While most of western Ukraine lived under Polish rule in the interwar period, the vast majority of Ukrainians lived under the subsequent regimes of Lenin and Stalin in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. From the very foundation of the USSR in 1922, Ukraine’s status within the Soviet Union was unclear.
Although Soviet Ukraine was technically a “founding member” of the USSR and even initially conducted its own independent diplomacy, it would always essentially be a puppet of Moscow. As Kiev was initially viewed with suspicion as a “bourgeois” locus of Ukrainian nationalism, the east Ukrainian city of Kharkiv – where the Bolsheviks had greater support – was chosen as Soviet Ukraine’s first capital. It would remain so until 1934, when the Soviet Ukrainian government would relocate to the older and more traditional capital of Kiev.
Although ultimately subordinate to the Russian Bolsheviks, there would be a “Communist Party of Ukraine” (CPU) to govern the Ukrainian SSR, and its members and leadership varied over time as to their relative ethnic and cultural Ukrainian character. Much like in Moscow, official positions of government did not always reflect the reality of who held real power within Soviet Ukraine.
As such, the effective “leader” of the country would more often than not be the “First Secretary” of the CPU. Most prominent among these early Party leaders of Soviet Ukraine were: Stanislav Kosior (1919-20, 1928-38), Lazar Kaganovich (1925-28, 1947), and Nikita Khrushchev (1938-47, 1947-49).
However, it should be noted that these men were essentially subject to the whims of the leadership in Moscow, whether Lenin (1922-24), or later Stalin (1924-53), which in part explains the general instability of CPU leadership in this period.
Kaganovich, in particular, was a noted Stalin loyalist, and Khrushchev would be more famous for using his position in Ukraine as a springboard to later becoming leader of the entire Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Kosior infamously presided over the Great Famine and Great Purge in the 1930s, before himself being purged and executed.
In Tsarist times, Communists had often been proponents of ethnic nationalism as a wedge against the political unity of the traditional multi-ethnic empires of Europe, most certainly including the massive and diverse Russian Empire. Perhaps ironic considering the later history of right-wing nationalism in the 20th century, 19th century nationalism was largely a left-wing phenomenon.
As such, in the early days of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks in Moscow would promote a policy of so-called “indigenization” (korenizatsiya), which appeared most strikingly in Ukraine. In a reversal of the Tsarist period’s attempted Russification of “Little Russia,” Ukrainian language and culture were now promoted in the Ukrainian SSR on an historically unprecedented scale.
The government now mandated that schools conduct studies in Ukrainian in predominantly ethnic Ukrainian areas of the country, while Ukrainian and Russian were otherwise both made mandatory subjects of study throughout the country. Ukrainian was also now used in secondary school and in universities for the very first time, having previously been consigned merely to primary school education.
Conscious efforts were also made to change Russian street signs into Ukrainian, while Ukrainian speakers were given preferential treatment when applying for government jobs. The results of the “Ukrainization” program were striking. Whereas in 1924, only 33% of the CPU were ethnic Ukrainians, by 1933, this number had grown to 60%.
In parallel, the cities of Soviet Ukraine, which had become quite Russified over the course of the Tsarist period, grew from 32% Ukrainian in 1920 to as high as 60% Ukrainian by 1939. A genuine blooming of culture in the cities actually attracted several former émigrés to immigrate to Soviet Ukraine in this period, most notably including historian and statesman Mykhailo Hrushevsky.
In a trend mirroring those of the Soviet Union at large, several cities in Ukraine were subjected to ideologically-driven name changes reflecting a desire both to erase the Tsarist past and honour the Soviet future. Most prominent in Soviet Ukraine were the respective re-namings of the industrial hubs of the lower Dnieper (Yekaterinoslav) and Donbass (Yuzhovka) to “Dnipropetrovsk” and “Stalino” in the 1920s. Ironically, both of these cities would later be further renamed to “Dnipro” (2016) and “Donetsk” (1961).
Also consistent with wider Soviet policy was the persecution and subjugation of Christian Churches in the Ukrainian SSR. In addition to the schism between the Greek Catholic Church and Orthodox Church in Ukraine, there also now existed several competing Orthodox Church hierarchies.
The primary dispute was over whether the Ukrainian Orthodox Church should be “Autocephalous” – that is to say, that there should be a “Patriarch of Kiev” independent of the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Moscow, who headed the Russian Orthodox Church. Ironically, the CPU initially supported the idea of a “Kiev Patriarchate” and consequent “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.”
However, after the Communists in Moscow succeeded in subjugating the Moscow Patriarchate to their will, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was subsequently pressured into accepting a subservient position within the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy. Meanwhile, in an echo to Tsarist times, the Greek Catholic Church was banned entirely, limited to operating in Poland and within the Ukrainian émigré community abroad.
Despite the initial successes of Ukrainization, its end goals were never clear. It was highly unlikely that the Russian-dominated Soviet Union ever envisioned an independent political future for Ukraine. This was especially true under Stalin, who ruled the USSR uncontested from 1928 to 1953, and who although himself Georgian and previously a strong proponent of ethnic diversity, later became increasingly a “Great Russian Chauvinist” and partisan of Russian nationalism.
As Ukraine was traditionally one of the most economically productive regions of both the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Stalin’s introduction of “Five-Year Plans” starting in 1928 would disproportionately affect the population of Ukraine. As such, questions of whether the exceeding number of deaths in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s constituted a deliberate, ethnically-motivated genocide against Ukrainians or it was merely the tragic, natural result of a wider horrific Soviet economic policy are still hotly contested among historians. Regardless, the “Great Famine” (Holodomor) was one of the most significant events in Ukrainian history and indeed of the 20th century.
As a result of Stalin’s simultaneous drive towards heavy industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, investment in Soviet industry necessitated the setting of unrealistically high quotas for the production of grain, the one economic product in which Ukraine always excelled due to her extremely fertile soil.
Further complicating matters was the politically-motivated persecution of the “kulaks,” an often-ambiguous classification of wealthier peasants in Ukraine who had been subjected to the jealousy of their neighbours after the more lenient Soviet economic policies of 1922-28.
With the deaths and deportations to Siberia of over 250,000 Ukrainian “kulaks” in 1930, the already-unrealistic grain quotas were now made even more exceedingly difficult, as Ukraine’s most experienced and productive farmers had been suddenly removed from the countryside.
Further peasant resistance to these quotas were met in kind with brutal reprisals from Stalin and his lackies in Ukraine. In 1931-32, a million more Ukrainians were now be rebranded “kulaks” and consequently deported to Siberia or elsewhere within the far reaches of the Soviet Union. The winter of 1932-33 would ultimately be the tragic boiling point.
What started as a bad harvest would end in a horrific famine spanning the whole of Soviet Ukraine and many other agricultural regions of the USSR. In one of many disturbing contradictions of the period, while the farmers of Ukraine starved, the Soviet Union actually continued to export grain at this time to satisfy trade relationships with the outside world.
Orders were decreed from Moscow that any peasant caught “hoarding” grain – eating the food they themselves produced – would be shot. This was ironic, considering the old Marxist adage that workers should “own the means of their production.”
Although determining exact numbers of deaths from this period is nigh impossible, historians estimate that 3-5 million Ukrainians died in 1932-33 alone, while as many as 10 million perished over the course of the entire 1930s.
Until the Gorbachev era, the Holodomor was explicitly denied by the Soviet authorities and questions of to what extent it was intentional and ethnically-motivated remain contested and politically-charged to this day. Once the dust had settled, at least 15% of Ukraine’s population died in the Holodomor, and the lost potential of those lives and their bloodlines will forever be incalculable.
Concurrent with the Holodomor was Stalin’s effective conclusion of the Soviet policy of Ukrainization and its equivalents across the Republics of the USSR. Perhaps the emblematic story in this regard was that of Mykola Skrypnyk. Both a loyal Communist and proponent of Ukrainization, Skrypnyk had served in several roles in the government of Soviet Ukraine before finally settling into the influential position of “Commissar for Education” from 1927 to 1933.
However, Skrypnyk was ultimately stopped in his tracks by Stalin, who now viciously accused him of promoting “bourgeois nationalism” and ironically of trying to make Ukraine more “Polish” than “Russian.” In the end, “nationalism” was only useful to Marxist ideology insofar as it was a means to subvert its political enemies, rather than as an end unto itself.
Skrypnyk was promptly arrested in 1933 and chose to commit suicide in prison rather than face his inevitable fate of execution. Skrypnyk’s death was a turning point for cultural Ukrainization and apparent pretenses to political autonomy in Soviet Ukraine. In many ways, from that point forward, rather than existing as one of many “constituent Republics” of the USSR, Ukraine would exist effectively as a mere province of the imperial Russian-led Soviet Union.
The history of the Second World War in Ukraine remains a topic rife with radioactive political controversy. The rise of the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s heralded a wholesale readjustment of European geopolitical strategy. The natural enemy of the Nazis were their ideological polar opposites – Communists – in the Soviet Union, both of whom served as a powerful bogeyman for the propaganda machine of the other.
Ironically, these diametrically opposed foes had a mutual ideological enemy in the liberal-capitalist West and mutual political enemy in their common neighbour, Poland, and would thus form a “non-aggression pact” with each other in August 1939. By the terms of this agreement, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would re-partition Poland, with the USSR staking its claim to primarily ethnic Belarusian and Ukrainian regions of eastern Poland, most of which had once belonged to the Russian Empire before the previous war.
Thus, the German invasion of Poland would commence on 1 September 1939, marking the official start of the cataclysmic Second World War. Included in Stalin’s Ukrainian spoils in this treaty were the regions of East Galicia and Volhynia, the former of which had never been under Russian rule before, but which housed a numerous and particularly nationalistic Ukrainian population.
The next turning point in the war for Eastern Europe would be the German invasion of the USSR – Operation Barbarossa – on 22 June 1941. Ukraine would swiftly fall under the weight of the German assault, which soon pushed as far as the Soviet Caucasus prior to the onset of winter.
The Ukrainian reaction to the German invasion was varied and complex. In the previous war, several Ukrainian patriots had fought alongside and cooperated with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) as a hedge against Russian domination.
As such, the Ukrainians had a history of siding with the Germans as a “lesser evil,” and a sizable number of Ukrainians thus volunteered to join the Wehrmacht (German army) and even Waffen-SS (Nazi elite soldiers) to both fight on the Eastern Front against their Soviet Russian oppressors and, regrettably, to collaborate in the Nazi genocide of Jews and Poles in Ukraine. Most prominent among these was the Waffen-SS “Galizien” (Galician) division, which included as many as 50,000 west Ukrainian volunteer soldiers at its height.
Particularly striking in this regard was the brutal massacre of Poles in Volhynia and East Galicia. Following the German defeat of Poland, the OUN was split between two factions, respectively led by Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera. The former “Melnykites” tended to be older and more moderate, while the latter “Banderites” were younger and more radical.
In 1942, the Banderites would reorganize as the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) and subsequently initiate some of the most gruesome acts of violence of the entire period. Tragically, as many as 100,000 Poles would be murdered in cold blood by the UPA across western Ukraine over the course of the war.
Between these massacres, prior Soviet deportations of ethnic Poles from these regions to Siberia, and subsequent “population transfers” of ethnic Poles to the new Communist Poland after the war, a thorough and complete ethnic cleansing of the Polish population of Galicia and Volhynia – regions in which Poles had lived since the 14th century – was all but complete.
“Lwów” was “Lviv” once again, and the Polish city of “Stanisławów” would be renamed “Ivano-Frankivsk” after a west Ukrainian poet. Although Polish-Ukrainian relations are today probably the best they have been since before the 17th century, the subject of “Wołyn” (Polish for Volhynia) remains a touchy subject, far from resolved or reconciled.
The other genocide orchestrated in Ukraine was the Nazi murder of 1 million Ukrainian Jews from 1941-44. Indeed, after only Poland, Ukraine was the main killing field of the Holocaust. In contrast to their concentration camp method of mass murder in Poland, the SS opted for a more direct approach in Ukraine, enlisting Einsatzgruppen – paramilitary death squads – to comb the vast countryside for Jews to be subjected to summary execution.
Tragically, as many as 100,000 Ukrainians volunteered to join these death squads and collaborate in the Nazi genocide of Jews in Ukraine. It should be noted, however, that many Ukrainians helped to protect Jews at this time, and that Ukrainians were often themselves also the victims of Nazi occupation.
Although the Germans were eager to work with anti-Jewish elements native to Ukraine, Nazi ideology taught that Ukrainians – like their Slavic brethren in Poland and Russia – were an “inferior race” to later also be subjugated and eliminated. As many as 3 million Ukrainians were killed by the Nazis in this period, while 2 million more were deported westward to Germany to serve as slave labourers in support of the German war machine. Hitler also had long-term plans to colonize Ukraine with ethnic Germans, most notably in Crimea, which was to be renamed “Gotenland” after the pagan Germanic Ostrogoths who had once ruled the peninsula.
Although it is striking that as many as 250,000 Ukrainians – and many of them volunteers – fought for Nazi Germany in the Second World War, far more overwhelming were the 4.5 million Ukrainians who fought for the Soviet Union. Although most of these soldiers were conscripted, by the end of the war, as high as 40% of the Red Army was Ukrainian, representing the largest non-Russian contingent of Soviet forces.
Following the decisive Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, Ukraine would serve as the key battleground of the southern flank of the Eastern Front for the next 20 months of the war. The Donbass city of Voroshilovgrad (Lukhansk) would be the first of several Ukrainian cities to be liberated by the Red Army from that point forward.
By the end of 1943, the Soviets had pushed the Germans back over the Dnieper, notably recapturing the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in November. The next year – 1944 – would prove to be arguably the most decisive of the war, with the Red Army clearing the Wehrmacht out of pre-war Soviet territory by the summer.
Western Ukraine would be captured in July, with the SS-Galizien division largely destroyed in battle against the Red Army at Brody, near Lviv. In October, Soviet Ukrainian forces would cross the mountains into Transcarpathia, soon bringing all ethnic Ukrainian lands under permanent Soviet control for the first time in the war, and indeed for the first time in modern history.
Once the dust had settled in 1945, as many as 1.5 million Ukrainian soldiers and 4 million Ukrainian civilians had lost their lives. Ukraine had been one of the primary warzones of the Eastern Front throughout the period. Both sides had used “scorched earth” tactics to prevent their enemy from economically benefitting from their military victories, such that the country was physically devastated upon both the initial Soviet retreat in 1941 and later German retreat in 1943-44. Meanwhile, many factories in the industrial lower Dnieper and Donbass regions were either completely destroyed or intentionally relocated eastward beyond the reach of the German war machine.
As a result of Soviet conquest and Stalin’s negotiations with the Western Allies, Ukrainian territory was expanded 25% as a result of the war, most crucially including the incorporation of the west Ukrainian regions of Galicia, Volhynia, Transcarpathia, and northern Bukovina.
With the exception of Volhynia, none of these territories had ever been subjected to a Russian administration, and often betrayed a more “Western” outlook on politics, society, and culture. Galicia, in particular, had been a noted hotbed of Ukrainian nationalism, both under Austrian rule in the 19th century and under Polish rule for the 20 years of the interwar period.
Even after the conclusion of the war with Germany, the UPA continued to act as an underground partisan force in western Ukraine, prompting a Soviet crackdown on the Ukrainian resistance, which was not fully eliminated until 1948. Many leaders of the UPA and similar Ukrainian organizations would subsequently move to the West.
Most prominent among these was Stepan Bandera, who would settle in Munich, West Germany, and remained active within several Ukrainian émigré communities prior to his assassination by a KGB agent in 1959. Although Bandera certain had fascist, anti-Polish, and anti-Jewish ideological leanings, the extent to which he actively collaborated with the Nazis during the war or ordered his followers to murder Poles and Jews in western Ukraine is not entirely clear.
Nonetheless, he remains a subject of extreme controversy in Ukraine and abroad to this day, with some viewing him as a national hero and martyr, while others condemning him as a genocidal traitor and war criminal.
Beyond the suppression of the UPA, other anti-Communist or non-Communist west Ukrainian organizations were inevitably persecuted after the war as part of Moscow and Kiev’s efforts to fully integrate their new territories into the administrative framework of Soviet Ukraine.
The Greek Catholic Church was an obvious target, and following the death of the courageous Metropolitan (chief bishop) Andriy Sheptystsky in 1944, was subjected to the full brunt of Soviet oppression and manipulation. In 1946, a “synod” was organized in Lviv by the Soviet authorities to officially “repudiate” the 1596 Union of Brest which had created the Greek Catholic Church in the first place.
As such, pro-Soviet clergymen formally “returned” to the Orthodox faith, now subjected to the Soviet-approved Patriarch in Moscow, rather than the Pope in Rome. From that point forward, the Greek Catholic Church in western Ukraine would be forced underground or into Western exile.
In this, one of the bloodiest eras in human history, the black soil of Ukraine was among the most brutally soaked in blood. Over the course of the 1930s and 40s, as many as 20 million historic inhabitants of the Ukrainian lands - be they ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Jews, or Germans - died of famine, disease, war, or genocide, with millions more deported or otherwise displaced, never to return. Indeed, the full long-term impact of the Holodomor and Second World War on Ukraine is likely incalculable, and still reverberates across Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the Ukrainian émigré community to this day.