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.

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire during the First World War, the Ukrainian War of Independence, and the occupation of the majority of the Ukrainian lands by the Bolsheviks, Ukraine was incorporated into the newly created Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a Soviet republic. During the early years of Communist rule, Lenin believed that the promotion of national movements and their right to self-determination would help the Communist cause of a proletarian revolution. His argument was that in order to move away from the view of Russia as an oppressing nation and the mistrust of Russian government under the tsars, all nations within Russia should have an equal right to self-determination. In addition to Lenin's belief, the Soviet government saw the promotion of the Ukrainian language as a tool to win over loyalty of the local Ukrainian population, legitimize their rule, and to show advantages of the newly formed Soviet-style system to the international community. This led to a more lenient stance on national self-expression, or Korenizatsiia. In the Ukrainian SSR, the Ukrainian language was promoted both on an administrative and on a societal level. In the early 1920s, the Ukrainian Soviet government passed multiple decrees to transition state institutions into the Ukrainian language while allowing Russian and other minority languages at a local level. In an effort to also lower the illiteracy rate in Soviet Ukraine, promotion of Ukrainian had also taken place in educational institutions and writing. By 1929, the number of higher education institutions that used Ukrainian as their language jumped to 69%, a massive increase from the 28.5% in 1926. Book publishing in Ukrainian also rose significantly. In 1923, only about a quarter of book copies were published in Ukrainian. By 1928, it was 60 percent. Prominent members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia such as Mykola Khvylovy also emerged during this time, combining both elements of communism and Ukrainian culture into national communism.

Despite the relaxation of restrictions on the Ukrainian language and culture, tensions still existed between the Soviet central government in Moscow and the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The main source of the tension was the question of whether the loyalty of the Ukrainian intelligentsia was to the Ukrainian national movement or to the Soviet government. Tensions escalated in the later 1920s due to a 1925-1928 literary discussion held by the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The discussion was centered on the issue of whether Ukrainian literature should take course on aligning more with European literature or with Russian literature. In one of those discussions, Mykola Khvylovy, one of the main figures of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, urged Ukrainian literature to get away from Moscow as much as possible. This caused outrage within the Soviet government and Joseph Stalin specifically, who complained about Khvylovy in his letter to Lazar Kaganovich and expressed the need to combat extremes like him. With the eventual consolidation of power under Joseph Stalin, Korenizatsiia was slowly reversed until it was abandoned in the late 1930s in favor of Russification.

The term "Executed Renaissance" was first proposed in 1959 by Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of Kultura publishers in Paris, and it was devoted to publishing anti-communist writers from throughout the Polish diaspora. In a 13 August 1958 letter to Yuriy Lavrinenko, Giedroyc referred to an anthology of recent Ukrainian literature which Lavrinenko had prepared at Giedroyc's request:

"About the name. Could it be better to give it a generic name: Executed Renaissance. Anthology 1917–1933 etc. The name would then sound spectacular. On the other hand, the humble name Anthology can only facilitate penetration by the Iron Curtain. What do you think?"

"So be it," replied Lavrinenko.