Visti VUTsVK

Visti VUTsVK (VUTsVK News). The major newspaper of the Soviet Ukrainian government, published daily in May–September 1919 in Kyiv, from May 1920 to November 1934 in Kharkiv, and then again in Kyiv to May 1941. Called Visty VUTsVK until 1929, it was the organ of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsVK) and, from 1937, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. It contained republican, all-Union, and world news, official Party government pronouncements, and political analyses and commentaries (see Communist Party of Ukraine). Under its first editors, Vasyl Blakytny and Yevhen Kasianenko, it also devoted considerable attention to cultural issues and emerged as one of the most influential organs supporting the Ukrainization policy of the 1920s. At that time, contributors included prominent writers and political figures, many of whom were former Borotbists or former members of other Ukrainian parties. The weekly cultural and literary supplements Literatura, nauka, mystetstvo (1923–4) and Kul’tura i pobut (1924–8) published some of Mykola Khvylovy's most important contributions to the Literary Discussion of 1925–8, and writings by other members and supporters of the writers' group Vaplite. Visti VUTsVK also published contributions to the forthcoming official conference on Ukrainian orthography held in Kharkiv in 1927, and a supplement on co-operative affairs (1927–8). In the late 1920s it was one of the most influential and popular papers in Ukraine; it reached a daily circulation of 74,000 in 1929, at a time when only 48,000 copies of the official Pravda (Moscow), the central Party organ, were sold in the Ukrainian SSR.

Under Stalinist rule the quality of the paper rapidly declined, and severe restrictions on its freedom of expression reduced it to a tool of the totalitarian state. By 1938 almost all of its former editors and contributors had fallen victim to the terror. That year the paper was renamed Visti Rad trudiashchykh URSR, and in 1941 it was amalgamated with Komunist (that became the daily Radians’ka Ukraïna).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]