# The Executed Renaissance: how Moscow killed a culture

> Ukrainian culture of the 1920s flourished in a vivid renaissance that Moscow deliberately destroyed after 1933. Mykola Khvylovy, who killed himself amid the Holodomor, is its symbol.

Canonical: https://holospravdy.com/en/executed-renaissance
Period: mizhvoyenniy | Type: spoke | Updated: 2026-06-18

**TL;DR.** The Soviet myth presented the USSR as a "flourishing" of peoples. The Ukrainian reality of the 1920s–1930s was the opposite: the vigorous cultural **renaissance** of the 1920s was deliberately **destroyed** by Moscow after 1933. An entire generation of writers, artists, and scholars came to be called the "**Executed Renaissance**." Its symbol is Mykola Khvylovy, a leader of that renaissance, who took his own life in 1933 against the backdrop of the Holodomor.

## The renaissance of the 1920s

The 1920s in Ukraine were a time of powerful cultural upsurge. **Mykola Khvylovy** was, in the assessment of historian Lyudmyla Turchyna, one of the leaders — if not the chief leader — of the Ukrainian renaissance of that era[1]. Around him and figures such as the Neoclassicists (Mykola Zerov), literary debates raged and a modern Ukrainian literature took shape.

## How Moscow curtailed freedom

This upsurge unfolded under Soviet rule — and the authorities **suppressed** it. Khvylovy was sent abroad in 1928, his position was examined at the **plenums of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U**, and People's Commissar of Education **Mykola Skrypnyk** gave "Khvylovism" a class-based, stigmatizing definition — supposedly the "ideological foundation of the kulak"[2]. Free literary debate was gradually curtailed in favor of the single permitted template — **socialist realism**. This was not chance but policy.

## The suicide of 1933

The denouement coincided with the Holodomor. In his final years Khvylovy was **permitted to travel to the villages** to record the consequences of the famine; according to one account, in one of those villages he saw the corpse of his own father[3]. In **1933** Khvylovy took his own life — an act of despair against the backdrop of both the extermination of the peasantry by famine and the destruction of Ukrainian culture.

## The Executed Renaissance

Khvylovy's fate was not an exception but a symbol. An entire generation of the Ukrainian creative and scholarly elite of the 1920s was destroyed in the 1930s. The phenomenon was named the "**Executed Renaissance**" by the eponymous anthology of Yurii Lavrinenko (1959). Its preface states plainly: these works were **banned and destroyed as a result of Moscow's new policy of suppressing and colonizing Ukraine** after 1933.

## What this means

The "Executed Renaissance" is a direct refutation of the myth of a Soviet "flourishing" of Ukrainian culture. In reality, the 1920s produced a surge, and the 1930s a **systematic extermination** of its bearers. It is the same imperial logic as the [Holodomor](/en/holodomor-man-made-famine): to physically destroy not only the peasantry but also the intellectual elite capable of keeping the nation separate. The culture that could not be subjugated was erased — but not entirely: it is precisely thanks to people like Khvylovy that we know what was destroyed.

## Citation sources

[1] summary: «Микола Хвильовий — один із лідерів, якщо не головний лідер, українського культурного відродження 1920-х років.» — Historian Every Saturday: Lyudmyla Turchyna. Mykola Khvylovy in the Context of His Era (01.03.2025) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Xjhh7Xvi8 (timecodes: 2:19)

[2] summary: «Радянська влада придушувала цей рух: Хвильового відправили за кордон 1928 року, його позицію розглядали на пленумах ЦК КП(б)У, а нарком освіти Микола Скрипник дав «хвильовізму» класове визначення — нібито це ідеологічне підґрунтя «куркуля». Вільну літературну дискусію згортали на користь шаблону соцреалізму.» — Historian Every Saturday: Lyudmyla Turchyna. Mykola Khvylovy in the Context of His Era (01.03.2025) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Xjhh7Xvi8 (timecodes: 28:01, 28:57, 29:13)

[3] summary: «Хвильовий — учасник «розстріляного відродження». В останні роки йому дозволяли виїжджати в села, щоб фіксувати наслідки Голодомору; за одним із припущень, в одному із сіл він побачив труп власного рідного батька. 1933 року Хвильовий наклав на себе руки.» — Historian Every Saturday: Lyudmyla Turchyna. Mykola Khvylovy in the Context of His Era (01.03.2025) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Xjhh7Xvi8 (timecodes: 44:26, 45:24, 45:50)