like an argument against the intellectual dreariness subsequently imposed by Stalinism.
Yohansen possessed a formidable knowledge of languages and wrote poetry, prose, criticism and experimental fiction. His The Journey of the Learned Doctor Leonardo and His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alceste, to Slobozhanshchyna Switzerland remains one of the strangest and most playful works of Ukrainian modernist literature.
That playfulness is important. Political repression is often described principally through statistics — numbers arrested, deported, imprisoned or executed — and inevitably the people involved become abstractions. Yet the cultural catastrophe of the 1930s was also the destruction of humour, eccentricity, friendships, love affairs, rivalries, absurd arguments and intellectual games.
Stalinism did not merely eliminate political opponents. It made life more boring.
Budynok Slovo
Many of these personalities converged upon the remarkable residential building known as Budynok Slovo, the House of the Word. Constructed by a writers’ cooperative in Kharkiv, it offered apartments to literary figures who had previously endured the severe housing shortages of the rapidly expanding Soviet Ukrainian capital.
Initially it must have seemed idyllic. Writers could work in proper studies, visit friends elsewhere in the building, exchange manuscripts and participate in a permanent literary community. An enormous concentration of Ukrainian intellectual talent found itself living behind the same walls.
As explored in the companion essay about the building, this arrangement subsequently acquired a darker significance. Concentrating writers in one place also made them convenient to watch, and as Stalinist repression intensified the building became associated with informers, surveillance, arrests and fear.
On 12 May 1933 the writer Mykhailo Yalovyi was arrested. The following day Khvylovyi gathered friends in his apartment and shot himself, an act that has come to symbolise the end of the optimistic period of Ukrainian cultural experimentation.
The Renaissance was becoming the Executed Renaissance.
The Holodomor and the end of ambiguity
These events coincided with a catastrophe occurring throughout the Ukrainian countryside. During 1932 and 1933, millions suffered starvation in the famine known as the Holodomor, produced in the context of forced collectivisation, punitive grain requisitions and Stalinist policies directed with particular severity against Soviet Ukraine.
The cultural and agricultural catastrophes cannot simply be collapsed into one another, but nor can they be understood in complete isolation. The early 1930s represented a decisive transformation in Moscow’s treatment of Ukraine, as the relative cultural latitude of Ukrainisation gave way to centralisation, repression and an increasingly aggressive campaign against alleged Ukrainian nationalism.
Writers who had believed that Ukrainian cultural development might coexist with Soviet communism discovered that the terms of the relationship had changed. Moscow would determine the acceptable boundaries of Ukrainian identity, and those who crossed them could be classified as nationalists, terrorists, spies or members of fictitious conspiracies.
The brilliance of Stalinist accusation lay in its flexibility. Virtually any independent thought could eventually be redescribed as evidence of political treachery.
Sandarmokh
The terror reached its most horrifying expression during 1937. In a forest in Karelia in northern Russia lies Sandarmokh, one of the great killing grounds of the Stalinist period, where thousands of people of numerous nationalities were executed by the NKVD.
Amongst them were members of Ukraine’s cultural elite. During mass executions in late October and early November 1937, prisoners transported from the Solovki prison camp were shot, including Les Kurbas, Mykola Kulish, Mykola Zerov and Mykhailo Yalovyi.
Maik Yohansen was executed in Kyiv in October 1937. Mykhailo Semenko was also shot that month, another Ukrainian futurist silenced by the distinctly anti-futurist method of a bullet.
The names multiply until their repetition becomes numbing, and that numbness presents its own danger. Every name represented unwritten books, unproduced plays, translations never undertaken, students never taught and intellectual movements whose future development can now only be imagined.
We know what Ukrainian culture produced during its brief period of comparative freedom. We cannot know what another twenty or thirty years of that freedom might have produced.
The destruction of cultural memory
Killing writers was only one component of the process. Their works also had to disappear.
Books were removed from circulation, names vanished from official literary histories and surviving writers learned to conform to the increasingly rigid requirements of Socialist Realism. Some adapted because they believed in the new cultural orthodoxy, others because they wanted careers and many because they wanted to remain alive.
This created a peculiar rupture in Ukrainian cultural memory. Later generations could grow up without knowing that the extraordinary experimental world of 1920s Kharkiv had ever existed. Soviet Ukrainian culture continued, sometimes producing important literature despite the restrictions imposed upon it, but the range of permissible cultural possibilities had been drastically narrowed.
This is one reason the rediscovery of the Executed Renaissance after the collapse of Soviet censorship became so important. Ukrainians were not merely discovering individual writers; they were recovering an alternative version of their own twentieth century.
They discovered that Ukrainian modernity had existed before Stalin attempted to erase it.
What was Stalin afraid of?
The obvious question is why an enormously powerful state was so frightened of poets and playwrights. Stalin commanded one of the largest security apparatuses in history, while the writers of Kharkiv commanded typewriters, theatre companies and occasionally rather unreliable printing presses.
The answer lies in the nature of political power. Governments can control territory through soldiers and police, but nations exist partly through shared stories, historical memories and languages. A state seeking comprehensive control cannot therefore remain indifferent to the people who create those things.
Ukrainian intellectuals presented an additional problem because their cultural work implicitly challenged the proposition that Ukraine was inseparable from Russia. They did not all advocate Ukrainian political independence, and many remained committed communists, but they were constructing the intellectual infrastructure through which Ukrainians might imagine themselves as a distinct modern European people.
That possibility was enough to make them dangerous.
The argument returns
The history of the Executed Renaissance has acquired renewed importance since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Once again Ukrainian museums, libraries, theatres, universities and cultural monuments have been damaged or destroyed, while writers, artists and academics have been killed in the war.
Historical comparisons must remain disciplined. Contemporary Russia is not Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Vladimir Putin’s government does not reproduce every institution or ideology of the 1930s. Nevertheless, Russian political rhetoric denying the legitimacy or distinctiveness of Ukrainian nationhood gives the history of Soviet cultural repression an unavoidable contemporary resonance.
When Ukrainian cultural institutions are damaged, therefore, Ukrainians do not perceive each event in historical isolation. They possess a collective memory of earlier periods in which Ukrainian books were prohibited, Ukrainian intellectuals were imprisoned and Ukrainian cultural independence was treated as politically dangerous.
The present consequently converses constantly with the past.
Kharkiv remembers
Kharkiv is an especially appropriate place in which to recover this history because the city complicates simplistic accounts of Ukrainian identity. It is overwhelmingly a Russian-speaking or bilingual city in everyday life, yet it has played an indispensable role in the development of modern Ukrainian culture. Language, political loyalty, cultural identity and historical memory have never fitted into the neat categories that outside observers sometimes attempt to impose upon Ukraine.
The Kharkiv of Khvylovyi, Kurbas, Kulish, Semenko and Yohansen was experimental precisely because it existed at intersections. It was industrial and literary, Ukrainian and cosmopolitan, revolutionary and increasingly sceptical of revolution, geographically close to Russia while intellectually looking towards Europe.
Modern Kharkiv retains something of that character. It remains argumentative, culturally complicated and difficult to reduce to slogans, while its survival under Russian bombardment has given the city’s Ukrainian identity a significance that Stalin could scarcely have anticipated.
The city that once witnessed Moscow’s destruction of a Ukrainian literary generation now stands close to the front line of another struggle over Ukraine’s right to exist independently.
The books came back
Stalin won the immediate contest. The writers were arrested, the theatre productions were stopped, the books disappeared and generations of Soviet citizens were denied an honest account of what had happened.
Yet political victories of this kind possess an unusual weakness: they depend upon permanent forgetting. Once archives reopen, manuscripts reappear and prohibited writers return to print, the apparent completeness of the victory begins to dissolve.
Today Khvylovyi is read again. Kulish’s plays are performed, Kurbas is studied as a major European theatrical innovator, Yohansen’s strange and delightful prose has returned to readers and the literature of the Executed Renaissance is increasingly translated for audiences outside Ukraine.
Budynok Slovo still stands in Kharkiv. Its walls survived the men who monitored the people inside them, and its history is now discussed openly in a country whose existence Stalin’s policies were intended to subordinate permanently to Moscow.
There is an irony in this that the writers themselves might have appreciated. The Soviet Union possessed secret police, prisons, camps, censorship offices and executioners, while the writers possessed words. For several decades it appeared obvious which side had prevailed.
The longer historical perspective makes the answer considerably less straightforward. The executioners are remembered principally because of the people they killed, while the people they killed are increasingly remembered because of what they wrote, and modern Ukraine continues the argument about cultural independence that Stalin attempted to settle by violence.
The Executed Renaissance was indeed executed, but it was never successfully erased. Its recovery represents something more profound than literary archaeology: it restores a missing part of Ukraine’s intellectual inheritance and reminds us that the modern Ukrainian cultural tradition was not created in reaction to the present war.
It was already flourishing in Kharkiv a century ago. The tragedy is that Moscow destroyed so much of it; the remarkable fact is that enough survived for Ukraine to find it again.
