The NKVD and the Political Origins of Socialist Realism: The Persecution of the Boichukisty in Ukraine

Abstract

On 17 December 1936, a People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) committee led by the specialist Solomon Gol ́dman (fig. 1) interrogated the recently arrested painter Mykhailo Boichuk (fig. 2) in a Kyiv prison cell. It seems likely that Boichuk’s captors had beaten or otherwise tortured him just before Gol ́dman’s interrogation to force the artist into confessing to having been a Ukrainian nationalist. After all, until the moment of his arrest, Boichuk had been the leader of the most influential school of Ukrainian monumental artists known as the Boichukisty (fig. 3), and the NKVD was especially interested in the Ukrainian character of the group’s projects. They asked Boichuk, “As part of your practical work, what did you do?”1 The “detrimental old Ukrainian art, ancient painting, and the achievements of the bourgeois formal schools,” he replied. “I sent youth down that pathway of specialist training, tearing them consciously away from the pathway to Socialist Realism, and in so doing, tore them away from their participation in the building of socialism.”2