Executed Renaissance

The Executed Renaissance (Ukrainian: Розстріляне відродження, romanized: Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia), or Red Renaissance (Ukrainian: Червоний ренесанс, romanized: Chervonyi renesans), was a generation of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals of the 1920s and early 1930s in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic who produced significant works in literature, philosophy, painting, music, theater, cinema, education, and science before being mostly destroyed during Stalin's Great Terror.

The 1920s were a period of national cultural flourishing in Soviet Ukraine, enabled by the collapse of the Russian Empire and the end of imperial censorship, along with the early Soviet policy of nativization. This was ended by the 1930 show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, which convicted 45 Ukrainian intellectuals on charges of anti-state or counter-revolutionary activity; up to 30,000 more would be arrested, deported, or executed over the following decade, culminating in the Great Purge of 1937-38.

The term was coined in 1959 by the Polish émigré publisher Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of the influential Kultura magazine in Paris, who suggested it to Ukrainian émigré and literary critic Yuriy Lavrinenko as a title for his anthology of the period's best Ukrainian literature.