The Bolshevik Terror in Sloviansk, 1917–1921
Part One: Revolution, Resistance, and the First Camps
When the Bolsheviks finally secured Sloviansk in 1920, the first thing they built was not a school, a hospital, or a workers’ club. It was a concentration camp. It became one of the first twenty-five forced-labour camps organized by Soviet power on the territory of what was then the Ukrainian SSR, a grim distinction for a city whose earlier years had been marked by a fierce and largely forgotten struggle for Ukrainian self-determination.
The story properly begins in the turmoil of 1917. In late December of that year, the city council of Sloviansk had officially recognized the authority of the Ukrainian Central Rada. The city mattered strategically: Vladimir Antonov-Ovsiyenko, commander of the Red forces, was determined to cut the railway connection between Ukraine and the Don in order to isolate the forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. To defend Sloviansk and keep order, a small detachment of the Black Kurin of Haidamaks was stationed there — roughly two hundred Cossacks. On 18 December 1917, a detachment of Muscovite Red Army men under the command of Rudolf Sivers, some three hundred bayonets strong, moved to seize the city. After a short but bitter street fight on 19 December, the superior Bolshevik forces drove the Ukrainian Haidamaks out. The Sloviansk Soviet of Workers’ Deputies was quickly Bolshevikized, and a communist named Petro Shyshkov was installed as its head.
The cultural life of the city had been flourishing in parallel. The Prosvita society in Sloviansk had been founded on February 17, 1917 on the initiative of students of the local technical school — Dmytro Miliutenko, later a distinguished actor, and Halia Chasovnykova. The organization was headed by Ivan Zubashev, chairman of the city administration. Its character was purely cultural and educational: teachers across the city were required to take courses in the Ukrainian language and literature, with prominent professors from Kharkiv — Mykola Plevako and Hnat Khotkevych among them — travelling to lecture. Ukrainian plays were staged; libraries were opened. Then, in January 1918, immediately after the occupation of the city, the Bolsheviks carried out a mass and brutal pogrom of the Prosvita office. The occupiers slashed portraits of Taras Shevchenko and Borys Hrinchenko with knives, burned Ukrainian books and threw them into the street, tore down and trampled the blue-and-yellow flags. Most of the activists were subsequently repressed or forced into hiding.
Part Two: The Camp and the Terror
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After the active phase of fighting against the White Guards and the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic ended, the Bolsheviks began to sweep the rear with speed. By official order №7 of March 1, 1920, a Bolshevik “Comrade Chavela” was appointed commissar of the Sloviansk concentration camp — in practice he had been running it since February 28. The organization and supervision were handled by the local Cheka. The camp’s purpose was the isolation of so-called “class enemies” and the suppression of the furious local resistance; prisoners were used as free labour under convoy.
The context explains the fury. Bolshevik propaganda had for decades painted the Soviet Donbas as an exclusively proletarian region loyal to Moscow. Archival data tell the opposite story: the Sloviansk district was ablaze with peasant anti-Bolshevik insurrection. The local population categorically refused to surrender grain under the prodrazverstka, the forced requisition. According to reports of the Provincial Cheka, by August 1920 some ten-thousand-armed insurgents were operating in Donetsk province, of whom more than twelve hundred fighters waged partisan war in Sloviansk County itself. In July 1920, in the village of Terny — now in the Lyman community near Sloviansk — a peasant uprising of about two thousand participants broke out and completely destroyed a Soviet grain requisition detachment. Even after the regular troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic had retreated, underground activists continued to operate in the city; in the summer of 1921 the Sloviansk Cheka recorded the mass distribution of leaflets against the famine artificially organized by the communists, behind which stood local pro-Ukrainian activists.
The gates of the Sloviansk camp were thrown open to everyone “suspicious,” since the gradation of prisoners was only nominal. Those who passed behind the barbed wire included participants of peasant detachments and insurgent otamans; former soldiers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and White Guards; hostages — family members of insurgents and Ukrainian activists, since the practice of taking the wives and children of those who fought against the Bolsheviks was widespread; and representatives of the local intelligentsia, the clergy, and well-to-do townspeople, the “bourgeoisie”.
Part Three: Sadism, Hostages, and Famine
After the final consolidation of Soviet power in 1920, the Sloviansk Cheka, subordinate to the Donetsk provincial Cheka, unleashed systematic terror. Because Sloviansk County offered furious resistance to the grain requisition, the methods of the Cheka were distinguished by particular sadism.
Peasants who hid grain from the Soviet requisition detachments were subjected to horrific torture in Sloviansk and the surrounding villages. They were stripped naked and driven out into the bitter frost, doused with water until a person turned into an icy figure. Others were tortured in the cellars of the Cheka, with “signs of communism” — stars — burned into their bodies. The punitive forced-labour camp established near Sloviansk in March 1920 was a place of slow death from exhaustion: prisoners — peasants, the intelligentsia, the “bourgeoisie” — were held in appalling unsanitary conditions and forced to work without pay at local enterprises, the saltworks and the railway, for fourteen to sixteen hours a day, receiving only a miserable ration of surrogate bread.
To stop the Ukrainian partisans, the Cheka took entire families into custody — elderly parents, wives, and small children. If the insurgents eliminated a komnezamivets, a Soviet activist, or a Chekist, the Sloviansk Cheka demonstratively shot ten to twenty hostages from among peaceful local residents without trial or investigation. And when the first artificially induced famine began in the Donbas through the actions of Soviet power, mass protests flared in Sloviansk; detachments of the All-Ukrainian Cheka dispersed them with machine-gun fire, and the “instigators” and distributors of anti-Soviet leaflets were executed on the spot without trial.
The history of Sloviansk in 1917–1921 is a chronicle of desperate Ukrainian resistance and of a devastating Bolshevik terror that set out to uproot everything national and every attempt at free thought in the Donbas. The materials of Ukrainian archives and historical research reveal the truth about the bloody events of those years in the city.
