REMAPPING UKRAINE 15th Century BCE to 21st Century CE

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Vanderbilt University

Winter Term 2015 Mary Pat Silveira

UKRAINIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC TERRITORY: 1922

THE INTERWAR YEARS

• Bolshevik policy of “War Communism”

• 1921: Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP: temporary return to market economy

• USSR created as federation 1922; Union Treaty 1924

REPUBLICS OF THE SOVIET UNION

• 1922: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and “Transcaucasia”

• 1924: Transcaucasia split into Armenia, Azerbaijan & Georgia; Turkmenistan & Uzbekistan added.

• 1929: Tajikistan added.

• 1936: Kazakhstan & Kyrgyzstan added.

• 1940: Moldova, Estonia*, Latvia* & Lithuania* added (*disputed: “occupied)

1924 UNION TREATY

• Exclusive Prerogative of Central Government:

– Military

– Foreign relations

– Foreign trade

– Transportation & communications

• Republics:

– Economic, social & cultural affairs

INDIGENIZATION

• 1923: Twelfth Party Congress adopt policy of indigenization

– Promote diversity

– Actively recruit Ukrainians to state & party

– Foster development Ukrainian culture

– Expand education and publishing in Ukrainian

RISE OF STALIN

• Lenin dies in 1924; Stalin consolidates power

• First Five Year Plan (1928-32)

– returns to socialism

– Large-scale industrialization

– Forced collectivization of agriculture

– Suppression of “bourgeois” culture

– Use of state coercion and control

INDUSTRIALIZATION

• Ukraine benefits from 27% of 1500 new Soviet industrial plants

– Includes largest hydroelectric dam in Europe

– Giant tractor factory and steel mill

• Most investments in Eastern Ukraine only, in Donbas & Lower Dnipro area

UKRAINE’S INDUSTRIAL AREA

AGRICULTURE AND BLACK FAMINE

• Enforced collectivization & grain requisitioning

• Emphasis on grain exports for foreign capital

• Crusade against kulaks

• No food for consumption; Peasants resist

• Demand rises; supply falls; drought intervenes

• Black Famine of 1932 and 1933

– b/w 7 and 8 million dead; 15-20 % Ukrainian pop

THE BLACK (GREAT) FAMINE: 1930s

The Great Terror/The Great Purge

• Stalin’s “Cultural Revolution

– 1933 retreats from Lenin’s nationalities

– 1934-38: purges intellectuals; hundreds of thousands killed & millions sent to Gulag

• Poles and Germans deported to Soviet Asia

• Jewish section of Communist Party dissolved

– New Soviet elite – “the class of 38”

UKRAINIANS IN POLAND

• Repression of Ukrainians

• 1925: Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance

• Ukrainian support for Soviet Ukrainians increases: create Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 1929

UKRAINIAN LANDS IN POLAND 1930

UKRAINIANS IN ROMANIA &

CZECHOSLOVAKIA • Romania: Bessarabia and Bukovyna

• Czechoslovakia: Transcarpathia

– Given autonomy in 1938 – “Carpatho-Ukraine”

UKRAINIAN LANDS IN ROMANIA & CZECHOSLOVAKIA

RISING THREAT OF WAR

• 1938: Appeasement at Munich: Germany invades Sudentenland

• 3/ 1939: Germany invades all Czechoslovakia

• 8/ 1939: German-Soviet nonaggression treaty (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact)

SECRET CODICIL

• Secret codicil of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: Division of Eastern Europe

• Sept 1, 1939: Germany invades Poland from west

• Sept 17, 1939: Soviet troops invade Poland from east; annex

• Galicia, west Volhynia & Polisia to Ukrainian SSR(1939)

• northern Bukovyna and Bessarabia (1940); and

• 3 Baltic States (1940)

GERMANY ADVANCES

• Germany is given lands in Poland west of San and Buh Rivers – 500,000 Ukrainians in this area

• Germany sets up Generalgouvernement

– Life at first appears better than in Soviet Ukraine – Many Ukrainian activists emigrate here & make center of

Ukrainian life – Establish Ukrainian Central Committee in 1940

• 1941: Germany breaks Pact w/ USSR; invades and

occupies Soviet Ukraine

UKRAINE WW II

RUSSIAN RETREAT

• Many Ukrainians reluctant to help USSR following years of starvation & purge

• Russians arrest nationalists, industrialists & civil servants; to avoid evacuating, kill most prisoners; deport others to Siberia, Arctic Circle & CA

• Russians in retreat: dismantle industry, destroy infrastructure & pursue “scorched earth policy”

REICHSKOMMISSARIAT

• Brief period allowed of Ukrainian national life

• Sense that Germans were “liberators”

• Third Reich cracks down

• Lebensraum & ethnic hatred apparent

HOLOCAUST IN UKRAINE

• Jews both shipped off in cattle cars to death camps or herded to outskirts of cities

– e.g., Babyn Yar (34,000 Jews shot)

• Nazis, with Ukrainian collaborators, responsible for killing In Ukraine:

– Over 900,000 Jews; second only to Poland

• Equaled approximately 20% of the Jewish population

END OF WWII

• Red Army expels Germans by fall 1944 • Altogether, Ukraine lost an estimated:

– 4.1m civilians and 1.4m military – 3.9m evacuated eastward by Soviets; – 2.2m deported to Germany as forced laborers

• Total loss (Est): 11.6 million

• Population in 1939: 40 million

YALTA 1945

• Major territorial change. Ukraine adds:

– Eastern Galicia, Volhynia and Polissia

– Northern Bukovina and lower Bessarabia

– Transcarpathia

• For first time in modern history, all Ukrainian ethnic lands united in a single state structure: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

UKRAINE 1945

POST WWII SOVIET UKRAINE

• Faced two challenges: integrate country & (re)build centralized command economy

– 28,000 villages and 714 towns and cities in ruin

– Center of Kyiv 85% demolished

– Kharkiv, second largest city, 70% in ruins

– More than 19 million homeless

INDUSTRIAL BASE SHATTERED

• Soviets had dismantled 544 industrial enterprises

• Germans destroyed another 16,150 enterprises

• 833 coal mines were blown up

• Electric power stations, dams, RR lines, bridges & roads were destroyed

• 872 state farms, 1300 machine tractor stations, and 27,910 collective farms destroyed

MAJOR DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

• Ukraine lost most of its Jewish population

• Poles in Western Ukraine either emigrate or are expelled

• Large German settlements that had existed before the war gone

• Tartars in Crimea sent to Central Asia

FOURTH FIVE-YEAR PLAN: 1949-50

• Emphasis on industry

• By end of plan:

– Industrial production 2.2 x 1940

– Highest p/c production pig iron & sugar in Europe

– Second highest in steel smelting & iron ore mining

– Third highest in coal mining

AGRICULTURE IN FOURTH PLAN

• Agriculture remains collectivized

– Collective farms increase from 28,000 to 33,000

– Heavy emphasis on industrial crops & low productivity

• Drought again in 1946: Famine

– Deaths estimated anywhere from 100,000 to 1 m

• Total harvests far below prewar level

• Problem recurs next five years as well

NEW CAMPAIGNS BEGIN

• 1951: Kremlin begins comprehensive campaign against “nationalist deviations” in West Ukraine

– Russian language only in schools

– Uniate and Catholic churches banned in West

– Anti-Jews (“rootless cosmopolians” and “killer doctors”)

• Relocate large number of Russians to Western areas

HISTORICAL IDEOLOGY

• All forced to accept Soviet version history, elaborated in 1954:

1. Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian peoples trace origin to single root – the Russian people who had founded Kievan Rus’

2. Throughout history, Ukrainian and Belarusian people had desired unification w/ Russian people

HISTORICAL IDEOLOGY

3. Reunifcation is a progressive act

4. Throughout history, Russian people were the “senior brother” in family of East Slavic peoples

5. Russia’s main virtue constituted in its giving rise to a strong working class, which in turn produced its vanguard, the Communist Party

NATIONAL EXPRESSION

• Individual national expression only permitted if it recognized Marxist-Leninist theory, as interpreted by Stalin… and

• Only if it took place within mind-set that accepted superiority of Russian culture & language as a model & means of expression

STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV

• Death of Stalin 1953; Khrushchev begins new approach toward Ukraine

• Celebrates 300th anniversary Agreement of Pereiaslav (“reunification Russia & Ukraine”)

• Cedes Crimea to Ukraine in 1954

UKRAINE: 1922-1954

KHRUSCHEV

• 20th Party Congress: The Personality Cult & its Consequences – blames Stalin for his crimes:

– Execution, torture & imprisonment of loyal party members on false charges

– Foreign policy errors

– Failings of Soviet agriculture

– Ordering mass terror

– Mistakes that led to appalling loss of life in WWII and German occupation

DE-STALINIZATION

• De-Stalinization reawakes Ukrainian nationalism

• Writers, directors, composers & artists: the “Sixties Group” – Reject socialist realism

– Reaffirm that literature an individual expression

– Renew traditional Ukrainian cultural values and language

– Rehabilitate banned Ukrainian authors

END OF KHRUSCHEV ERA

• Economy begins to level off

• Agriculture still in crisis

• Khruschev removed Oct 1964; followed by Brezhnev & Kosygin

BREZHNEV-KOSYGIN ERA

• New restrictions on nationalist culture

• Repression of writing; first wave of arrests of dissident intellectuals 1965-66; next wave, 1971-72, broader

• 1979 – all union conference calls for mandatory of teaching Russian in every kindergarten and pre-kindergarten

BREZHNEV TO GORBACHEV

• Brezhnev dies 1982

• Andropov dies after 15 months in office

• Chernenko dies after only 13 months in office

• Gorbachev becomes general secretary of Communist Party in 1985