Ukrainization

TOPIC 6

THE INTERWAR YEARS

Part I: Soviet Ukraine in the interwar period (1920-41)

As a result of World War I and the revolution Ukrainian territories were divided among four states. Bukovyna was attached to Romania. Transcarpathia was joined to the new Czechoslovak Republic. Poland got Galicia and western Volhynia. The lands east of the Polish border formed Soviet Ukraine.

The territories under Bolshevik control were formally organized as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That was a tactical response to the rising Ukrainian nationalism. By declaring the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic the Bolsheviks wanted to show that they respected Ukrainians’ national rights. In such a way they planed to reduce the influence of Ukraine’s nationalistic forces. The city of Kharkiv was made the capital of Ukraine. It remained Ukraine’s main city until 1934 when Kyiv became capital again.

On Dec. 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian republic (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) – was proclaimed.[1] Soviet republics were formally independent but in reality they were under full control of a highly centralized political organization – the Communist Party apparatus. All orders from Moscow were compulsory for all “sovereign” republics.

NEP

The major task facing the Bolsheviks after the war was to rebuild the economy. The policy of “War Communism” – based on nationalization of all enterprises, forced labor, state redistribution of goods, and the forcible requisition of food – caused economic chaos. In 1921, industrial production in the Ukrainian lands was only one tenth of the prewar figure, and trains ran just once a week between the major cities. The forcible requisition of extra food and the prohibition of trade did not stimulate peasants to produce food beyond their needs. They did not sow much grain. Thus, when drought came in 1921 it caused a famine that killed over a million of peasants in Ukraine and the Volga region in Russia.

Dissatisfied with Bolshevik agrarian policy peasants rebelled in many regions of Ukraine and Russia. There were strikes in Petrograd and even the marines of the Kronshtadt fortress, the cradle of the Bolshevik revolution, staged an uprising. Faced with such problems Vladimir Lenin in March 1921 introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which denationalized small-scale industry and trade and replaced grain requisitions with a fixed tax that enabled the peasant to sell the surplus of food on the free market. The policy of creating collective farms was also abandoned. The results were quite good. By 1927, the Ukrainian economy had recovered to the prewar level.

Ukrainization

In 1923 the Bolsheviks announced the policy of indigenization, or korenizatsiia (“putting down roots”). As the name implies the Bolsheviks wanted to ‘put down roots’ (вкоренитись) in all Soviet republics.

The policy had three major tasks: 1) promotion of native languages in all spheres of life; 2) fostering of national cultures; 3) recruitment of the party and government cadres from the indigenous (local) populations to bind them to the Soviet regime. (The Bolsheviks did not want their party made up mainly of Jews and Russians look foreign in Soviet republics.) The Ukrainian version of this policy was called Ukrainization. By korenizatsiia the Bolsheviks attempted to disarm the forces of nationalism in Soviet republics. The new Communist regime tried to show that in contrast to Tsarist Russia it respected the cultures of the non-Russians in the USSR.

In Ukraine, this program started a decade of rapid cultural flourishing. Enrollments in Ukrainian-language schools and the publication of Ukrainian-language books increased dramatically. Government officials who could not speak Ukrainian were forced to attend language courses. A lot of various Ukrainian cultural organizations were established.

The results of Ukrainization were really impressive. Whereas in 1922 only 20% of government business was conducted in Ukrainian, by 1927 the figure rose to 70%. In 1923 only 35% of government employees and 23% of party members were Ukrainian. By 1926-27 the respective percentages rose to 54% and 52%. In 1929, over 80% of schools and 30% of universities offered instruction in Ukrainian only. By 1930, nearly 80% of all books published were in Ukrainian, and by 1931 nearly 90% of all newspapers were in Ukrainian.[2] Before the revolution, when Ukrainian schools and the press were practically nonexistent, Ukrainophiles could only have dreamt of such conditions.

The Communists widely used their achievements in cultural policy for domestic and international propaganda. It was effective. Many Ukrainian political emigrants decided to return to Ukraine (M. Hrushevskyi and others). Thousands of West Ukrainians also moved to Soviet Ukraine from Poland. Latter, in the 1930s, they were repressed.

The purpose of Ukrainization was to implant Soviet power. But there was a side effect of this policy. Ukrainians started to hear their previously persecuted national language in schools and in the workplace. Forbidden under the tsarist regime courses on Ukrainian history were now taught in schools and universities. A national revival began in Ukraine.

By the 1930s the Kremlin understood that korenizatisiia did not contribute to the unity of the state as it developed different national identities in the USSR. The growth of national consciousness in Soviet republics could lead in time to demands for economic and then political independence. The Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin decided to use the old experience of Tsarist Russia and strengthen his totalitarian empire through the promotion of a single culture. Such a culture was to be common to all Soviet nations. The only common culture was Russian. So, since the 1930s till the end of the 1980s the Soviet nations had been experiencing a favorable promotion of Russian culture at the expense of their own. Russification in all republics reached gigantic proportions. The study of national histories, languages, and literatures was severely limited. The communist government tried to create a new people – the “Soviet people”, and Russian culture was to serve as the basis for the development of this people. That explains why national cultures and languages in the Soviet Union had not been paid proper attention since the 1930s.

As a result of such a policy Ukraine gradually became heavily Russified and the level of national consciousness significantly dropped.

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