Comrade Dovzhenko has written a film story under the title "Ukraine in Fire."

In this film story, to put it mildly, Leninism is being revised, the policy of our Party on fundamental, root questions is being revised. Dovzhenko's film story, containing the most gross errors of an anti-Leninist character, is an outspoken attack against the Party's policy.

That this is indeed the case can be verified by anyone who reads Dovzhenko's story "Ukraine in Fire."

Dovzhenko prefaced his film story with a small but most revealing preface. In this preface there are the following lines:

"If, by virtue of the sharpness of my experiences, doubts, or delusions, my judgments prove to be untimely, or too bitter, balanced by other judgments, then perhaps that is indeed the case."

It is not difficult to see the purpose with which this preface was written. Evidently Dovzhenko understands perfectly well that in his film story, from a political standpoint, far from everything is in order. Obviously with this worthless excuse he is attempting to insure himself against the eventuality of his revisionist, nationalist work being exposed.

First of all, it is very strange that in Dovzhenko's film story "Ukraine in Fire," which should have shown the full triumph of Leninism, under the banner of which the Red Army is now successfully liberating Ukraine from the German invaders, there is not a single word about our teacher the great Lenin.

And this is not accidental.

It is not accidental because Dovzhenko revises the policy and criticizes the work of the Party in smashing the class enemies of the Soviet people. And, as is known, this work was carried out by the Party in the spirit of Leninism, in full accord with the immortal teaching of Lenin.

The hero of Dovzhenko's film story, Zaporozhets, says to partisans about to judge him for working as a village elder under the Germans:

"You've got used to class struggle, like drunkards to moonshine! Oh, it will lead us to ruin! Kill me, I beg you. Kill me, go on! Give pleasure to Colonel Krause. Keep the line pure!"

"We try to outwit each other, with an iron broom, with a red-hot iron, and we root each other out to the mockery and derision of our enemies. As long as the line is pure, even if the earth is empty! Well, give the Germans their fun, overfulfil the task of our self-destruction! Beat him, the scoundrel!

— Be quiet, you fool! ...I know no class struggle today and I don't want to know it. I know the fatherland! The people are perishing! I am a slave of the German workers and peasants! — Zaporozhets suddenly shouted threateningly. — And my daughter is a slave! Shoot, you class purist! Well, why have you stopped?"

Thus Dovzhenko here comes out against class struggle. He attempts to discredit the policy and all the practical activity of the Party in liquidating the kulaks as a class. Dovzhenko permits himself to mock such concepts, sacred for every communist and genuinely Soviet person, as the class struggle against exploiters and the purity of the Party line.

Dovzhenko fails to understand that simple and obvious truth, clear to all Soviet people, that without the liquidation of the exploiting classes in our country our people, our army, our state would not have been as mighty, combat-ready, and united as they proved to be in the present grave war against the German imperialists.

Dovzhenko does not understand that the present Patriotic War is also a class war, for the most predatory and rapacious imperialists have attacked our socialist country with the aim of conquering it, destroying the Soviet system, enslaving and exterminating our people.

It is precisely this, and no other circumstance, that has led to the remnants of the crushed exploiting classes, hostile to the workers and peasants, finding themselves during the course of the war in the same camp as our fierce enemy — the German invaders.

Dovzhenko, of all people, should know of the instances of Petliurites and other Ukrainian nationalists fighting on the side of the German invaders against the Ukrainian and all the Soviet people. These vile traitors to the motherland, betrayers of the Soviet people, do not lag behind the Hitlerites, killing our children, women, and old people, devastating our cities and villages.

They have gone over entirely to the side of the German villains, have become executioners of the Ukrainian people, and actively fight against Soviet power, against our Red Army. Had Dovzhenko set himself the goal of writing a truthful work, he should in his film story have branded these traitors.

But Dovzhenko is evidently at odds with the truth. Otherwise how can one understand that Dovzhenko in his film story has not exposed these contemptible betrayers of the Ukrainian people? They are absent from Dovzhenko's film story, as if they do not exist. Dovzhenko lacked the courage, found no words, to nail them to the post of shame.

Dovzhenko ventures, moreover, to criticize the policy and practical measures of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government aimed at preparing the Soviet people, the Red Army, and our state for the present war.

In Dovzhenko's film story, the collective farmer Kuprian Khutornoi, addressing his deserter sons, says:

"I defended the Tsar, I did not run away! To whom did you swear allegiance? — he turned to Pavlo.
— Now there is no God! — shouted one deserter.
— You lie, there is! The fatherland!
— But that was never discussed. They taught us about classes. And again everyone fled — Pavlo made excuses.
— I won't let you! I defended the Tsar, I did not retreat, but you cannot defend your own power.
— The armor is thin, dad!"

"The armor is thin" — this expression is repeated in Dovzhenko's film story several times.

It — this expression — was invented by Dovzhenko in order to say: "The Soviet state was not prepared for the war, and the Soviet people found themselves unarmed."

Dovzhenko does not understand that simple and obvious truth that the German imperialists, who set themselves the goal of seizing foreign lands and enslaving other peoples, were quietly, long before the war, comprehensively preparing their economy and army for an aggressive war, transferring all their industry to a war footing several years before the start of the war.

Our socialist state was not preparing and could not prepare itself for the seizure of foreign lands, for the subjugation of other peoples, was not preparing and could not prepare itself for an aggressive war. One must be able to see this difference, and with an honest approach to the matter it is not difficult to see it.

However, the Soviet state proved by no means unarmed before the unexpected and treacherous attack of Hitlerite Germany. This is explained by the fact that here too we followed the precepts of Lenin, who warned our Party and our people that sooner or later imperialist states would attack our socialist country and that therefore we must be prepared for a serious war to preserve the freedom and independence of our fatherland.

And we prepared for such a defensive war. Of course, in preparing for this defensive war, we could not have prepared for it to the same degree as Hitlerite Germany had prepared, building its army and industry with a view to the conquest of all European, and not only European, states.

In developing the armed forces of our state and the national economy, our Party and the Soviet government were so far-sighted that they managed to prepare the Soviet state and Soviet people for the fact that in the first period of the war they bore alone the full force of the blows of the military machine of German imperialism, halted the offensive of the many-million, well-armed aggressive army of the enemy, and then, having mobilized the forces of the people and restructured the economy on a war footing, successfully beat the occupiers and drove them from our land.

The lessons of the Patriotic War, which has been going on for more than two and a half years, show that of all the peoples not pursuing aggressive goals, our country and our people proved the most prepared for war against German imperialism, even in comparison with such powerful states as England and the United States of America.

Such is the truth. Had Dovzhenko set himself the goal of writing a truthful work, he should have said this in his film story. But Dovzhenko, it turns out, is at odds with the truth.

Lenin, furthermore, warned us that the Soviet republic must be prepared for the fact that it would be attacked by a bloc of imperialist states. Lenin, as the leader and teacher of the Party, as a wise man of our people and a knower of the laws of the development of society and the relations between states, was preparing the Party and the country for the worst and most difficult variant of the future relations of our state with other countries in time of war.

As a result of the circumstances that took shape historically, and of course primarily as a result of the correct policy of the Party and the government, we managed in time to forestall the planned military bloc of imperialist states directed against the USSR, to neutralize in the present war Japan, Turkey, and Bulgaria, while such states as England and the United States of America proved to be not in the camp hostile to us, as could have happened, but are now fighting together with us in a military alliance against German imperialism.

It is known that German imperialism is the most predatory, perfidious, terrorist, worst variety of imperialism. The capitalists of England and the United States of America saw in the predatory plundering character of German imperialism a clear and great danger for their countries.

Our Party correctly took this circumstance into account and through its skilled foreign policy ensured the creation of a powerful anti-Hitler bloc of states; England and the USA entered the same camp as ourselves against the Germans. Thus here too the Leninist policy of our Party triumphed.

Had Dovzhenko wanted to write the truth, he should have written about this too. But the truth, unfortunately, is not a characteristic of Dovzhenko's creative work. Therefore he prefers to conceal this truth and, moreover, prefers to criticize the policy of our Party and our government.

In his film story Dovzhenko criticizes the Party's policy in the field of collective-farm construction. He portrays the matter as if the collective-farm system had killed in people their human dignity and sense of national pride, had weakened the strength and steadfastness of the Soviet people. In Dovzhenko's film story, the collective-farm woman Khrystya, who has become the mistress of an Italian officer, says before a partisan tribunal:

"I know that I will not leave here alive. Something here — she pressed her hand to her heart — tells me that my death has come, that I have done something forbidden, evil and unlawful, that I have neither that national pride of which you spoke, nor honor, nor dignity.

So tell me at least before death, why is there none of this in me? And where is it, dear people! Our kin is honest... Why did I grow up lacking pride, unworthy and worthless. Why in our district before the war did you measure our girlish virtue mainly in workdays and in hundredweights? Am I a nationalist? What am I?"

Here Dovzhenko denies that simple and obvious truth that the collective-farm system strengthened the Soviet state both economically and morally-politically, that without collective farms we could not have successfully waged the war.

Imagine that we had preserved the kulak in the countryside and that collective farms were absent. Everyone would understand that grain and agricultural raw materials for industry would in large measure be in the hands of the kulak. He would dictate to us any speculative prices he liked for produce and raw materials, would leave the army and the working centers without grain, without food.

The kulak would try to strangle the people with hunger and strike Soviet power in the back. And if all this did not happen, it is only because we liquidated the kulaks, to whom Dovzhenko evidently feels such a strong attraction, as a class, and successfully built the collective farms.

Dovzhenko does not and will not understand that only the collective farms truly emancipated the Soviet woman. The Soviet woman came to feel herself a genuine mistress, a free, full-fledged citizen of the socialist state only thanks to the collective farms.

The workday, which Dovzhenko mocks, allowed the woman to become a genuine human being. Thanks to the workday, the collective-farm woman ceased to be economically dependent on the family, on the husband. By earning a large number of workdays, the collective-farm woman became an economically independent person.

This is genuine emancipation of women, and not the idle talk about emancipation with which bourgeois politicians have so diligently occupied and still occupy themselves.

Furthermore, the nationalist fog has so clouded Dovzhenko's consciousness that he has ceased to see that enormous educational work, obvious to all, which our Party has carried out among the people in developing its political self-awareness and raising its culture.

Only a person who regards from biased, anti-Leninist positions the great creative, progressive work of our Party and our state can fail to notice the enormous growth of the cohesion, political activity, consciousness, and cultural level of the Soviet people that has become possible on the basis of our general successes.

Dovzhenko writes:

"Accustomed to typical irresponsibility, not knowing the solemnity of prohibition and summons, their sluggish natures did not rise to the heights of understanding the course of history, which called them to a gigantic battle, to the extraordinary.

And no one stood before them as an example — neither the glorious forefathers of their history, the great warriors, for they did not know history — nor the near, dear heroes of the revolution, for they did not know how to honor their memory in the village. Amid the first blows of fate they lost their oath, for the word 'sacred' told them almost nothing. They were spiritually unarmed, naive and short-sighted."

Through the words of an enemy, a German officer, Dovzhenko thus evaluates the Soviet people:

"This people has an Achilles' heel that is never and nowhere concealed. These people are absolutely devoid of the ability to forgive each other's disagreements even in the name of common, lofty interests. They have no instinct of statehood... You know, they do not study history. Remarkable. For twenty-five years they have been living by negative slogans of the denial of God, property, family, friendship! All that remains for them from the word nation is only the adjective.

They have no eternal truths. That is why there are so many traitors among them... There is the key to the chest where their ruin is hidden. There is no need for us to destroy all of them. You know, if you and I are clever, they will destroy each other themselves."

And then Dovzhenko took great pains in his film story to prove and confirm the correctness of this assessment.

How could Dovzhenko sink to such a monstrous slander against the Soviet people?

Criticizing the work of our Party and government in the education of the people, Dovzhenko does not stop at distorting the history of Ukraine in order to slander the national policy of Soviet power.

In Dovzhenko's film story, Ukrainian peasants, harnessed by the Germans to a yoke, speak among themselves:

"— Yes, in history, they say, our kind were also harnessed more than once before.
— By whom?
— By Bohdan Khmelnytsky!
— Oh, he was a great villain! In the museum in Chernihiv before the war his saber hung. There was a large inscription: 'The saber of the notorious executioner of the Ukrainian people Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who, Bohdan, suppressed the people's revolution in sixteen hundred and something.' The saber was under glass there, and twelve of his portraits were locked in the basement. They showed them to no one. They said those portraits cast a fog over people! Oh!"

The hero of the film story, Zaporozhets, says:

"Were we bad historians? Did we not know how to forgive each other? Did national pride not shine in our books of class struggle?"

It goes without saying that all of this is brazen mockery of the truth. It is obvious to everyone that it is precisely Soviet power and the Bolshevik Party that sacredly preserve the historical traditions and rich cultural heritage of the Ukrainian people and all the peoples of the USSR and have raised high their national self-awareness.

Dovzhenko slanders our Party and Soviet activists and the command cadres of the Red Army as well, portraying them as careerists, self-seekers, and obtuse people cut off from the people.

Dovzhenko writes about our cadres:

"There were many among them who were worthless people, devoid of understanding of the people's tragedy. The underdevelopment of ordinary human relations, the tedium of formalism, departmental indifference or simply the absence of human imagination and dull egoism carried them past the wounded on state rubber wheels.
— Comrades, have pity!.. — the wounded begged.
— Stop, I'll shoot! — the wounded Roman Zaporozhets cried. — Stop!
— Ah, what is happening? Tell me, why are we such filth? — a wounded youth with a shattered leg wept. — Comrade commander, what a program! The highest in the world. But here we are, look at us! Give the wounded a lift, damn you, stop! — he wept.
Vehicles flew past like autumn leaves."

About the command cadres of the Red Army:

"— We, dad, have lost a general! He shot himself, damn him, may the damp earth not take him!
We fell into confusion.
— Go to the colonel!
— We don't know where he is. The devil take him!
— Go and catch up.
— The bridges, dad, have been blown up. We can't swim."

About Soviet workers:

"He was a great devotee of various secret papers, secret affairs, secret instructions, resolutions, decisions. This gave him prestige in the eyes of the town's citizens and lent him a special respectability for many years.

He had classified his provincial stupidity and profound indifference to the human being with them. He was devoid of imagination, as is any person with a drowsy, sluggish heart. He had grown accustomed to his post. It had never once entered his head that, in essence, the only thing he was classifying was his own stupidity, thus classified."

"He had no love for people. He loved himself and instructions."

Dovzhenko says that after the liberation of Soviet power captured by the Germans "...there will probably no longer be teachers, or technicians, or agronomists. The war will grind them out. Only investigators and judges will remain. And the hale ones will return, like bears, well-practiced!"

Dovzhenko does not and will not see that obvious and simple truth that our Party, Soviet, and military cadres are flesh of the flesh, blood of the blood of the Soviet people, that they stand in the front ranks of the fighters against the fascist invaders, selflessly, heroically fighting in the ranks of the Red Army and in the partisan detachments.

Dovzhenko is here too at odds with the truth. And the truth is that the Soviet people trusts our officers and generals, our Party and Soviet workers, and loves them, for they are its best people. In this, incidentally, lies one of the important sources of the strength and inviolability of our Soviet system.

In his film story Dovzhenko comes out against the military policy of the Soviet government, slanders our cadres, criticizes the foundations of the Soviet system and the collective farms — he also criticizes the basic tenets of Leninist theory.

Dovzhenko writes:

"All were taught to be quiet and meek... Everything aimed at cowardice. Don't fight, don't object! There was but one weapon — writing denunciations on each other, damn it! And there is no God for you, no devil — everything flows, everything changes. So they flowed. And the judges up front."

From where did Dovzhenko gather such boldness and impudence — or perhaps both — to say such things? Dovzhenko should take off his hat in a sign of respect when it is a matter of Leninism, of the theory of our Party, whereas he, like a kulak hanger-on and outspoken nationalist, permits himself to make attacks against our worldview, to revise it.

In his film story Dovzhenko slanders the Ukrainian people. Indeed, it has long been known, and all Russian and Ukrainian literature testifies to this, how pure, poetic, and noble the character of a Ukrainian girl is. But how did Dovzhenko portray the Ukrainian girl?

The Ukrainian girl Olesya addresses with the following words a tankman she has encountered on the road: "— Listen, — said Olesya, — spend the night with me. Night is falling already. If you can, do you hear?

She put down the bucket and came up to him.

— I am a girl. I know, the Germans will come tomorrow or the day after, they will torment me, they will outrage me. I am so afraid of this. I beg you... let it be you... spend the night with me..."

Where in Ukraine did Dovzhenko see such girls? Is it not clear that this is unbridled slander against the Ukrainian people, against Ukrainian women.

Intolerable and unacceptable for Soviet people is the openly nationalist ideology, clearly expressed in Dovzhenko's film story.

Thus Dovzhenko writes:

"Remember, on whatever fronts we may fight today, wherever Stalin may send us — to the north, to the south, to the west, to all four points of the compass — we are fighting for Ukraine!

There she smolders before us in fires, our martyr, our native land!"

"We fight for what has no price in the world — for Ukraine!
— For Ukraine! — the fighters quietly sighed.
— For Ukraine! For the honest Ukrainian people! For the only forty-million people that has found no human life for itself in the centuries of Europe on its own land. For the people torn apart, split asunder! — Kravchina fell silent for a moment and seemed not to say further, but to think aloud:
— Tell me, can we, sons of the Ukrainian people, not despise Europe for all these centuries?"

It is clear how untenable and incorrect are views of this kind. Had Dovzhenko wanted to speak the truth, he should have said: wherever the Soviet government may send you — to the north, to the south, to the west, to the east — remember that you are fighting for and defending, together with all the fraternal Soviet peoples, in fellowship with them, our Soviet Union, our common Motherland, for to defend the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics means also to defend and protect Soviet Ukraine.

Ukraine as an independent state will be preserved, will grow strong, and will flourish only in the presence of the Soviet Union as a whole.

Dovzhenko is at odds with the truth, therefore he has turned everything upside down. However, the world does not end there — what Dovzhenko does not understand, the working people of Ukraine understand perfectly. Ukrainians heroically fight the enemy on all sectors of our great front.

They fight the enemy well, and they understand that to fight for the Soviet Union means to fight for their native Ukraine. They understand what Dovzhenko has not understood, namely: all the peoples of the Soviet Union are fighting for Ukraine.

In the course of this struggle, those regions of Ukraine which were seized by the enemy in the first period of the war are now being liberated. This has proved possible thanks to the combat fellowship of Russians and Ukrainians, Georgians and Belorussians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and Moldavians, Turkmen and Uzbeks, all the peoples of the Soviet Union.

If one is to judge the war by Dovzhenko's film story, then in the Patriotic War representatives of all the peoples of the USSR do not participate — only Ukrainians participate in it. This means that here too Dovzhenko is again at odds with the truth. His film story is anti-Soviet, a vivid manifestation of nationalism, of narrow national narrowmindedness.

Dovzhenko's film story "Ukraine in Fire" is a platform of narrow, limited Ukrainian nationalism, hostile to Leninism, hostile to the policy of our Party and the interests of the Ukrainian and all the Soviet people.

Dovzhenko attempts from his nationalist positions to criticize and instruct our Party. But from where does Dovzhenko get such pretensions? What does he have behind him, to come out against the policy of our Party, against Leninism, against the interests of the entire Soviet people?

We shall not agree with him, nor will the Ukrainian people agree with him. One would only need to print Dovzhenko's film story and let the people read it, so that all Soviet people would turn away from him, and would deal with Dovzhenko so that nothing would remain of him.

And this because the nationalist ideology of Dovzhenko is calculated to weaken our forces, to disarm Soviet people, whereas Leninism, that is the ideology of the Bolsheviks which Dovzhenko permits himself to criticize, is calculated to further consolidate our positions in the struggle with the enemy, toward our victory over the most fierce enemy of all the peoples of the Soviet Union — the German imperialists.