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The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian: Українська Радянська Соціалістична Республіка, romanized: Ukrainska Radianska Sotsialistychna Respublika; Russian: Украинская Советская Социалистическая Республика, romanized: Ukrainskaya ...
The Ukrainian Soviet Republic (Russian: Украинская Советская Республика, romanized: Ukrainskaya Sovetskaya Respublika; Ukrainian: Українська Радянська Республіка, romanized: Ukrainska Radianska Respublika) was a Soviet republic created by the Ukrainian Bolsheviks after the ...
- Overview
- Ukraine in the interwar period
- The New Economic Policy and Ukrainization
- Industrialization and collectivization
In the aftermath of World War I and the revolutionary upheavals that followed, Ukrainian territories were divided among four states. Bukovina was annexed to Romania. Transcarpathia was joined to the new country of Czechoslovakia. Poland incorporated Galicia and western Volhynia, together with smaller adjacent areas in the northwest. The lands east ...
In the aftermath of World War I and the revolutionary upheavals that followed, Ukrainian territories were divided among four states. Bukovina was annexed to Romania. Transcarpathia was joined to the new country of Czechoslovakia. Poland incorporated Galicia and western Volhynia, together with smaller adjacent areas in the northwest. The lands east ...
Two main tasks faced the Bolsheviks in the 1920s—to rebuild the economy and to conciliate the non-Russian nationalities. The policy of War Communism—based on nationalization of all enterprises and the forcible requisition of food—wreaked economic havoc. Compounded by drought, it contributed to a famine in 1921–22 that claimed a million lives in Ukraine. In 1921 Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which partially restored private enterprise in industry and trade and replaced grain requisitions with a fixed tax and the right to dispose of the surplus on the free market. By 1927 the Ukrainian economy recovered to the prewar level, and segments of the population enjoyed a measure of prosperity.
In parallel with the NEP, the Bolsheviks took steps to appease, and at the same time to penetrate, the non-Russian nationalities. In 1923 a policy of “indigenization” was announced, including the promotion of native languages in education and publishing, at the workplace, and in government; the fostering of national cultures; and the recruitment of cadres from the indigenous populations. In Ukraine this program inaugurated a decade of rapid Ukrainization and cultural efflorescence. Within the CP(B)U itself, the proportion of Ukrainians in the rank-and-file membership exceeded 50 percent by the late 1920s. Enrollments in Ukrainian-language schools and the publication of Ukrainian books increased dramatically. Lively debates developed about the course of Ukrainian literature, in which the writer Mykola Khvylovy employed the slogan “Away from Moscow!” and urged a cultural orientation toward Europe. An important factor in the national revival, despite antireligious propaganda and harassment, was the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had gained a wide following among the Ukrainian intelligentsia and peasantry since its formation in 1921.
By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had launched a new “revolution from above.” The introduction of his first five-year plan in 1928 marked the end of the NEP and the onset of breakneck industrialization. In Ukraine this led to rapid economic and social transformation. By the outbreak of World War II, industrial output had increased fourfold, the number of workers had tripled, and the urban population had grown from 19 to 34 percent of the total. Though with a sectoral bias toward heavy industry and a regional concentration in the Donets Basin (Donbas) and central Dnieper area, Ukraine had undergone a remarkable industrial development.
The cost of the accelerated industrialization was borne by the peasantry. In 1928 the regime introduced special measures against the kulaks (arbitrarily defined “wealthy” peasants). These progressed from escalating taxes and grain-delivery quotas to dispossession of all property and finally to the deportation, by the mid-1930s, of some 100,000 families to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Wholesale collectivization began in 1929, under duress from party activists and under threat of economic sanctions. The percentage of farms collectivized rose from 9 to 65 percent from October 1929 to March 1930 and exceeded 90 percent by the end of 1935. Mass resistance to collectivization—in the form of revolts, slaughter of cattle, and destruction of machinery—was answered by the imposition of ever higher delivery quotas and confiscation of foodstuffs.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR or Soviet Ukraine was in the southwestern part of the Soviet Union. It had the second largest population of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. This lasted from 1922 to 1991.
On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.)—a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (S.F.S.R.)—was proclaimed. The first constitution for the new multinational federation was ratified in January 1924.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, abbreviated as the Ukrainian SSR, UkSSR, and also known as Soviet Ukraine or just Ukraine, was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1991.
Soviet Ukraine was one of the main theaters of World War II. The borders of Soviet Ukraine changed in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and the Soviet Union brutally occupied Eastern Poland, today’s Western Ukraine.
