Discipline Through Humiliation : Cultural Politics in Post-war Ukraine Under Stalin

Discipline through Humiliation examines what it meant to live and work as a non Russian author in the post-war Soviet Union, tracing the experiences of Ukrainian writers caught up in Stalin’s literary purges of the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called Zhdanovite repressions.

Being a successful Ukrainian writer under late Stalinism was a perilous balancing act. To survive, authors had to navigate an ideological minefield – scrutinizing every line they wrote while seizing rare openings in official discourse to advance their own cultural agendas. Focusing on both writers and institutions, the book exposes complex interactions between Ukrainian literary figures and Soviet authorities as they sought to bring Ukraine into conformance with Moscow’s cultural policies. It shows how the regime employed a wide array of instruments of control – from material rewards to public rituals of (self )humiliation – to discipline writers and control the boundaries of Ukrainian cultural expression.

Historian Iuliia Kysla examines the complex connection between the arts and politics, revealing how the omnipotent dictator pacified Ukraine and purged its culture during this crucial period in Soviet history. Drawing on a wide array of archival documents, including materials from the Ukrainian secret police and party institutions, Kysla reconstructs the mechanisms through which cultural conformity was enforced and dissent contained.