The Tragedy of Artists’ Fates: The Correspondence Between Mykhailo Donets and Oleksandr Ulukhanov (on the materials of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine)

Abstract

The present paper examines the documents from the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSA SSU) and highlights the situation in the Ukrainian opera art of the 1920s–1930s. The tense atmosphere of the everyday life of an artist of the era is described based on the correspondence of two prominent opera singers—Mykhailo Donets and Oleksandr Ulukhanov. The exempts from their letters, which were preserved in the case-form of Mykhailo Donets, are provided with a commentary. The brutal execution of Mykhailo Donets is another evidence of no moral boundaries of Stalin’s empire. The last documental mention of Donets being alive is dated July 6, 1941. His further fate remains unknown. On September 10, 1941, Vsevold Merkulov, the Minister of the State Security of the USSR, ordered the execution of all detained in Kyiv prisons. It is believed that Mykhailo Donets was executed that day. In 1955, his case was closed “in the absence of a corpus delicti,” and by late 1980 it was declassified and accessible to the public. The life of Oleksandr Ulukhanov also ended tragically. He emigrated to Lviv but was murdered by NKVD in 1941.