PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

# Ukrainian Writers in the DP Camps

By Victor Serge

Ne Leader correspondent in Mexico; author of "The Long Dusk" and "Russia
Twenty Years After."

DURING the 1920's and 1930's there was a proletarian literary movement in the Ukraine. It was, naturally, Communist, full of idealism and with plenty of intolerance and sectarianism. It centered at Kiev and Kharkov in a "Free Academy" known by the abbreviation "Vaplite." The recognized leader was the young poet Mikola Khvylovy, a man of undeniable talent. He sang the civil war and the glories of industrialization and gained a reputation, also, by the publication of charming prose tales.

It happened that this movement became the object of severe criticism. The Communist Party accused it of looking up. in the West with too much sympathy and of being guilty of Ukrainian patriotism. When, in 1933, the Political Bureau suddenly ordered a purge of intellectual circles and of Ukrainian Communists in general, there was a wave of suicides, followed by a wave of arrests. The old Bolshevik Skrypnik, member of the Central Committee and

from the beginning a fanatical Stalinist, sent a bullet through his brain. The poet Miloka Khvylovy, author of *The Century of Electricity, Autumn*, and *Th. Symphony of Twilight*, also put an end to himself. This was just the start. In the course of these purges, countless intellectuals were sent to the mass graves and to the concentration camps.

The survivors did their pathetic best to adapt themselves to the situation by pretending adoration of the great chief. Then the Nazi invasion plunged them into a frightful moral confusion. The successor of Khvylovy as head of the proletarian writers, Arkady Lioubtchenko, was tortured to death by the Gestapo.

Countless hostages and prisoners were taken to Germany, where, upon the defeat of the Nazi forces, they were found interned in various places.

Immediately there arose the question of their repatriation. Those who were inside the British and American zones inquired about what their fate would be if they were shipped back to their homeland. They feared that their records, especially their association with the literary men who had been murdered and imprisoned, would lead to their condemnation in advance, and that the best they could expect would be banishment to Arctic regions.

Most of these men are young-under

forty—and all their lives had been lived under one sort of terror or another. Their faith in their ideologies had been destroyed by prolonged persecution. Today most of them are in the DP camps. Their future is uncertain, but they are resolved, no matter what comes, not to return to the terror. They want, above all, to become free men able to work for a free world.

It will be readily understood that I cannot record here any of the names of these men. But I do want to advertise to the world the fact that all the representatives of the proletarian literature of the Ukraine are now rotting in those DP camps. Through all their years of suffering they have maintained their idealism and their determination to serve humanity. But experience has taught them to condemn tyranny, no matter under what name it is known. And up to the present moment, all that they have been given is semi-captivity, undernourishment and fear for the future.

THE NEW LEADER

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