Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
gigatos | June 11, 2022
Summary
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as Ukrainian SSR (in Russian, Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респу́блика, Украи́нская ССР), commonly referred to as Soviet Ukraine, was one of the fifteen constituent republics of the former Soviet Union, from its formation in 1922 until its dissolution in 1991.
The Ukrainian SSR was a founding state of the United Nations, although it was legally represented by the Soviet Union in international relations. Following perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian SSR has been transformed into a modern State of Ukraine, whose current constitution was ratified on 28 June 1996.
Throughout its 72-year history, the borders of the republic changed on certain occasions. After the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, the current western region of Ukraine was separated from the Second Polish Republic and annexed by the Soviet Union. Likewise, in 1954, the Crimean oblast was ceded to the Ukrainian SSR by the Russian SFSR, in accordance with the ukaz of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of February 19, 1954. Between 1923 and 1934, the city of Kharkov was the capital of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1934, the seat of government was moved to the historical capital Kiev, which remains the capital of independent Ukraine.
Geographically, the Ukrainian SSR was located in Eastern Europe to the north of the Black Sea, being bordered by the Soviet republics of the Moldavian SSR, the Belarusian SSR and the Russian SFSR. The border of the Ukrainian SSR with Czechoslovakia formed the westernmost part of the Soviet Union. According to the Soviet census of 1989, the population of the republic consisted of 51 706 746 inhabitants. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 2001, the population of Ukraine decreased to 48,457,000.
After the February Revolution of 1917, which deposed Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the October Revolution, carried out by the Bolsheviks, and the beginning of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks established a short-lived Ukrainian Soviet Republic. During the civil war period (1917-1923), many factions were formed proclaiming themselves to be governments, each with supporters and detractors. The two most prominent governments were the government of the Ukrainian People”s Republic in Kiev and the government of the Ukrainian People”s Republic of the Soviets in Kharkov.
The first was internationally recognized as a signatory of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Central Ukrainian Rada and the Central Empires, while the second was only supported by Lenin”s government. Both were fought against by the forces of the White Movement in the region. This conflict, known as the Ukrainian-Soviet War, was part of the Russian Civil War and represented a struggle for national independence, which ended with the defeat of the Ukrainian People”s Republic, its territory being annexed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian: УРСРР). After the defeat of Soviet Russia in the Polish-Soviet War, the present-day western region of Ukraine became part of the Second Polish Republic. In 1922, the Ukrainian SSR became a founding member of the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian People”s Republic of Soviets was founded on December 24-25, 1917. In its publications, it names itself as the “Republic of the Soviets of Workers”, Soldiers” and Peasants” Deputies” or as the “Ukrainian People”s Republic of the Soviets”. However, this republic was recognized only by another unrecognized state, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Due to the signing by the Ukrainian Central Rada of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it was finally defeated in mid-1918 and finally dissolved. The last session of the government took place in the city of Taganrog. In July 1918, the former members of the government formed the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of Ukraine, whose constituent assembly was held in Moscow.
With the defeat of the Central Empires in World War I, Bolshevik Russia resumed its hostilities towards the Ukrainian People”s Republic, which was fighting for Ukrainian independence, organizing another Soviet government in Kursk, Russia. On March 10, 1919, in accordance with the Third Congress of Soviets in Ukraine (which took place between March 6 and 10, 1919), the name of the Ukrainian People”s Republic of Soviets was changed to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
After the ratification of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, the names of all Soviet republics were changed, exchanging the second word (“Soviet” or “radyanska” in Ukrainian) and the third (“socialist”). According to this situation, on December 5, 1936, the Eighth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets of the Soviet Union changed the name of the republic to “Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic” (Ukrainian SSR), which was ratified by the Fourteenth Congress of Soviets in the Ukrainian SSR on January 31, 1937.
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Foundation 1917-1922
After the February Revolution of 1917, various factions sought to create an independent Ukrainian state, alternately cooperating and fighting each other. Numerous socialist factions participated in the formation of the Ukrainian People”s Republic (UPR) such as the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, revolutionary socialists and others. The largest faction initially consisted of members of the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party (Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party), which headed the government together with federalists and Mensheviks. Most of the time the Bolsheviks boycotted any government initiative, instigating various armed demonstrations to establish Soviet power without any attempt at consensus.
Immediately after the October Revolution in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks instigated the Bolshevik Revolt in Kiev to support the revolution and secure Kiev. However, due to lack of adequate support from the Ukrainian population and the Central Rada, the Kiev group of Bolsheviks disbanded. Several of its members moved to Kharkov and received support from eastern Ukrainian cities and industrial centers. Later, this decision was considered a mistake by the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the People”s Secretariat of the Ukrainian People”s Republic of Soviets Yevgeny Bosh. The Secretariat issued an ultimatum to the Central Rada on December 17 to recognize Lenin”s Bolshevik government, of which the Rada was highly critical. The Bolsheviks convened a separate congress and established the Ukrainian People”s Republic of the Soviets on December 24, 1917, declaring that the Central Rada and its sympathizers needed to be eradicated. Several battles ensued against the Ukrainian People”s Republic in order to install a Soviet regime in the country and, with the direct support of the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian national forces were practically defeated. The Ukrainian government appealed to foreign powers to find direct support from the Central Empires because European governments refused to recognize it. After signing its own Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, Soviet Russia returned all the territories captured in Ukraine, and the Bolsheviks were expelled from Ukraine. The Ukrainian Soviet Republic was dissolved after the last session on November 20, 1918.
In the end, after the creation of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of Ukraine in Moscow, a new Ukrainian Bolshevik government was formed on December 21, 1919, initiating new hostilities against the pro-independence Ukrainians who had lost the military support of the defeated Central Empires. Finally, the Red Army ended up controlling most of the Ukrainian territory after the Soviet-Polish Peace of Riga. On December 30, 1922, by signing the Treaty of Creation of the USSR, the Ukrainian SSR, together with the Russian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Transcaucasian SSR, became one of the founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
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Interwar period 1922-1939
The revolution that brought the socialist party to power devastated Ukraine, leaving more than 1.5 million dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, in addition to which Soviet Ukraine had to face the famine of 1921. Seeing the exhausted society, the Soviet government remained very flexible during the 1920s. Thus, national culture and the Ukrainian language enjoyed a renaissance, as “Ukrainianization” became a local implementation of the Soviet policy of korenization (literally “indigenization”). The Bolsheviks also undertook to introduce multi-benefit health care, education, and social security, as well as the right to work and housing. Women”s rights were greatly increased through new laws intended to eliminate social inequalities. Most of these policies were abruptly abolished in the early 1930s, after Iosif Stalin gradually consolidated his power to become the leader of the Communist Party and the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union.
From the late 1920s, Ukraine became involved in Soviet industrialization, and in the following decade the republic”s industrial output quadrupled. However, industrialization came at a high cost to the peasants, who were demographically the backbone of the Ukrainian nation. To meet the state”s ever-increasing demand for food and to finance industrialization, Stalin instituted a collectivization program, whereby the state expropriated peasants” land and livestock and grouped them into collective farms, enforcing this policy through regular troops and secret police. Those who resisted were arrested and deported, diminishing the number of peasants. However, the Bolshevik state continued to demand the same production, so that with fewer peasants, the individual peasant”s share of production increased, as did his or her misery. Collectivization had a devastating effect on agricultural productivity. Members of collective farms could not receive grain until unattainable quotas had been met, and hunger in the Soviet Union became widespread. Between 1932 and 1933, several million died from a famine caused by this policy, known as the Holodomor. Scholars still debate whether or not this famine can be considered genocide, but for the Ukrainian parliament and for more than a dozen countries it was.
The times of industrialization and Holodomor also coincided with the Soviet assault on leaders of national politics and culture, often accused of “nationalist deviations”. Two waves of Stalinist political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union (this includes four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite and three-quarters of the senior officers of the entire Red Army.
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World War II 1939-1945
On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and annexed the territory of Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR. According to a Treaty between the USSR and the Third Czechoslovak Republic, signed on June 29, 1945, the region of Subcarpathian Ruthenia was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR, becoming the present-day Zakarpattia Oblast.
The war expanded the territory of the Ukrainian SSR by annexing territories in eastern Poland to western Ukraine during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. While the war brought Ukraine enormous physical destruction, it also brought territorial expansion. The reason for this territorial expansion can be explained by the prestige of the Soviet Union as one of the victors of the war. The Ukrainian border was extended to the Curzon line, i.e. it annexed the present western territory of Ukraine, formerly controlled by Poland. Ukraine was also extended to the south, near the Izmail area, formerly part of Romania (after the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina). The agreement signed by the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia allowed the transfer of Transcarpathia to Ukraine. The territory of Ukraine grew by 167,054 square kilometers and its population increase is estimated at 11 million.
After the Second World War some amendments were made to the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR, which allowed it to act as a separate country within international law in some cases and, to a certain extent, to remain part of the Soviet Union at the same time. In particular, the amendments allowed the Ukrainian SSR to become one of the founding members of the United Nations, together with the Soviet Union and the Belarusian SSR. This was part of an agreement with the United States to ensure a degree of balance in the General Assembly, which, according to the USSR, was unbalanced in favor of the Western Bloc. As a member of the UN, the Ukrainian SSR was an elected member of the UN Security Council in the periods 1948-1949 and 1984-1985.
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Khrushchev: 1953-1964
When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, a collective government took power headed by Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrenti Beria, who began a process of de-Stalinization. The change began when, in 1953, officials were allowed to criticize the Russification policy and, in particular, the Russification of Ukraine. Aleksei Kyrychenko on June 4, 1953, succeeded Leonid Melnikov as First Secretary of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of Ukraine, which was important as he was the first ethnic Ukrainian to come to office since the 1920s.
The “thaw”, the policy of deliberate liberalization, was characterized by four points: 1. amnesty for all those convicted of state crime during the war or the immediate post-war years, 2. amnesties for one third of those convicted of state crime during Stalin”s rule, 3. the establishment of the first Ukrainian mission to the United Nations in 1958 and 4. the steady increase of Ukrainians with rank in the Party and in the Ukrainian SSR Government. Most of the positions of power and three quarters of the state officials were ethnic Ukrainians.
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1964-1985
Khrushchev was deposed by the Central Committee and the full Politburo in October 1964 and was succeeded by another collective leadership, led by Leonid Brezhnev – born in Ukraine into a family of Russian workers – as First Secretary of the CPSU and Aleksei Kosyguin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The Brezhnev era will be marked by social and economic stagnation, a period known as the Brezhnevian stagnation. The new regime introduced the policy of Flowering, Reunion and Fusion. Policies aimed at uniting the various Soviet nationalities into one, by merging the best elements of each. This policy turned out to be a new form of the Russification policy. The unification of Soviet nationalities would be carried out, according to Vladimir Lenin, when the Soviet Union reached the final stage of communism, also the last stage of human development. Some Soviet officials throughout the Union called for the abolition of the “Soviet republics” and the establishment of a single nation. Instead of introducing the ideological concept of the Soviet nation, Brezhnev at the 24th Party Congress spoke of “a new historical community of the people – the Soviet people”, and introduced the ideological concept of developed socialism, which postponed communism. When Brezhnev died in 1982, he was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died soon after taking power. Andropov was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, who ruled for no more than 13 months. Chernenko was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.
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Gorbachev and independence 1985-1991
The Ukrainian SSR was divided into 25 oblasts (provinces) as shown in the following table (data from January 1, 1976, source: Great Soviet Encyclopedia).
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Autonomous oblasts
Sources
