How to Stop Trump From Erasing History

Heidi Siegmund Cuda on the fight to disrupt the US President's attempts to control the future by rewriting the past

In the before times, I was listening to Timothy Snyder’s The Making of Modern Ukraine podcast series when I was jolted by the phrase ‘The Executed Renaissance.’ I didn’t know that Joseph Stalin had ordered the mass murder of the Ukrainian intelligentsia that had flourished in the 1920s and 1930s.

An entire generation of Ukrainian language poets, writers, and artists, who lived in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic were persecuted, denied work, imprisoned, and murdered. Poets, writers, dramaturgists who wrote in the Ukrainian language were denied their voice in history.

According to historian Orest Subtelny, the collapse of the Russian Empire and the subsequent “cultural leniency of the Soviet regime in the 1920s led to an astonishing literary and cultural renaissance” in Ukraine, which was part of a movement to stamp out illiteracy.

The new generation of writers, who used their words to rise up beyond their social circumstances, celebrated independent thought and a rebellious spirit.

This brief period of literary freedom — also referred to as the Red Renaissance — was exterminated under Stalinist rule, with repression, show trials, forced suicides, concentration camps, and executions to silence independent expression.

In a period known as the Great Terror of 1937 - 1938, 223 writers were arrested, and about 300 representatives of the Ukrainian Renaissance were murdered in October and November 1938, and were buried in a mass killing field.