Ukraine’s House of Writers, the 1920s–1930s

How a home for Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1920's became a deadly trap.

In 1920's Kharkiv, when the city was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a group of Ukrainian writers championed the construction of an apartment complex that would be dedicated to housing members of the Ukrainian intellectual community. However, the initial promise of a home for Ukrainian writers and poets soon gave way to tragedy.

Entrapment: Ukraine’s House of Writers, the 1920s–1930 examines state violence perpetrated against the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and the creation of a place of surveillance, the famous House of Writers (Budynok Slovo), an apartment building that was conceived by an association of writers in Kharkiv in the 1920s. This building fashioned an important identity for Ukrainian intellectuals, which was altered under state pressure, terror, and arrests. Their creative art was gradually transformed into the art of living and surviving under the terror, a feature of a regimented society. In the 1930s, approximately 90 percent of the building’s residents were repressed. The book explores the anatomy of terror, the Soviet secret police’s strategies and tactics, and the writers’ behavior during arrests and interrogation. The objective of this research is to illuminate the historical continuity and consistency of Russia’s attempts to subvert Ukraine.