Ideological Campaign or a Fatal Accident? The Discussions of 1928–1930 and the Collapse of Historian M. I. Yavorsky’s Career

Abstract

This article examines the personality of Matvei Ivanovich Yavorsky, a leading Ukrainian Marxist historian of the 1920s. The article reveals the circumstances that led to the historian’s removal from leading academic positions in the early 1930s. The historiography created an image of Yavorsky as a scholar who suffered under the attacks of Moscow Marxist historians led by M. N. Pokrovsky and his disciple P. O. Gorin. Contrary to popular belief, the author shows that the story of Yavorsky’s downfall was a series of coincidences that led to the transformation of an ideological polemic into a campaign of harassment, followed by his arrest and death. The article explains why the debates of the time were not the cause of Yavorsky’s downfall. Patronage from the Ukrainian party leadership allowed Yavorsky to engage in aggressive polemics with his opponents (primarily Gorin). Discussions within the Ukrainian academic community led to a softening of Yavorsky’s position on conceptual differences (the driving forces of the revolution in Ukraine) rather than a public campaign against him. The author shows that Gorin and Pokrovsky did not have the administrative capacity to start harassing the scholar. The collapse of Yavorsky’s career turned out to be the result of the revealed facts of his biography (service in the Austro-Hungarian army). Yavorsky’s situation did not fit into any of the ideological campaigns of the time and came as a complete surprise to the local party leadership. Attempts to launch a campaign against Yavorsky (“yavorshchina”) were quashed by the Ukrainian SSR leadership, which gave the historian the opportunity to move to Leningrad. There, however, he was caught by the OGPU’s Operation Spring. During the investigation in Ukraine, people who had testified against Yavorsky were implicated in the case. This led to his arrest, imprisonment and death sentence.