Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

Name

The original names of the republic in 1919 were both Ukraine and Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (Ukrainian: Українська Соціалістична Радянська Республіка, romanized: Ukrainska Sotsialistychna Radianska Respublika, abbreviated УСРР, USRR). After the ratification of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, full official names of all Soviet republics were changed, transposing the second (socialist) and third (sovietskaya in Russian or radianska in Ukrainian) words. In accordance, on 5 December 1936, the 8th Extraordinary Congress Soviets in Soviet Union changed the name of the republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was ratified by the 14th Extraordinary Congress of Soviets in Ukrainian SSR on 31 January 1937.

History

Establishment: 1917–1922

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, several factions sought to create an independent Ukrainian state, alternately cooperating and struggling against each other. Numerous more or less socialist-oriented factions participated in the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic among which were Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialists-Revolutionaries and many others. The most popular faction was initially the local Socialist Revolutionary Party that composed the local government together with Federalists and Mensheviks.

Following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the February Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, many people in Ukraine wished to establish an autonomous Ukrainian Republic. During a period of the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1923, many factions claiming themselves governments of the newly born republic were formed, each with supporters and opponents. The two most prominent of them were an independent government in Kiev called the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) and a Soviet Russia-aligned government in Kharkov called the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (USR). The Kiev-based UNR was internationally recognized and supported by the Central Powers following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, whereas the Kharkov-based USR was solely supported by the Soviet Russian forces, while neither the UNR nor the USR were explicitly supported by the White Russian forces that remained, although there were attempts to establish cooperation during the closing stages of the war with the former.

Immediately after the October Revolution in Petrograd, Bolsheviks instigated the Kiev Bolshevik Uprising to support the revolution and secure Kiev. Due to a lack of adequate support from the local population and governing anti-communist Central Rada, however, the Kiev Bolshevik group split. Most moved to Kharkov and received the support of the eastern Ukrainian cities and industrial centers. Later, this move was regarded as a mistake by some of the People's Commissars (Yevgenia Bosch). They issued an ultimatum to the Central Rada on 17 December to recognise the Soviet government of which the Rada was very critical. The Bolsheviks convened a separate congress and declared the first Soviet Republic of Ukraine on 24 December 1917 claiming the Central Rada and its supporters outlaws that need to be eradicated. The conflict between the two competing governments, known as the Ukrainian–Soviet War, was part of the ongoing Russian Civil War, as well as the Ukrainian War of Independence.

The government of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was founded on 24–25 December 1917. In its publications, it named itself either the Republic of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies or the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets. The 1917 republic was only recognised by another non-recognised country, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Warfare ensued against the Ukrainian People's Republic for the installation of the Soviet regime in the country, and with the direct support from Soviet Russia the Ukrainian National forces were practically overrun. The government of Ukraine appealed to foreign capitals, finding support in the face of the Central Powers as the others refused to recognise it. With the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty by Russia, the Russian SFSR yielded all the captured Ukrainian territory as the Bolsheviks were forced out of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets was eventually dissolved.

Interwar years: 1922–1939

The policies of War Communism led to the devastation of Ukraine's economy and decline of agriculture, provoking numerous peasant uprisings against Bolshevik authorities, which had to be suppressed with the use of troops of the Red Army. The collapse in the agrarian sphere produced a detrimental effect on the whole economy, and by early 1921 only 4,060 of more than 10,000 industrial enterprises in Ukraine continued their operations. This, in its turn, contributed to the collapse of the transport system, with railways coming to a standstill. Even personnel of the Red Army stationed in Ukraine suffered from famine and lack of goods. In these circumstances, central authorities of the Bolshevik Party were forced to change their approach to the economy.

The discussions on the introduction of New Economic Policy (NEP), which started in Moscow cabinets during the early months of 1921, were initially met with skepticism by Ukrainian Communist leadership, which saw prodrazvyorstka as an essential component in the reconstruction of economy. After the 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in May 1921 a council of Ukrainian party members in Kharkiv supported the transition to NEP despite some local opposition. A big role in that decision was played by massive peasant unrest. NEP didn't produce any significant changes in the Communist doctrine, but served as a tactical step in order to facilitate the exchange of goods between rural areas and the city. The introduction of the new system signified the failure of the Bolsheviks to rebuild agriculture according to Communist principles.

A severe drought hit Southern Ukraine throughout 1921, at the peak of the Soviet government's campaign of food requisitions from peasants. Unrealistic grain production quotas led to the refusal of peasants to give up their grain, as a result of which authorities answered with terror, including taking of hostages and mass shootings. Despite the visible food problems in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks refused to appeal for international help, concentrating their attention on the Volga region. As a result, a major famine engulfed Southern Ukraine and the Donbas, lasting until 1923. The lack of food resulted in a decline of insurgent activities against Soviet authorities, with some historians viewing the requisitions of food by the government as the first instance of terror through hunger in Ukraine.

In order to increase its influence in regions dominated by non-Russian ethnic groups, the Bolshevik Party leadership developed the program of korenizatsiya, which provided development of local languages and cultures with simultaneous preservation of centralized control. In Ukrainian SSR during the 1920s this process took the form of Ukrainization and involved promoting the use and the social status of the Ukrainian language and the elevation of ethnic Ukrainians to leadership positions. These policies provided Ukrainians an impression of national sovereignty, without abandoning the Communist Party's dictatorial rule. The "nationalization" of Soviet bureaucracy also contributed to an increased efficiency of management, strengthening the regime. At the same time, Soviet authorities clearly distinguished between "Communist" and "Petliurite" Ukrainization, seeing the latter as a threat to state unity. The campaign of Ukrainization aimed to prove the genuine character of Soviet rule in Ukraine and dispel the image of the regime as an alien occupying force. Its course was accelerated by power struggles in the Kremlin following the death of Lenin, which made it necessary for supreme party leadership to attain support of the Ukrainian society. At the same time, Russian preserved its role as the language of interethnic communication, with Russians remaining de-facto title nation of the Soviet Union. Ukrainization was halted in 1932-1933, when Stalin's regime proclaimed Ukrainian "bourgeois nationalism" to be the chief threat to Soviet unity.

World War II: 1939–1945

In September 1939, following the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Official Soviet propaganda depicted the invasion as a "campaign of liberation" aimed to "free" ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians from Polish rule. According to the Treaty on Friendship and Borders from 28 September 1939, Soviet Union and Nazi Germany partitioned the Polish state, as a result of which approximately 200,000 sq km of territory with a population of 12 million people was incorporated into the USSR. Following the campaign against Poland, as well as the subsequent Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania in 1940, newly incorporated territories were divided into oblasts, of which Volyn, Drohobych, Lviv, Rivne, Stanislaviv, Ternopil, Chernivtsi and Izmail oblasts were attached to the Ukrainian SSR. As a result, the republic increased its territory to 560,000 sq km, with its population reaching 41,657,000 inhabitants. Despite government propaganda, the attachment of Western Ukraine to the Soviet Union was seen by many Ukrainians not as a unification of their country, but as an illegitimate partition of Poland. The newly annexed territories underwent rapid Sovietization, with landowners' holdings being divided between peasants. Between February 1940 and June 1941 320,000 people were forcibly deported from Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. Polish prisoners of war were interned in special camps, and more than 14,000 of them were extrajudicially executed in Katyn, Kharkiv and Tver. The repressions by Stalinist regime had a preventive character, with all people potentially able to resist the regime being eliminated.

Immediately after the start of German-Soviet War in June 1941, Ukraine became a theatre of major battles between Wehrmacht and the Red Army. In the Battle of Brody mechanized units of the Soviet Southwestern Front suffered a crushing defeat from German forces. Stavka was reluctant to allow Red Army units an organized retreat, which led to their failure to organize defence on the "Stalin Line". By 10 July 1941, German forces found themselves on distant approaches to Kyiv. In August, German forces broke the Southern Front and encircled over 100,000 Red Army soldiers at Uman. Advancing from the Moscow direction, tank divisions of Guderian and Kleist on 15 September closed another ring of encirclement in the vicinity of Bakhmach, Lokhvytsia and Lubny. According to Soviet data, 453,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were captured by Germans in the area. On 18 September Red Army troops left Kyiv, but only a small number of them succeeded to break through German lines and reach Soviet positions. On 30 September Stavka ordered the withdrawal of troops located in Odesa defensive area to Crimea. By October, the Germans had captured Kharkiv and Stalino, advancing to Mariupol, Taganrog and Rostov.

Post-war years: 1945–1953

While World War II (called the Great Patriotic War by the Soviet government) did not end before May 1945, the Germans were driven out of Ukraine between February 1943 and October 1944. The first task of the Soviet authorities was to reestablish political control over the republic which had been entirely lost during the war. This was an immense task, considering the widespread human and material losses. During World War II the Soviet Union lost about 8.6 million combatants and about 18 million civilians, of these, 6.8 million were Ukrainian civilians and military personnel. Also, an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians were evacuated to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic during the war, and 2.2 million Ukrainians were sent to forced labour camps by the Germans.

The material devastation was huge; Adolf Hitler's orders to create "a zone of annihilation" in 1943, coupled with the Soviet military's scorched-earth policy in 1941, meant Ukraine lay in ruins. These two policies led to the destruction of more than 28,000 villages and 714 cities and towns. 85 percent of Kyiv's city centre was destroyed, as was 70 percent of the city centre of the second-largest city in Ukraine, Kharkiv. Because of this, 19 million people were left homeless after the war. The republic's industrial base, as so much else, was destroyed. The Soviet government had managed to evacuate 544 industrial enterprises between July and November 1941, but the rapid German advance led to the destruction or the partial destruction of 16,150 enterprises. 27,910 collective farms, 1,300 machine tractor stations and 872 state farms were destroyed by the Germans.

While the war brought to Ukraine an enormous physical destruction, victory also led to territorial expansion. As a victor, the Soviet Union gained new prestige and more land. During the Tehran Conference in 1943, British prime minister Winston Churchill negotiated a plan with Stalin, according to which lands of Poland populated by ethnic Ukrianians and Belarusians would be transferred to Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus respectively, in exchange for which Poland would receive parts of German territory. The new Polish-Ukrainian border would generally follow the Curzon Line. Following the expulsion of Germans, between 1944 and 1946 Poland and Soviet Ukraine performed a population exchange, in course of which 810,400 Poles were resettled from Ukraine into Poland, and 482,900 Ukrainians had to leave Poland for Ukraine. Further 150,000 of Ukrainians would be deported from Polish territory during the Operation Vistula in 1947. A population exchange was also organized between Ukraine and Czechoslovakia.

Khrushchev and Brezhnev: 1953–1982

When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the collective leadership of Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrentiy Beria took power and a period of de-Stalinization began. Change came as early as 1953, when officials were allowed to criticise Stalin's policy of russification. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) openly criticised Stalin's russification policies in a meeting in June 1953. On 4 June 1953, Aleksey Kirichenko succeeded Leonid Melnikov as First Secretary of the CPU; this was significant since Kirichenko was the first ethnic Ukrainian to lead the CPU since the 1920s. The policy of de-Stalinization took two main features, that of centralisation and decentralisation from the centre. In February 1954, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) transferred Crimea to Ukraine during the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's reunification with Russia, Soviet term for the Pereiaslav Agreement (Ukrainian: Переяславська рада), a treaty which brought Ukraine under Russian rule three centuries before. The massive festivities lasted throughout 1954, aiming to prove the old and brotherly love between Ukrainians and Russians, and depict the Soviet Union as a "family of nations"; it was also a way of legitimising Marxism–Leninism.

The "Thaw" – the policy of deliberate liberalisation – was characterised by four points: amnesty for some convicted of state crime during the war or the immediate post-war years; amnesties for one-third of those convicted of state crime during Stalin's rule; the establishment of the first Ukrainian mission to the United Nations in 1958; and the steady increase of Ukrainians in the rank of the CPU and government of the Ukrainian SSR. Not only were the majority of CPU Central Committee and Politburo members ethnic Ukrainians, three-quarters of the highest ranking party and state officials were ethnic Ukrainians too. The policy of partial Ukrainisation also led to a cultural thaw within Ukraine. Late 1950s saw the emergence of Ukraine's dissident movement. In 1958 Levko Lukianenko established the underground "Ukrainian Workers' and Peasants' Union", whose members were arrested three years later and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The process against the organization was publicized in foreign media through the efforts of Ivan Svitlychnyi.

In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed by a joint Central Committee and Politburo plenum and succeeded by another collective leadership, this time led by Leonid Brezhnev, born in Ukraine, as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Brezhnev's rule would be marked by social and economic stagnation. The new regime introduced the policy of rastsvet, sblizhenie and sliianie ("flowering", "drawing together" and "merging"/"fusion"), which was the policy of uniting the different Soviet nationalities into one Soviet nationality by merging the best elements of each nationality into the new one. This policy turned out to be, in fact, the reintroduction of the Russification. Brezhnev's tenure saw the gradual elimination of previously established distinctions between party oligarchy and the nomenklatura. During its later years, the regime established by Brezhnev and his circle of aging Communist party officials was frequently described as a gerontocracy.

Gorbachev to independence: 1985–1991

Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost (English: restructuring and openness) failed to reach Ukraine as early as other Soviet republics because of the influence of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a conservative communist appointed by Brezhnev as the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the russification policies, and the apparent social and economic stagnation led many Ukrainians to oppose Soviet rule. Gorbachev's policy of perestroika was also never introduced into practice, 95 percent of industry and agriculture was still owned by the Soviet state in 1990. The talk of reform, but the lack of introducing reform into practice, led to confusion which in turn evolved into opposition to the Soviet state itself. The policy of glasnost, which ended state censorship, led the Ukrainian diaspora to reconnect with their compatriots in Ukraine, the revitalisation of religious practices by destroying the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church and led to the establishment of several opposition pamphlets, journals and newspapers.

Glasnost policies resulted in the publication of previously classified information on Soviet history, including materials on the Holodomor of 1932–1933 and produced a significant change in outlooks of the Ukrainian elite. Among prominent people who became disillusioned with the Soviet regime were Ukrainian Central Committee member Leonid Kravchuk and poet Dmytro Pavlychko, both of whom adopted positions critical of Moscow's Communist rule. The issue of Holodomor was first mentioned on the highest level in July 1988 during Borys Oliynyk's speech at the 19th all-Union Party Conference. In his interview given in November of the same year, writer Yuriy Shcherbak called the famine an element of terror against the Ukrainian national liberation movement. In 1990 the Institute of Party History of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine published a collection of documents dedicated to the famine, which was approved by first secretary Volodymyr Ivashko. Simultaneously, publication of previously banned works on Ukrainian history, including Mykhailo Hrushevsky's History of Ukraine-Rus, texts by Dmytro Yavornytsky and Mykhailo Drahomanov, memoirs of Volodymyr Vynnychenko and the History of Ruthenians was initiated by a Ukrainian party commission.

The beginning of Perestroika was signified by the emergence of Soviet Ukraine's first non-government civic organizations. The first of them, the Ukrainian Culturological Club and the Lion's Society, were established in 1987 by youth representatives and dissidents. A big role after the Chernobyl Disaster was played by the ecology movement. In March 1988 former members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group established the Ukrainian Helsinki Union under the leadership of Levko Lukianenko, who was released from prison later that year. In 1987 The Ukrainian Herald resumed publishing after a 15-year pause, making it the first legal independent political publication in Ukraine. In February 1989 the Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society was established under the leadership of Dmytro Pavlychko. In October of the same year the Supreme Council of Ukrainian SSR adopted the Law on Languages, which officially recognized Ukrainian as state language.

Politics and government

The Ukrainian SSR's system of government was based on a one-party communist system ruled by the Communist Party of Ukraine, a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS). The republic was one of 15 constituent republics composing the Soviet Union from its entry into the union in 1922 until its dissolution in 1991. All of the political power and authority in the USSR was in the hands of Communist Party authorities, with little real power being concentrated in official government bodies and organs. In such a system, lower-level authorities directly reported to higher level authorities and so on, with the bulk of the power being held at the highest echelons of the Communist Party. The regime established by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine and other Soviet republics can be characterized as a form of party oligarchy.

Originally, the legislative authority was vested in the Congress of Soviets of Ukraine, whose Central Executive Committee was for many years headed by Grigory Petrovsky. Soon after publishing a Stalinist constitution, the Congress of Soviets was transformed into the Supreme Soviet (and the Central Executive Committee into its Presidium), which consisted of 450 deputies. The Supreme Soviet had the authority to enact legislation, amend the constitution, adopt new administrative and territorial boundaries, adopt the budget, and establish political and economic development plans. In addition, parliament also had to authority to elect the republic's executive branch, the Council of Ministers as well as the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. Legislative sessions were short and were conducted for only a few weeks out of the year. In spite of this, the Supreme Soviet elected the Presidium, the Chairman, three deputy chairmen, a secretary, and couple of other government members to carry out the official functions and duties in between legislative sessions. Chairman of the Presidium was a powerful position in the republic's higher echelons of power, and could nominally be considered the equivalent of head of state, although most executive authority would be concentrated in the Communist Party's politburo and its First Secretary.

Full universal suffrage was granted for all eligible citizens aged 18 and over, excluding prisoners and those deprived of freedom. Although they could not be considered free and were of a symbolic nature, elections to the Supreme Soviet were contested every five years. Nominees from electoral districts from around the republic, typically consisting of an average of 110,000 inhabitants, were directly chosen by party authorities, providing little opportunity for political change, since all political authority was directly subordinate to the higher level above it.

Foreign relations

During the first years of its existence, Ukrainian SSR was the only Soviet republic along with Soviet Russia to establish its own foreign contacts. Following the signing of a union treaty with Russian SFSR on 28 December 1920, the government of Christian Rakovsky signed an agreement on cooperation with the Menshevik Georgian Democratic Republic, and on 14 February 1921 Soviet Ukraine established diplomatic ties with Lithuania. During the talks in Riga in 1921 Soviet Ukrainian representative Emmanuel Kviring supported the idea of establishing the republic's embassies in the capitals of great powers, as well as in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Austria. In October of the same year Alexander Shumsky was appointed ambassador of Soviet Ukraine in Warsaw. In 1921-1922 Ukrainian SSR signed peace treaties with Estonia and Latvia, and established friendly relations with Turkey. Soviet Ukrainian trade missions were established in several European cities. However, starting from 1922 Ukrainian SSR was forced to cease the activities of its diplomatic organs under pressure from Moscow. At the Lausanne Conference representatives of Soviet Ukraine took part in negotiations as part of a common delegation with representatives of Soviet Russia and Soviet Georgia, headed by Georgy Chicherin. In September 1923 the diplomatic apparatus of Ukrainian SSR ceased its existence, and its consulates and services were incorporated into the all-Union commissariat.

During the following decades, the Ukrainian SSR, along with the rest of the 15 republics, had virtually no say in their own foreign affairs. However, since 1944, the Ukrainian SSR was permitted to establish bilateral relations with countries and maintain its own standing army. This clause was used to permit the republic's membership in the United Nations, alongside the Byelorussian SSR. Accordingly, representatives from the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" and 50 other states founded the UN on 24 October 1945. In effect, this provided the Soviet Union (a permanent Security Council member with veto powers) with another two votes in the General Assembly. The latter aspect of the 1944 clauses was never fulfilled and the republic's defense matters were managed by the Soviet Armed Forces and the Defense Ministry. Another right that was granted but never used until 1991 was the right of the Soviet republics to secede from the union, which was codified in each of the Soviet constitutions. Accordingly, Article 69 of the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR stated: "The Ukrainian SSR retains the right to willfully secede from the USSR." However, a republic's theoretical secession from the union was virtually impossible and unrealistic in many ways until after Gorbachev's perestroika reforms.

Administrative divisions

Legally, the Soviet Union and its fifteen union republics constituted a federal system, but the country was functionally a highly centralised state, with all major decision-making taking place in the Kremlin, the capital and seat of government of the country. The constituent republics were essentially unitary states, with lower levels of power being directly subordinate to higher ones. Throughout its 72-year existence, the administrative divisions of the Ukrainian SSR changed numerous times, often incorporating regional reorganisation and annexation on the part of Soviet authorities during World War II.

The most common administrative division was the oblast (province), of which there were 25 upon the republic's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Provinces were further subdivided into raions (districts) which numbered 490. The rest of the administrative division within the provinces consisted of cities, urban-type settlements, and villages. Cities in the Ukrainian SSR were a separate exception, which could either be subordinate to either the provincial authorities themselves or the district authorities of which they were the administrative center. Two cities, the capital Kiev, and Sevastopol (which hosted a large Soviet Navy base in Crimea), were uniquely designated "cities with special status." This meant that they were directly subordinate to the central Ukrainian SSR authorities and not the provincial authorities surrounding them.

Historical formation

However, the history of administrative divisions in the republic was not so clear cut. At the end of World War I in 1918, Ukraine was invaded by Soviet Russia as the Russian puppet government of the Ukrainian SSR and without official declaration it ignited the Ukrainian–Soviet War . Government of the Ukrainian SSR from very start was managed by the Communist Party of Ukraine that was created in Moscow and was originally formed out of the Bolshevik organisational centers in Ukraine. Occupying the eastern city of Kharkov, the Soviet forces chose it as the republic's seat of government, colloquially named in the media as "Kharkov – Pervaya Stolitsa (the first capital)" with implication to the era of Soviet regime. Kharkov was also the city where the first Soviet Ukrainian government was created in 1917 with strong support from Russian SFSR authorities. However, in 1934, the capital was moved from Kharkov to Kiev, which remains the capital of Ukraine today.

During the 1930s, there were significant numbers of ethnic minorities living within the Ukrainian SSR. National Districts were formed as separate territorial-administrative units within higher-level provincial authorities. Districts were established for the republic's three largest minority groups, which were the Jews, Russians, and Poles. Other ethnic groups, however, were allowed to petition the government for their own national autonomy. In 1924 on the territory of Ukrainian SSR was formed the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Upon the 1940 conquest of Bessarabia and Bukovina by Soviet troops the Moldavian ASSR was passed to the newly formed Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, while Budzhak and Bukovina were secured by the Ukrainian SSR. Following the creation of the Ukrainian SSR significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians found themselves living outside the Ukrainian SSR. In the 1920s the Ukrainian SSR was forced to cede several territories to Russia in Severia, Sloboda Ukraine and Azov littoral including such cities like Belgorod, Taganrog and Starodub. In the 1920s the administration of the Ukrainian SSR insisted in vain on reviewing the border between the Ukrainian Soviet Republics and the Russian Soviet Republic based on the 1926 First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union that showed that 4.5 millions of Ukrainians were living on Russian territories bordering Ukraine. A forced end to Ukrainisation in southern Russian Soviet Republic led to a massive decline of reported Ukrainians in these regions in the 1937 Soviet Census.

Upon signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union partitioned Poland and its Eastern Borderlands were secured by the Soviet buffer republics with Ukraine securing the territory of Eastern Galicia. The Soviet September Polish campaign in Soviet propaganda was portrayed as the Golden September for Ukrainians, given the unification of Ukrainian lands on both banks of Zbruch River, until then the border between the Soviet Union and the Polish communities inhabited by Ukrainian speaking families.

Economy

Before 1945

At the onset of Soviet Ukraine, having largely inherited conditions from the Tsarist Empire, one of the biggest exporters of wheat in the world, the Ukrainian economy was still centered around agriculture, with over 90% of the workforce being peasants. In the 1920s, Soviet policies in Ukraine attached importance to developing the economy. The initial agenda, War Communism, had prescribed total communisation and appropriation per quota of food from the people by force - further economic damage and a 1921–1923 famine in Ukraine claiming up to one million lives ensued. With the New Economic Policy and the partial introduction of free markets, an economic recovery followed.

During the 1920s, the majority of Ukraine's economic enterprises was subordinated to the union centre. In 1921 Soviet Ukraine's authorities introduced the system of khozraschet, which turned enterprises into autonomous subjects of the economy. Such enterprises were united into trusts, which represented separate branches of industry. At the same time, trusts were barred from paying taxes from their fixed assets, and were instead obliged to deliver a specially introduced "industrial tax", which increased their dependence on the state budget. The economic system was distorted due to the prioritization of non-consumer production by the regime. The period of NEP saw the revival of credit and financial institutions, a currency reform and the organization of state trade and cooperation. Starting from 1925 the economic policies experienced a turn towards industrialization and collectivization.

After the death of Lenin and the consolidation of his power, Stalin was determined to accelerate industrialisation and reversed policy again. As heavy industry and wheat exports boomed, common people in rural areas were bearing a cost. Gradually escalating measures, from raised taxes, dispossession of property, and forced deportations into Siberia culminated in extremely high grain delivery quotas. Even though there is no evidence that agricultural yield could not feed the population at the time, four million Ukrainians were starved to death during the 1932–1933 Holodomor, while Moscow exported over a million tonnes of grain to the West, decimating the population.

In the aftermath of collectivization, the Soviet regime achieved a mode of coexistence with Ukraine's peasants through the employment of women in order to compensate for demographic losses during the famine, as well as mechanization of agriculture and the introduction of a passport system. In the industrial sphere, Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s was dominated by metallurgy and food industry. Between 1928 and 1937 the industrial growth in Ukrainian SSR achieved record numbers worldwide. The number of workers grew almost threefold. For the first time in history, by the late 1930s, less than half of Soviet Ukraine's population was employed in agriculture. During that time the republic was Europe's second biggest producer of pig iron and took the fourth place worldwide in coal production. At the same time, the development of Ukraine's industry repeated pre-revolutionary patterns, with most of its centers being concentrated in the Donbas-Dnieper region.

After 1945

In 1945, agricultural production stood at only 40 percent of the 1940 level, even though the republic's territorial expansion had "increased the amount of arable land". In contrast to the remarkable growth in the industrial sector, agriculture continued in Ukraine, as in the rest of the Soviet Union, to function as the economy's Achilles heel. Despite the human toll of collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union, especially in Ukraine, Soviet planners still believed in the effectiveness of collective farming. The old system was reestablished; the numbers of collective farms in Ukraine increased from 28 thousand in 1940 to 33 thousand in 1949, comprising 45 million hectares; the numbers of state farms barely increased, standing at 935 in 1950, comprising 12.1 million hectares. By the end of the Fourth Five-Year Plan (in 1950) and the Fifth Five-Year Plan (in 1955), agricultural output still stood far lower than the 1940 level. The slow changes in agriculture can be explained by the low productivity in collective farms, and by bad weather-conditions, which the Soviet planning system could not effectively respond to. Grain for human consumption in the post-war years decreased, this in turn led to frequent and severe food shortages.

The increase of Soviet agricultural production was tremendous, however, the Soviet Ukrainians still experienced food shortages due to the inefficiencies of a highly centralised economy. During the peak of Soviet-Ukrainian agriculture output in the 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, human consumption in Ukraine, and in the rest of the Soviet Union, actually experienced short intervals of decrease. There are many reasons for this inefficiency, but its origins can be traced back to the single-purchaser and -producer market system set up by Joseph Stalin. Khrushchev tried to improve the agricultural situation in the Soviet Union by expanding the total crop size – for instance, in the Ukrainian SSR alone "the amount of land planted with corn grew by 600 percent". At the height of this policy, between 1959 and 1963, one-third of Ukrainian arable land grew this crop. This policy decreased the total production of wheat and rye; Khrushchev had anticipated this, and the production of wheat and rye moved to Soviet Central Asia as part of the Virgin Lands Campaign. Khrushchev's agricultural policy failed, and in 1963 the Soviet Union had to import food from abroad. The total level of agricultural productivity in Ukraine decreased sharply during this period, but recovered in the 1970s and 1980s during Leonid Brezhnev's rule. A major role in Ukraine's agriculture during Soviet times was played by personal land plots, which were confiscated from peasant during Khrushchev's rule. Following their restoration to villagers by the late 1960s, they produced one-quarter of all vegetables and one-third of the total meat, lard, milk and fruit production, as well as more than half of all potatoes. The presence of such plots in Ukraine ameliorated the deficit of goods in the republic during the later years of Soviet rule, when rapid urbanisation produced an additional stress on agricultural producers.

Culture, science and religion

Stalinist era

In 1930 compulsory primary education in the Soviet Union was introduced by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars. After 1933, the policies of korenization were replaced with Russification, which became especially prominent in the educational sphere. The Soviet history course in schools was created on the base of Russian history courses from imperial times.

During the 1930s, numerous Ukrainian scientific and cultural activists were subjected to state-organized political repressions. More than half of the members of the Writers' Union of Ukraine were repressed on trumped-up charges between 1934 and 1938. Many were imprisoned in concentration camps and executed, while some, like Mykola Khvylyovy, committed suicide due to persecution by authorities.

Starting from the second half of 1920s Kyiv became a major centre of cinematography, with the local cinema studios producing several renowned films such as Arsenal and Earth by Alexander Dovzhenko. After a conflict with Mykola Skrypnyk, Dovzhenko moved to Moscow and received the protection of Stalin, producing propaganda movies for his regime. A significant development in Ukrainian arts was the school created by Mykhailo Boychuk, who was in 1936 arrested by the Soviet authorities and later executed. Despite repressions, the number of Ukrainian intelligentsia saw an increase during the first decades of Soviet rule.

Many churches and synagogues were destroyed during the existence of the Ukrainian SSR. By 1937, only 850 Christian places of worship continued to function in the republic compared to approximately 10,000 less than a decade earlier. Many churches were closed and transformed into clubs, meanwhile the St. Sophia Cathedral and Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv were turned into museums of atheism. In 1930 the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was dissolved by authorities after accusations of nationalism. In 1937 St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv was demolished during construction works. Nevertheless, according to materials of a census performed during the same year, over 50% of Ukrainian SSR's population declared themselves to be religious.

During the Second World War, the Soviet regime toned down its propaganda of class struggle, and started appealing to heroic past of the Russians and other peoples of the USSR in fight against external enemies. Starting from the beginning of German invasion, Ukrainian historical figures such as Daniel of Galicia and Bohdan Khmelnytsky were lionized as great patriots and fighters against German aggressors, although neither of the two ever fought against Germany. This practice demonstrated the ability of Communism and Nationalism to coexist inside of a single system. In September 1943 Stalin agreed to restore the position of patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. In order to rehabilitate the popular image of the regime, several prominent cultural figures, such as Mykola Bazhan and Pavlo Tychyna, were appointed to serve in the government of Ukrainian SSR. Ukrainian historians and publishers evacuated from the warzone engaged in production of popular works and propaganda, promoting Ukrainian Soviet patriotism. In October 1943 Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky was established, and the ancient city of Pereyaslav was renamed in honour of the hetman. At the same time, the official ideology continued to promote the image of Russians as the "elder brother".

Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods

The liberalization of political life during the Khrushchev Thaw led to the spread of Western cultural influences in the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, translations of previously banned authors such as Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway became possible with the reestablishment of Vsesvit magazine in 1958. In 1959 students in Kyiv organized the performance of koliadky, traditional Ukrainian Christmas carols, and were soon permitted to create a cultural club under the aegis of local Komsomol. The club also engaged in social activities, among others demanding to establish a memorial to victims of Stalinist repression at Bykivnia. Similar clubs were established in other cities of Ukraine, contributing to the emergence of Sixtiers movement.

Following a short period of cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church, in 1958 Khrushchev's government announced the beginning of a new anti-religious campaign. By 1964, more than half of Ukraine's religious communities lost their churches, and two-thirds of all monasteries were shut down by authorities. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Ukrainian population in different parts of the republic continued to follow religious rites. In 1958 the theses published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party promoted the facultative status of Ukrainian language in schools with simultaneous compulsory teaching of Russian. This proposal produced a backlash among Ukraine's cultural elite. Nevertheless, between 1959 and 1966 the number of Russian-language schools in Ukrainian SSR increased, while the number of Ukrainian-language schools fell.

In Ukraine, the removal of Khrushchev resulted in the political rise of Petro Shelest, who was considered to be a Ukrainophile and worked to undo the Russificatory policies of his predecessor, promoting Ukrainian-language education, media and publishing. A loyal Communist by ideology, Shelest refused to recognize the elimination of national distinctions as a goal of Soviet Union's development, and promoted the notions of Soviet republics' sovereignty. Shelest's removal from the post of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1972 signified a decisive turn to policies of Russification, which were implemented by his successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. The fight against supposed "Ukrainian nationalism" frequently adopted the forms of hysterical accusations against Ukrainians following their national traditions, and Soviet officials would demonstratively use Russian during official events. Even the statue of Neptune in Lviv's Rynok Square had its trident removed in order not to produce unneeded associations.

Final years of Soviet rule

The advent of Perestroika led to a spike in the Ukrainian national liberation movement, which was vividly demonstrated in the sphere of religion. Starting from 1987 numerous petitions were directed to authorities with demands to provide official recognition of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church following more than 40 years of persecution. To neuter these demands, in April 1988 Gorbachev ordered Patriarch Pimen I of Moscow to increase the number of Orthodox parishes in Western Ukraine and promote church publications in Ukrainian language. However, those measures had little effect on the Greek Catholic community. In May 1989 six bishops of the banned church organized a hunger strike in central Moscow, and in Western Ukraine a major action in support of religious freedom was organized on the initiative of cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky. On 17 September 1989 calls for legalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church were issued by participants of a demonstration in memory of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, which was organized in Lviv. Answering to numerous telegrams he received from Ukraine, on 5 October 1989 pope John Paul II declared the official recognition of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church by Soviet authorities to be a prerequisite for democratization in the USSR. On 23 January 1990 a council of Greek Catholic bishops in Lviv recognized the decision of the 1946 synod to be invalid and demanded full rehabilitation of the church and return of all of its properties. The victory of local Democratic Bloc representatives in elections to the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine made it possible to realize the council's demands, and Lviv's St. George's Cathedral returned to Greek Catholics. In March 1991 cardinal Lubachivsky returned from emigration.

Following the steps of Greek Catholics, in August 1989 the community of Sts. Peter and Paul Church in Lviv declared their refusal to subordinate itself to the Russian Orthodox Church and proclaimed its autocephaly. On 20 October a congress of clergymen declared the restoration of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and in June 1990 an all-Ukrainian synod elected Mstyslav Skrypnyk as its patriarch. In January 1990 a synod of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow approved the transformation of its parishes in Ukraine into a self-governed exarchate under the name of Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). By early 1991, 10,810 religious communities were registered in Ukraine, with the biggest confessions being represented by UOC (5031 communities), UGCC (2001), Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (1127) and UAOC (939).

Demographics

Between 1959 and 1989 Soviet Ukraine's population increased by 9,6 million, reaching the number of 51,7 million people. This made Ukraine Europe's sixth most populated country after Russia, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France. However, the population growth gradually slowed down, and was to a large degree contributed to by migration from other parts of the USSR. Decreasing birth rates and increasing mortality were combined with an increase in average life expectancy, which led to the aging of population. Starting from late 1960s, rural areas of Ukraine started experiencing depopulation. The ethnic composition of Ukrainian SSR changed with time, with the percentage of ethnic Ukrainians decreasing amid simultaneous increase in the number of ethnic Russians. Immigration played a significant role in this process. This contributed to Russification, especially in eastern and southern parts of the country. Nevertheless, even Ukrainians who adopted Russian as main language tended to preserve their Ukrainian identity.

Urbanisation in post-Stalin Ukraine grew quickly; in 1959, only 25 cities in Ukraine had populations over one hundred thousand, by 1979 the number had grown to 49. During the same period, the growth of cities with a population over one million increased from one to five; Kiev alone nearly doubled its population, from 1.1 million in 1959 to 2.1 million in 1979. This proved a turning point in Ukrainian society: for the first time in Ukraine's history, the majority of ethnic Ukrainians lived in urban areas; 53 percent of the ethnic Ukrainian population did so in 1979. The majority worked in the non-agricultural sector, in 1970 31 percent of Ukrainians engaged in agriculture, in contrast, 63 percent of Ukrainians were industrial workers and white-collar staff. In 1959, 37 percent of Ukrainians lived in urban areas, in 1989 the proportion had increased to 60 percent. During the same period, the share of rural inhabitants decreased from half of the population to one-third.