Mykola Oleksiyovych Skrypnyk

Skrypnyk was recognized as the foremost authority on the Marxist theory of the national question in the Soviet Union. He consistently defended Lenin's principle of national self-determination in the process of federation-building, and at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923 he opposed Stalin's 'autonomization' scheme, insisting on the substantive sovereignty of the republics. For Skrypnyk, solving the national question was not a matter of administrative redrawing of borders but a comprehensive task: to redress the colonial inequality bequeathed by Tsarism through language, culture, education, and the training of national cadres.

As People's Commissar of Education of Ukraine from 1927 to 1933, he put this theory into practice. He raised the share of Ukrainian-language schools above eighty percent, converted the research of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences into Ukrainian, and launched a massive program of translating world classics and foreign literature. In 1928 he adopted the so-called 'Kharkiv spelling' (the Skrypnyk orthography), standardizing written Ukrainian. He served as editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia and, as director of the All-Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism, anchored Marxist scholarship within Ukrainian institutional life.

Skrypnyk was no national communist. He repeatedly stressed that Ukrainization must proceed within the framework of a strong centralized Soviet state and under the banner of proletarian internationalism. In the early 1930s, however, amid grain requisitioning and forced collectivization from the center, his policies were branded a 'nationalist deviation.' The cultural revolution he designed began to unravel with his own destruction in 1933; under Stalinism, Ukrainization was condemned as 'bourgeois nationalism' and dismantled.

From 1932 to early 1933 Skrypnyk in fact opposed the raised rates of grain procurement, a position Kaganovich singled out in a letter to Stalin in the summer of 1932. According to the Ukrainian-language account, at the end of October 1932 he was appointed responsible for carrying out grain procurement in Dnipropetrovsk oblast, and the campaign against him followed Postyshev's arrival in Soviet Ukraine in January 1933 on Stalin's instructions.

In his last year, 'distortions of Leninism', 'nationalist errors' and 'wrecking in linguistics' were hunted in his works. The February and June plenums of the CP(b)U Central Committee were mostly directed against him, and he was required to produce a recantation document acknowledging his 'errors', while repeated Politburo explanations were all found unsatisfactory. In February 1933 he was released from the post of People's Commissar of Education and appointed head of Gosplan and deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom of the Ukrainian SSR. On 7 July 1933, at the start of another Politburo session where the question of his document was again raised, he left the hall and killed himself in his own office in Derzhprom. He was buried in Kharkiv.

Conflicting interpretive accounts of the suicide's motive are attributed rather than resolved. The Russian-language account says that, perhaps having no other way out, he 'prevented his inevitable destruction' by suicide; the English-language account states he shot himself at his desk rather than be forced to recant his policies in a show trial. Only the fact of the suicide is documented.

The funeral and the immediate defamation are documented. At the funeral on 8 July H. Petrovsky called Skrypnyk the founder of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine who 'fell victim to an insolent class enemy', while V. Zatonsky and K. Sukhomlyn acknowledged the suicide as a 'black stain' his glorious past could not wash away. On 12 July, to blacken the dead man, CP(b)U Central Committee secretary M. Popov at a Kyiv party aktiv meeting listed his 'anti-Leninist errors': prioritising the national question, focusing only on great-power chauvinism, belittling Lenin's and Stalin's role in the theory of the national question, justifying forced Ukrainization in schools, separating Ukrainian Soviet culture from the culture of Russian workers, and the anti-party theory of 'national-bolshevism'. The November 1933 joint plenum of the CP(b)U Central Committee and Central Control Commission resolution already spoke of a 'new nationalist deviation in the party led by N. A. Skrypnyk', and on 27 March 1934 the CP(b)U Politburo adopted a special decision 'On the confiscation of Skrypnyk's works'.

Rehabilitation was long delayed and contested. Although formally rehabilitated in the second half of the 1950s, his whole literary legacy remained banned. In 1962 a presidium of the Communist Party of Ukraine decision on the 90th anniversary of his birth raised the question of publishing his works, but a collection of his selected works appeared only in 1991; a monument-bust was erected to him in Kharkiv on Pushkinska Street in 1968, and streets bear his name in Kyiv, Lviv and his native Yasynuvata. On 28 March 1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, by special resolution, recognised that the political accusations of 'national-uклонism' against Skrypnyk rested on falsified materials and distorted representations of his views and activity, and ruled him rehabilitated in party terms (posthumously).