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Soviet Union [USSR] Ukrainians
Ukrainians trace their ancestry to the East Slavic tribes that
inhabited the present-day Ukrainian Republic in the first centuries
after the birth of Christ and were part of the state of Kievan Rus'
formed in the ninth century. For a century after the breakup of
Kievan Rus', the independent principalities of Galicia and Volhynia
served as Ukrainian political and cultural centers. In the
fourteenth century, Galicia was absorbed by Poland, and Volhynia,
together with Kiev, became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In
1569 Volhynia and Kiev also came under Polish rule, an event that
significantly affected Ukrainian society, culture, language, and
religion. Ukrainian peasants, except for those who fled to join the
cossacks (see Glossary) in the frontier regions southeast of
Poland, were enserfed. Many Ukrainian nobles were Polonized.
The continuous oppression of the Ukrainian people by the Polish
nobility led to a series of popular insurrections, culminating in
1648, when Ukrainian Cossacks joined in a national uprising.
Intermittent wars with Poland forced the Ukrainian Cossacks to
place Ukraine under the protection of the Muscovite tsar. A
prolonged war between Muscovy and Poland followed, ending in 1667
with a treaty that split Ukraine along the Dnepr River. Ukrainian
territory on the right (generally western) bank of the Dnepr
remained under Poland, while Ukrainian territory on the left
(generally eastern) bank was placed under the suzerainty of the
Muscovite tsar. Although both segments of Ukraine were granted
autonomous status, Muscovy and Poland followed policies to weaken
Ukrainian autonomy. A number of uprisings by Ukrainian peasantry
led to the crushing of the remainder of Ukrainian autonomy in
Poland
(see Soviet Union USSR - Expansion and Westernization
, ch. 1). Ukrainian selfrule under the tsar ended after Mazepa, the Ukrainian hetman
(leader), defected to the Swedish side during the war between
Russia and Sweden at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In
1775 Catherine the Great dispersed the Ukrainian Cossacks and
enserfed those Ukrainian peasants who had remained free. The
partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century placed
most of the Ukrainian territory on the right bank of the Dnepr
River under Russian rule. The westernmost part of Ukraine (known as
western Ukraine) was incorporated into the Austrian Empire.
The resurgence of Ukrainian national consciousness in the
nineteenth century was fostered by a renewed interest among
intellectuals in Ukrainian history, culture, and language and the
founding of many scholarly, cultural, and social societies. The
Russian government responded by harassing, imprisoning, and exiling
leading Ukrainian intellectuals. Ukrainian academic and social
societies were disbanded. Publications, plays, and concerts in
Ukrainian were forbidden. Finally, the existence of a Ukrainian
language and nationality was officially denied. Nevertheless, a
Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire persisted,
spurred partially by developments in western Ukraine, where
Ukrainians in the more liberal Austrian Empire had far greater
freedom to develop their culture and language.
After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Ukrainians in both empires
proclaimed their independence and established national republics.
In 1919 the two republics united into one Ukrainian national state.
This unification, however, could not withstand the aggression of
both the Red and White Russian forces and the hostile Polish forces
in western Ukraine. Ukraine again was partitioned, with western
Ukraine incorporated into the new Polish state and the rest of
Ukraine established as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in
March 1919, which was later incorporated into the Soviet Union when
it was formed in December 1922.
In the decade of the 1920s, the Ukrainian Republic experienced
a period of Ukrainization. Ukrainian communists enjoyed a great
deal of autonomy in running the republic, and Ukrainian culture and
language dominated. Stalin's rise to power, however, halted the
process of Ukrainization. Consequently, Ukrainian intellectual and
cultural elites were either executed or deported, and leading
Ukrainian party leaders were replaced by non-Ukrainians. The
peasantry was forcibly collectivized, leading to a mass famine in
1932-33 in which several million peasants starved to death.
Pointing to the fact that grain was forcibly requisitioned from the
peasantry despite the protests of the Soviet government in the
Ukrainian Republic, some historians believe that Stalin knowingly
brought about the famine to stop national ferment in the Ukrainian
Republic and break the peasants' resistance to collectivization.
When western Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Union
following the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, the
population suffered terror and mass deportations.
When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Ukrainians
anticipated establishing an independent Ukraine. As the Red Army
retreated eastward, Ukrainian nationalists proclaimed an
independent state, but the invading Germans arrested and interned
its leaders. Ukrainian nationalist forces consequently began a
resistance movement against both the occupying Germans and the
Soviet partisans operating in the Ukrainian Republic. When the Red
Army drove the Germans out of the Ukrainian Republic, Ukrainian
partisans turned their struggle (which continued until 1950)
against the Soviet army (the name changed from Red Army just after
the war) and Polish communist forces in western Ukraine. The Soviet
regime deported Ukrainian intelligentsia to Siberia and imported
Russians into the Ukrainian Republic as part of their pacification
and
Russification (see Glossary) efforts.
The vast majority of Ukrainians, the second largest nationality
in the Soviet Union with about 44 million people in 1989, lived in
the Ukrainian Republic. Substantial numbers of Ukrainians also
lived in the Russian, Kazakh, and Moldavian republics. Many nonUkrainians lived in the Ukrainian Republic, where the Russians,
with over 11 million, constituted the largest group.
Ukrainians have a distinctive language, culture, and history.
In 1989, despite strong Russifying influence, about 81.1 percent of
Ukrainians residing in their own republic claimed Ukrainian as
their first language.
By the 1980s, the majority of Ukrainians, once predominantly
agrarian, lived in cities. The major Ukrainian cities in 1989 were
Kiev, the capital of the Ukrainian Republic, with a population of
2.6 million, and Khar'kov, Dnepropetrovsk, Odessa, and Donetsk, all
with over 1 million people.
Although Ukrainians constituted about 15 percent of the Soviet
Union's population in 1989, their educational and employment
opportunities appeared unequal to their share of the population. In
the 1970s, they ranked only eleventh out of seventeen major
nationalities (the nationalities corresponding to the fifteen union
republics plus Jews and Tatars) in the number of students in
secondary and higher education and ninth in the number of
scientific workers in proportion to their share of the total
population. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, the number of
Ukrainians in the CPSU has steadily increased. Nevertheless,
Ukrainians remained underrepresented in the party relative to their
share of the population. This was particularly true in the
Ukrainian Republic, where in the 1970s the Ukrainian proportion of
party membership was substantially below their proportion of the
population. The percentage of Russians in the CPSU in the Ukrainian
Republic, however, was considerably higher than their share of the
republic's population. Although in the past Ukrainians had held a
disproportionately high percentage of seats on the CPSU Central
Committee, since 1961 their share of membership in this body has
steadily declined to 13 percent of the seats in 1986.
Data as of May 1989
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