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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.
- Overview
- Western Ukraine under Soviet and Nazi rule
- The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine
- Ukraine reunited under Soviet rule
- The last years of Stalin’s rule
- The period of Khrushchev
- Ukraine under Shelest
- Ukraine under Shcherbytsky
- Ukraine on the path to independence
The Nazi German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of World War II. By mid-September, in accordance with the secret protocols of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), western Volhynia and most of Galicia, both previously under Polish rule, were occupied by Soviet troops and soon officially incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. In June 1940 northern Bukovina was occupied and shortly annexed to Soviet Ukraine from Romania (which sided with Germany during the war). The replacement of Polish and Romanian by the Ukrainian language in state administration and education was offset by a suppression of all existing organizations, Sovietization of institutional life, and arrests of political leaders and community activists. By mid-1941 more than one million people had been deported to the east, including large numbers of Poles and Jews.
The ethnically mixed western borderlands, with more than 500,000 Ukrainians, were included in the administrative region of Poland established by the Nazis. A limited linguistic and cultural revival in the heavily Polonized area was permitted under German oversight, but political activities were banned, except for the OUN. The OUN itself was rent by factional strife between the followers of Andry Melnyk, who headed the organization from abroad after the assassination of Konovalets by a Soviet agent in 1938, and the younger supporters of Stepan Bandera with actual experience in the conspiratorial underground. The split became permanent after a congress held in Kraków in February 1940, when the Melnyk and Bandera factions developed into separate organizations (OUN-M and OUN-B, respectively) differing in ideology, strategy, and tactics.
The Nazi German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of World War II. By mid-September, in accordance with the secret protocols of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), western Volhynia and most of Galicia, both previously under Polish rule, were occupied by Soviet troops and soon officially incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. In June 1940 northern Bukovina was occupied and shortly annexed to Soviet Ukraine from Romania (which sided with Germany during the war). The replacement of Polish and Romanian by the Ukrainian language in state administration and education was offset by a suppression of all existing organizations, Sovietization of institutional life, and arrests of political leaders and community activists. By mid-1941 more than one million people had been deported to the east, including large numbers of Poles and Jews.
The ethnically mixed western borderlands, with more than 500,000 Ukrainians, were included in the administrative region of Poland established by the Nazis. A limited linguistic and cultural revival in the heavily Polonized area was permitted under German oversight, but political activities were banned, except for the OUN. The OUN itself was rent by factional strife between the followers of Andry Melnyk, who headed the organization from abroad after the assassination of Konovalets by a Soviet agent in 1938, and the younger supporters of Stepan Bandera with actual experience in the conspiratorial underground. The split became permanent after a congress held in Kraków in February 1940, when the Melnyk and Bandera factions developed into separate organizations (OUN-M and OUN-B, respectively) differing in ideology, strategy, and tactics.
The surprise German invasion of the U.S.S.R. began on June 22, 1941. The Soviets, during their hasty retreat, shot their political prisoners and, whenever possible, evacuated personnel, dismantled and removed industrial plants, and conducted a scorched-earth policy—blowing up buildings and installations, destroying crops and food reserves, and flooding mines. Almost four million people were evacuated east of the Urals for the duration of the war. The Germans moved swiftly, however, and by the end of November virtually all of Ukraine was under their control.
Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by some of the Ukrainian populace. In Galicia especially, there had long been a widespread belief that Germany, as the avowed enemy of Poland and the U.S.S.R., was the Ukrainians’ natural ally for the attainment of their independence. The illusion was quickly shattered. The Germans were accompanied on their entry into Lviv on June 30 by members of OUN-B, who that same day proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and the formation of a provisional state administration; within days the organizers of this action were arrested and interned in concentration camps (as were both Bandera and, later, Melnyk). Far from supporting Ukrainian political aspirations, the Nazis in August attached Galicia administratively to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control over the area between the Dniester and Southern Buh rivers as the province of Transnistria, with its capital at Odessa. The remainder was organized as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
In the occupied territories, the Nazis sought to implement their “racial” policies. In the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Babi Yar (Ukrainian: Babyn Yar) in Kyiv, nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city. The Nazis were aided at times by auxiliary forces recruited from the local population.
In the Reichskommissariat, ruthlessly administered by Erich Koch, Ukrainians were slated for servitude. The collective farms, whose dissolution was the fervent hope of the peasantry, were left intact, industry was allowed to deteriorate, and the cities were deprived of foodstuffs as all available resources were directed to support the German war effort. Some 2.2 million people were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labourers (Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”). Cultural activities were repressed, and education was limited to the elementary level. Only the revived Ukrainian Orthodox Church was permitted to resume its work as a national institution. Somewhat better was the situation of Ukrainians in Galicia, where restricted cultural, civic, and relief activities were permitted under centralized control.
After their victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive westward. In mid-1943 the Germans began their slow retreat from Ukraine, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake. In November the Soviets reentered Kyiv. With the approach of the front, guerrilla activity in western Ukraine intensified, and bloody clashes that claimed large numbers of civilian victims occurred between Ukrainians and Poles. In spring 1944 the Red Army began to penetrate into Galicia, and by the end of October all of Ukraine was again under Soviet control.
The Soviet victory, the Red Army’s occupation of eastern Europe, and Allied diplomacy resulted in a permanent redrawing of Ukraine’s western frontiers. With compensation of German territories in the west, Poland agreed to the cession of Volhynia and Galicia; a mutual population exchange—and the subsequent deportation of the remaining Ukrainian population by Poland to its new western territories—created for the first time in centuries a clear ethnic, as well as political, Polish-Ukrainian border. Northern Bukovina was reoccupied in 1944 and recognized as part of Ukraine in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. Transcarpathia, which had reverted from Hungary to Czechoslovakia in 1944, was ceded to Ukraine in 1945 by a Czech-Soviet government agreement. In 1945 Ukraine became a charter member of the United Nations and subsequently became a signatory of peace treaties with Germany’s wartime allies—Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
Postwar reconstruction, the reimposition of totalitarian controls and terror, and the Sovietization of western Ukraine were the hallmarks of the last years of Stalin’s rule. Economic reconstruction was undertaken immediately as Soviet authorities reestablished control over the recovered territories. The fourth five-year plan, as in the prewar years, stressed heavy industry to the detriment of consumer needs. By 1950, Ukraine’s industrial output exceeded the prewar level. In agriculture, recovery proceeded much more slowly, and prewar levels of production were not reached until the 1960s. A famine in 1946–47 resulting from postwar dislocations and drought claimed nearly one million casualties.
The prewar system of totalitarian control exercised through the Communist Party and the secret police was quickly reimposed. Khrushchev continued to head the CP(B)U as first secretary—except briefly from March to December 1947—until his promotion to secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow in December 1949; he was succeeded by Leonid Melnikov. Purges in party ranks were relatively mild. However, real and alleged Nazi collaborators, former German prisoners of war and repatriated enslaved workers, Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists,” and others suspected of disloyalty—essentially hundreds of thousands of people—were sent to concentration camps in the far north and Siberia. A hard-line ideological campaign to stamp out Western influences went hand in hand with a renewed Russification drive. Ukrainian writers, artists, and scholars, who in the wartime years had been permitted to develop patriotic themes and sentiments in a mobilization effort against the Germans, were now accused of Ukrainian nationalism and subjected to persecution and repression. An “anticosmopolitan” campaign destroyed the remaining vestiges of cultural institutions of a Jewish community decimated by the Holocaust.
Khrushchev’s ascendancy over his rivals in Moscow after Stalin’s death in 1953 was of particular significance for Ukraine. As first secretary of the CP(B)U, Khrushchev had gained intimate knowledge of Ukraine, staffed party and government posts with his own trusted appointees, and become familiar with Ukrainian cultural elites. In contrast to Stalin’s anti-Ukrainian paranoia, Khrushchev harboured few prejudices against Ukrainians who adhered to the party line and served the Soviet state with loyalty.
Shortly after the death of Stalin, Melnikov was removed as first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, or CPU—as the CP(B)U was renamed in 1952—for “deviations in nationality policy,” specifically, promotion of nonnative cadres and Russification of higher education in western Ukraine. His replacement was Oleksy Kyrychenko, only the second Ukrainian to fill the post. This and accompanying changes in personnel in the party and government boosted morale and confidence, especially as their sphere of competence was also steadily increased. Unionwide celebrations in 1954 of the 300th anniversary of the “reunification” of Ukraine with Russia were another sign of the Ukrainians’ rising (though clearly junior) status; on the occasion, the Crimean Peninsula, from which the indigenous Tatar population had been deported en masse at the end of World War II, was transferred from the Russian S.F.S.R. to Ukraine. Ukrainian party officials began to receive promotions to central party organs in Moscow close to the levers of power. In 1957 Kyrychenko was transferred to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; his place as first secretary of the CPU was taken by Mykola Pidhorny (Nikolay Podgorny), who moved to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee in 1963. There was a steady expansion of party membership, which by the end of 1958 exceeded one million, of whom 60.3 percent were Ukrainians and 28.2 percent Russians; more than 40 percent had joined the party after the war.
Khrushchev also introduced a limited decentralization in government administration and economic management. These measures enhanced the powers and stoked the ambitions of the Ukrainian party and government leaders and bureaucracy, and this in turn elicited warnings against “localism” from Moscow. Economic recovery in Ukraine continued, with impressive—though diminishing over time—rates of growth in industry. Some concessions were made in the provision of consumer goods. Agriculture lagged, however, despite reforms in the administration of collective farms to increase productivity.
By 1953 mass terror had abated, and repression came to be applied more discriminately. An amnesty in 1955–56 released the majority of concentration camp inmates, and several hundred thousand returned to Ukraine, though many political prisoners continued to serve their long sentences. During the cultural thaw and the de-Stalinization campaign that followed Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, Ukrainian cultural elites pressed more boldly for concessions. Writers who had suffered under Stalin received praise and honours. Qualified rehabilitation was extended to condemned figures from the 1920s and ’30s, and historians began to treat previously forbidden topics. Some proscribed literary works were republished, and a number of new periodicals made their appearance, including the first journal since the 1930s devoted to Ukrainian history.
In the latter half of Khrushchev’s reign, however, a distinct trend toward Russification reemerged. An educational reform adopted in 1959 initiated a long process of curtailment of Ukrainian-language instruction in schools. In 1961 the new party program emphasized the importance of the Russian language for the integration of the Soviet peoples and spoke of the diminishing significance of borders between Soviet republics. Party theoreticians evolved the theory of “fusion of nations” that would be accompanied by the disappearance of national languages as Soviet society progressed toward communism.
Small, clandestine dissident groups began to form in the late 1950s, primarily as discussion circles on Ukrainian political and cultural alternatives. Some dozen such groups were uncovered by the secret police and their members imprisoned between 1958 and 1964. With open opposition to the party line impossible, defense of the Ukrainian language and culture was usually expressed indirectly—through poetry extolling the mother tongue, complaints about the unavailability of Ukrainian-language textbooks, and calls for subscription to Ukrainian periodicals.
Until Leonid Brezhnev achieved preeminence by the mid-1970s, power in Moscow after Khrushchev’s ouster was shared by a collective leadership headed by a triumvirate consisting of Brezhnev, Aleksey Kosygin, and Pidhorny. Shelest, Pidhorny’s protégé, became a full member of the Politburo within a month of Khrushchev’s ouster. However, Brezhnev’s client, Shcherbytsky, shortly reemerged from relative obscurity; he reassumed the premiership in Kyiv in 1965 and became a candidate member of the Politburo in Moscow in 1966.
Although the new leadership in Moscow quickly reversed many of Khrushchev’s decentralizing measures, it initially showed greater sensitivity toward the non-Russians. The seeming retreat in Moscow’s nationalities policy, connected with the leadership’s preoccupation with the succession struggle, facilitated the three main trends that characterize the Shelest era in Ukraine: the growing cultural revival, greater assertiveness by Kyiv’s political elite, and the development of a large-scale dissident movement.
The cultural revival was built on the hard-won, though necessarily limited, achievements of the de-Stalinization thaw. It was spearheaded by a younger “generation of the ’60s” (shestydesyatnyky) who, without the formative firsthand experience of Stalin’s reign of terror, experimented with themes and forms that at times provoked the ire of the preceding generation. More proscribed figures from the past were rehabilitated as literary scholars, and historians explored previously forbidden topics. New journals and serials devoted to Ukrainian history made their appearance, and monumental encyclopaedic publications were launched. Such efforts came under severe attack from party ideologues and the conservative cultural establishment. Announced publications failed to appear, published works were withdrawn from circulation, and numerous works of art were destroyed. Plans prepared on the ministerial level in Kyiv for a partial de-Russification of higher education were never implemented.
Nevertheless, the cultural achievements were unparalleled since the Ukrainization period in the 1920s. They were made possible by the support of influential segments of the party leadership, most notably Shelest himself. In addition to supporting Ukrainian culture, Shelest defended the economic interests of Ukraine, pressing for a larger share in the U.S.S.R.’s allocation of investment and greater republican control in economic management. These efforts were aimed in part at strengthening the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Ukrainian population. During Shelest’s tenure, Communist Party membership in Ukraine grew at a rate double the all-union average to reach 2.5 million by 1971.
From its embryonic beginnings in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the dissident movement continued to develop under Shelest. In 1965 the first arrests and trials of 20 dissidents occurred; profiles of these dissenters were circulated clandestinely, and their compiler, the journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, was also arrested and imprisoned. The national dissent movement grew rapidly thereafter. It took the form of protest letters and petitions to the authorities, the formation of informal clubs and discussion circles, and public meetings and demonstrations. Increasingly the materials prepared by the dissidents were circulated through samvydav (“self-publication”—the Ukrainian equivalent of Russian samizdat), some of which made its way abroad and was published. An outstanding work in this regard was Ivan Dziuba’s “Internationalism or Russification?”; it was translated and published in several languages. Throughout the 1960s, however, reprisals for dissident activity were generally mild.
Beginning in 1970, there were signs that the relative permissiveness of the Shelest regime was drawing to a close. The head of the KGB in Ukraine was replaced. Harsh rhetoric about “anti-Soviet activities” and “bourgeois nationalism” increased; tribute was paid to “the great Russian people.” In 1971 Brezhnev’s protégé and Shelest’s rival, Shcherbytsky, was elevated to full member of the Politburo. Between January and April 1972, several hundred dissidents and cultural activists were arrested in a wave of repression that swept Ukraine. In May Shelest was removed as Ukraine’s party leader, succeeded by Shcherbytsky. Shelest continued for another year as a member of the Politburo and a deputy prime minister in Moscow, but in May 1973 he lost all his remaining party and government positions.
Shcherbytsky’s promotion marked an important step in the consolidation of power in Moscow by his patron, Brezhnev, and a turning point in Ukrainian postwar politics. Shcherbytsky survived in office 17 years until his resignation in the fall of 1989, a few weeks before his death—long after the death of Brezhnev in 1982 and well into the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Personnel changes in the party and government followed gradually after Shcherbytsky’s accession to office; many of them involved the removal of Shelest’s supporters and the promotion of cadres associated with the site of Shcherbytsky’s (and Brezhnev’s) earlier career, the Dnipropetrovsk regional Communist Party organization. The most significant occurred in October 1972: Valentyn Malanchuk, who had previously conducted ideological work in the nationally highly charged Lviv region, was appointed secretary for ideology. A purge in 1973–75 removed almost 5 percent of the CPU members from party rolls.
Arrests of national and human rights activists continued through 1972–73. The bulk of samvydav literature was now produced in labour camps, and much of it made its way abroad, where it was published. Following the signing of the international Helsinki Accords, with their human rights provisions, in 1975, the Helsinki Watch Group was founded in Ukraine, headed by the poet Mykola Rudenko; by the end of the 1970s, its members were almost all in concentration camps or in exile abroad. The expirations of political prisoners’ sentences were increasingly followed by rearrest and new sentences on charges of criminal activity. Incarceration in psychiatric institutions became a new method of political repression.
Political repression was accompanied by a broad assault on Ukrainian culture and intensification of Russification. Immediately after Shelest’s fall, the circulation of the most popular Ukrainian periodicals was substantially reduced, and most of the new journals and serials started under Shelest ceased publication; a general decline in Ukrainian-language publishing and education continued during Shcherbytsky’s tenure. For two years after his appointment as secretary for ideology, Malanchuk supervised a purge of Ukrainian scholarly and cultural institutions, with numerous expulsions from the Academy of Sciences, universities, editorial boards, and the official organizations of writers, artists, and cinematographers. The general trend was unaffected by Malanchuk’s unexpected removal in 1979, which may have been a concession to the disaffected cultural intelligentsia, whose cooperation was needed in the upcoming celebrations of the 325th anniversary of the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” that year and the 1,500th anniversary of the founding of Kyiv in 1982.
An upsurge of nationalism was the unexpected and unintended consequence of Gorbachev’s attempt to grapple with the Soviet Union’s mounting economic problems. Beginning in 1986, Gorbachev launched a campaign for an ill-defined economic perestroika (“restructuring”) and called for an honest confrontation with real problems, or glasnost (“openness”), which further entailed popular involvement in the process. In the non-Russian republics, these policies opened the opportunity to voice not merely economic but also predominantly national concerns.
In contrast to the rapid growth of mass movements in the Baltic and Transcaucasian republics, in Ukraine the national revival stimulated by glasnost developed only gradually. From mid-1986 the Ukrainian press and media, at first cautiously, began to broach long-forbidden topics. While this process expanded and intensified, the spontaneous formation locally of unofficial groups, primarily in Kyiv and Lviv, began in 1987. The year 1988 witnessed the rise of mass mobilization, with the first public demonstrations—in Lviv from June through August and in Kyiv in November—and the emergence of embryonic national organizations. Finally, the national revival in Ukraine entered the stage of overt politicization in 1989.
In the three years 1987–89, new leaders emerged. Especially prominent were many cultural activists from the shestydesyatnyky of the Shelest period, as well as former dissidents. The issues that galvanized Ukrainian society at this time included such traditional concerns as language, culture, and history, resurgent interests such as religion, and new concerns over the environment and the economy.
Russification and the parlous state of the Ukrainian language in schools, publishing, and state administration received the earliest attention. Fears about the long-term language trends were confirmed by data from the 1989 census: at the same time that Ukrainians had declined as a percentage of Ukraine’s population, their attachment to Ukrainian as their native language had fallen even more rapidly. Debates over the issue culminated in the passage of a language law in autumn 1989 that for the first time gave Ukrainian official status as the republic’s state language.
A campaign to fill in the “blank spots” in history aimed to restore public awareness of neglected or suppressed historical events and figures such as Hetman Ivan Mazepa, to rehabilitate historians such as Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, and to republish banned works of pre-Soviet historical scholarship. Particularly intense were efforts to introduce knowledge of the Stalin period, especially the Great Famine of 1932–33, which became labeled the “Ukrainian genocide.” Fresh revelations appeared in the press about mass graves of political prisoners executed in the Stalin era. To honour the victims of Stalinism and to promote investigations of the repressions and famine of the 1930s, the All-Ukrainian “Memorial” Society was founded in March 1989 based on already existing local groups.
A religious revival was also under way in 1988, greatly stimulated by celebrations of a millennium of Christianity in Kyivan (Kievan) Rus. Lavish government-supported Russian Orthodox solemnities in Moscow were countered with unofficial celebrations throughout Ukraine, including open observances by the proscribed Greek Catholics. As bishops and clergy emerged from the underground, demands grew for the relegalization of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Defections by the clergy and entire congregations from Russian Orthodoxy began in the fall of 1989, and, on the eve of Gorbachev’s visit to the Vatican in December, Soviet authorities announced that Greek Catholic communities would be allowed official registration. In a parallel development, the formation of an initiative group for the restoration of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church was proclaimed in February 1989 in Kyiv.
The political status of Ukraine remained unchanged until the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany in August 1939, in which the Red Army allied with Nazi Germany to invade Poland and incorporate Volhynia and Galicia into the Ukrainian SSR.
- Ukraine
- Bolshevik victory
During World War II, elements of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for Ukrainian independence against both Germany and the Soviet Union, while other elements collaborated with the Nazis, assisting them in carrying out the Holocaust in Ukraine and their oppression of Poles.
4 days ago · World War II and its aftermath. Western Ukraine under Soviet and Nazi rule; The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine; Ukraine reunited under Soviet rule; Soviet Ukraine in the postwar period. The last years of Stalin’s rule; The period of Khrushchev; Ukraine under Shelest; Ukraine under Shcherbytsky; Ukraine on the path to independence ...
Dec 21, 2023 · Following the Second World War, the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was expanded to include territories annexed from pre-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Crimea was later transferred to the Ukrainian SSR from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1954, after the death of Josef Stalin.
Here's the story of Ukraine and Russia's long and turbulent relationship over the past 1,000 years, from Medieval Rus to the First Tsars, the Imperial Era to the USSR and in the Post-Soviet Era.
