Executed Renaissance

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The Executed Renaissance (or "Red Renaissance", Ukrainian: Розстріляне відродження, Червоний ренесанс, romanized: Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, Chervonyi renesans)^[1] was a generation of Ukrainian language poets, writers, and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s who lived in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and wеre killed by the Soviet regime.

Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin's nationality policies of Korenizatsiya (lit. "Indigenization") favored the revival of minority and heritage languages, encouraging them to be taught in the schools and published and providing them with material support and visibility. The poets and writers of the Ukrainianization generation were often resident in the Slovo Building in Kharkiv, which was then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. With the 1929's Great Turn or "Great Break", newly appointed Soviet Premier and CPSU Secretary General Joseph Stalin reversed those policies in favor of State centralisation, Socialist Realism, and Russification. While outwardly pro-Soviet, Ukrainian language school teachers, poets, and writers refused to submit to Stalin's restoration of Tsarist policies of linguistic imperialism. In retaliation, Ukrainian language schoolteachers, as well as poets, writers and dramatists who wrote in the same language were arrested en masse, deported to the Gulag, imprisoned or executed. Those victims were also part of Stalin's larger 1937-1938 Great Purge, with its most infamous killing field being at Sandarmokh forest, a mass grave site in Karelia where an estimated 6000 political prisoners from the Solovki concentration camp were secretly executed and buried by the NKVD.

"The Executed Renaissance", as a term, was first suggested in 1959 in Paris^[2] by anti-communist Polish émigré publisher Jerzy Giedroyc of the influential Kultura magazine. He was writing to Ukrainian émigré and literary critic Yuriy Lavrinenko to recommend the title for the 1959 anthology of the best Ukrainian literature by the Ukrainianization generation.^[3]

In a 2023 article for The Guardian, Joseph Stalin's destruction of the Executed Renaissance was compared to a second alleged decimation of Ukrainian intellectuals by the Russian military during Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, with alleged killings on the battlefronts, trenches as well as in strikes on civilian areas.^[2]