Not Gaily in the «Blooming Ukraine»: The Ukrainian SSR during the Years of the Great Terror through the Eyes of Czechoslovak Diplomat Rudolf Brabec

The aim of this article is to promote informing of the readership in Ukraine about situation of the Czechs in Soviet Ukraine during the Stalinist repressions (the second half of the 1930s). The methodological basis of the research is the consistent application of the principles of historicism, objectivity, systemic and interdisciplinary approaches. The use of methods of source analysis and synthesis allowed to consider the results of Rudolf Brabec (1886–1955) work in the context of social and political events in the Ukrainian SSR, through the prism of his professional activity, while using his reports on the Soviet reality of the Stalin era. The scientific novelty consists in the presentation of fragments of the newly discovered reports of the Consul General of the Czechoslovak Republic R. Brabec, which are an extremely valuable document of that era. Conclusions. The article analyzes some aspects of the activities of the Consulate General of the Czechoslovak Republic in Kyiv, headed by R. Brabec during the Stalinist repressions in Ukraine. The Consulate of the Czechoslovak Republic operated in extremely difficult conditions, providing consular and humanitarian assistance to Czech citizens and trying to protect them from persecution by the Soviet special services, which, unfortunately, did not have any positive consequences. Consul General Rudolf Brabec himself became the object of close attention of the state security authorities of the Ukrainian SSR, which made it very difficult for him to fulfill his official duties. But, devoted to his duty as a diplomat, he regularly prepared and sent to Prague reports on the current state of affairs in the USSR, which are now a valuable source both for reproducing the everyday life of citizens of Soviet Ukraine in the second half of the 1930s, and for analyzing political relations between Czechoslovakia and the USSR of this period.