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

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 2022. Vol. 23. No. 3. P. 457–492.

Angelina Lucento

By analyzing the discourse used in NKVD interrogations of the Boichukisty from the Ukrainian Security Service’s archive and works pro- duced by the artists, this article demonstrates that the Ukrainian NKVD played a critical role in the style’s evolution. During the Great Terror, spe- cialists like Gol ́dman pursued artists and intellectuals whose activities they considered a threat to the Soviet state. In this article, I show that Gol ́dman and his officers succeeded in turning the artists and the particular agricultural motifs and folk patterns that they favored into examples of what Socialist Realism in the Ukrainian Republic should not be. I further reveal how the NKVD’s purge of the Boichukisty and their works, most of which were either destroyed outright or locked away in museum storage units (spetsfondy), led to the redefinition of national form in Socialist Realist art in the Ukrainian Republic and discuss the implications of such a redefinition for the broader evolution of the official style of Soviet visual art.

Keywords: Soviet history, art, Art history, socialist realism, cultural history, Regional soviet art