Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was, for most of its existence, the second-most powerful constituent republic in the Soviet Union. With a population of over 51 million counted in the 1989 census, it was second only to Russia. Its capital, Kiev, was a city whose centre was 85 percent destroyed by the time World War II ended. It signed away its sovereignty in stages across seven decades, was granted membership in the United Nations while simultaneously having no independent foreign policy, and then, on a single day in December 1991-92.3 percent of its people voted to become something entirely different.

  How did a state that began in the chaos of 1917 revolutions, fought off attempts by Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, and separatists, and absorbed enormous territorial gains through wartime deals and pacts, eventually dissolve not by force but by referendum? What happened inside those borders between the founding of the first Soviet Ukrainian government in December 1917 and the declaration of independence on the 24th of August 1991? And what does it mean that this republic was, in the words of its own constitution, a state that retained "the right to willfully secede from the USSR" while that right was, in practical terms, impossible to exercise until the very end?

• 2. Revolution and Founding

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  On the 24th of December 1917, Bolsheviks convened a congress in Kharkov and declared the first Soviet Republic of Ukraine, naming the Central Rada and its supporters as outlaws to be eradicated. They did this not from Kiev, the historic Ukrainian capital, but from the eastern industrial city of Kharkov, because a failed uprising in Kiev had forced most of the Bolshevik faction to relocate there, where the eastern Ukrainian cities and industrial centers gave them support.

  Two governments now claimed to rule Ukraine simultaneously. The Kiev-based Ukrainian People's Republic was internationally recognized and backed by the Central Powers after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Kharkov-based Ukrainian Soviet Republic was backed solely by Soviet Russian forces. Neither government had the support of the White Russian forces, though there were some attempts at cooperation late in the conflict.

  The provisional Soviet government created in Kursk on the 28th of November 1918 set its initial seat in the city of Sudzha. It moved as military fortunes shifted, and on the 10th of March 1919 the Third All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets ratified the Constitution of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in Kharkiv. Three thousand workers were dispatched from Russia to seize grain from Ukrainian farms to feed Russian cities, and were met with armed resistance. Lenin ordered the liquidation of the second Soviet Ukrainian government in August 1919. A third government was formed on the 21st of December 1919, initiating new hostilities against Ukrainian nationalists who had lost their military support from the defeated Central Powers.

  The Polish-Soviet Peace of Riga ended the war, leaving the pro-independence Ukrainian People's Republic's territory absorbed into a new Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, while western Ukraine was annexed into the Second Polish Republic. On the 30th of December 1922, along with the Russian, Byelorussian, and Transcaucasian republics, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the four founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

• 3. Hunger as a Weapon

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  By early 1921, only 4,060 of more than 10,000 industrial enterprises in Ukraine were still operating. War Communism had devastated the agrarian economy, and railways had come to a standstill. Even Red Army personnel stationed in Ukraine suffered from famine and lack of goods. When the party introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, Ukrainian Communist leadership was initially skeptical, seeing grain requisitions as essential to economic reconstruction. A severe drought hit Southern Ukraine that year, at the peak of the Soviet government's campaign of food seizures from peasants. The Bolsheviks refused to appeal for international help, focusing attention on the Volga region instead. A major famine engulfed Southern Ukraine and the Donbas, lasting until 1923.

  A decade later, the situation was far worse in scale and in intent. In 1929-1930 a new campaign of grain requisition began as part of collectivization. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were deported through dekulakization, gutting the agricultural workforce. By late 1932, over 70 percent of peasant households had been forced into collective farms. The Law of Spikelets, adopted on the 7th of August 1932, introduced execution by firing squad for taking collective farm property, including grain from uncultivated fields.

  A telegram sent by Stalin on the 1st of January 1933 to Ukrainian Communist leadership ordered that all peasants suspected of hiding grain have their entire property, including food, confiscated. Blacklisted settlements were blockaded; their inhabitants starved. Transportation of private grain was outlawed. Peasants from famine-affected areas attempting to leave Ukraine to buy food elsewhere were turned back by guards. The famine known as the Holodomor caused a direct loss of human life estimated between 2.6 million and 10 million. Any mention of it was banned by Soviet authorities until the 1980s.

  The International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine concluded in 1990 that the famine resulted from a combination of Soviet policies including compulsory grain requisitions, forced collectivization, dekulakization, and Russification. The General Assembly of the United Nations stopped short of calling it genocide, describing it as a "great tragedy," though France, Germany, and the United States, after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, went on to individually categorize it as genocide.

• 4. Terror, Police, and the Disappeared

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  In Soviet Ukraine during the 1920s, the Cheka secret police and its successor the OGPU functioned as what some observers described as a "state within a state." Directly subordinated to the Central Committee in Moscow, these organs were independent of local institutions of government. The head of the GPU's Ukrainian branch served simultaneously as Moscow's chief envoy in Ukraine. The GPU used methods including public terror through show trials, which were an annual occurrence in Ukraine during that period, and organized fictitious anti-Soviet organizations to eliminate political opponents. One of the most prominent of these invented organizations was named the "Union for the Freedom of Ukraine."

  Starting from the late 1920s, Stalin's dictatorial regime introduced a system of total terror against perceived enemies: National Communists, then technical specialists and engineers, then members of the intelligentsia. Among the first victims were the National Communists, followed by engineers targeted in the Shakhty Trial. Several prominent Ukrainian Communists were driven to suicide by government persecution, among them Mykola Khvylyovy, Mykola Skrypnyk, and Panas Liubchenko. Millions of Ukrainians ended up in concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands became victims of mass executions, including the Vinnytsia massacre.

  Mass terror continued until 1938, reaching its peak during the tenure of Nikolay Yezhov. Its main executors in Ukraine were security officers Martin Latsis and Vsevolod Balitsky, and party secretaries Pavel Postyshev and Nikita Khrushchev. The scale of the killings would not be acknowledged publicly until the glasnost era, when previously classified documents on the Holodomor and Stalinist repression were published for the first time. In July 1988, the issue of the Holodomor was first raised at the highest official level during Borys Oliynyk's speech at the 19th all-Union Party Conference.

• 5. War and Occupation

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  Immediately after the German-Soviet War began in June 1941, Ukraine became a theatre of catastrophic battles. German forces found themselves on distant approaches to Kyiv by the 10th of July 1941. In August, German forces encircled over 100,000 Red Army soldiers at Uman. Tank divisions closing another ring near Bakhmach, Lokhvytsia, and Lubny on the 15th of September captured 453,000 Soviet soldiers and officers according to Soviet data. Red Army troops left Kyiv on the 18th of September. By the 27th of July 1942, the last Soviet troops had retreated from Shchotove in Luhansk Oblast, completing the German occupation of the entire territory of Soviet Ukraine.

  During the retreat, starting from June 1941, over 550 industrial enterprises and over 3.5 million workers were evacuated from Ukraine. Structures that could not be evacuated were destroyed: the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station was demolished, along with numerous coal mines and many streets in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other cities. By the end of the war, more than 28,000 villages and 714 cities and towns had been destroyed. Nineteen million people were left homeless.

  Under German occupation, 1,554,000 Jews were murdered within the modern-day borders of Ukraine. In just two days in late September 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe C killed 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near Kyiv. Over 2 million Ukrainians were forcibly mobilized as Ostarbeiter and sent to Germany; about 450,000 of them died from lack of food, hard labor, poor medical care, and allied bombings.

  Following the Battle of Stalingrad, Soviet forces expelled German troops from the easternmost parts of Ukraine between December 1942 and February 1943. Kyiv was entered on the 6th of November 1943. Sevastopol fell to Soviet forces on the 9th of May 1944. By the 28th of October 1944, German troops had been expelled from Transcarpathia. Between 1944 and 1945, over 103,000 rebels were killed and over 110,000 captured as Soviet forces returned, according to official data.

• 6. Borders, Populations, and the UN Seat

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  In September 1939, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. About 200,000 square kilometers of territory with a population of 12 million people was incorporated into the USSR. Volyn, Drohobych, Lviv, Rivne, Stanislaviv, Ternopil, Chernivtsi, and Izmail oblasts were attached to the Ukrainian SSR. Combined with the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania in 1940, the republic's territory grew to 560,000 square kilometers with a population of 41,657,000.

  Between February 1940 and June 1941, 320,000 people were forcibly deported from Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. More than 14,000 Polish prisoners of war were extrajudicially executed at Katyn, Kharkiv, and Tver.

  After World War II, during the Tehran Conference in 1943, Winston Churchill negotiated a plan with Stalin to transfer lands populated by ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians from Poland to Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, with Poland receiving parts of German territory in exchange. Between 1944 and 1946, Poland and Soviet Ukraine conducted a population exchange in which 810,400 Poles were resettled from Ukraine into Poland, and 482,900 Ukrainians had to leave Poland for Ukraine. A further 150,000 Ukrainians were deported from Polish territory during Operation Vistula in 1947. On the 29th of June 1945, Czechoslovakia officially agreed to transfer Carpathian Ruthenia to the Ukrainian SSR.

  The Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the United Nations on the 24th of October 1945, alongside the Soviet Union and the Byelorussian SSR. This arrangement was part of a deal with the United States to create some degree of balance in the General Assembly. In effect, it provided the Soviet Union with additional votes in the General Assembly, while the Ukrainian SSR served as an elected member of the United Nations Security Council in 1948-1949 and again in 1984-1985. Ukraine joined UNESCO in 1954. The republic also retained Article 69 in its own constitution, which stated that it "retains the right to willfully secede from the USSR," though this right was functionally impossible to exercise until the final years of Soviet rule.

• 7. Dissent, Thaw, and the Long Opposition

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  When Stalin died on the 5th of March 1953, the collective leadership that followed allowed officials to criticise his russification policies for the first time. On the 4th of June 1953, Aleksey Kirichenko succeeded Leonid Melnikov as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, becoming the first ethnic Ukrainian to lead the CPU since the 1920s. In February 1954, Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to Ukraine during celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Agreement.

  Late in the 1950s, Ukraine's dissident movement began to take shape. In 1958 Levko Lukianenko established the underground "Ukrainian Workers' and Peasants' Union"; its members were arrested three years later and sentenced to long prison terms. In September 1965, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Petro Shelest ordered the KGB to arrest prominent dissidents. After learning about the arrests, Ivan Dziuba and Viacheslav Chornovil organized Ukraine's first public protest in decades, which took place during the screening of Sergei Parajanov's film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in Kyiv's Ukraina cinema. In 1968 Dziuba's pamphlet Internationalism or Russification? was published by Suchasnist publishing house in Munich.

  In January 1972 a new massive campaign against dissidents was launched. But following the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a new wave of dissident activity began. In November 1976 the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was established in Kyiv by Mykola Rudenko, Oles Berdnyk, Petro Hryhorenko, Ivan Kandyba, Levko Lukianenko, and several other activists. Soviet authorities immediately began arresting members. Several political prisoners, including Oleksa Tykhy, Yuriy Lytvyn, and Vasyl Stus, died in imprisonment. Chornovil, after three years in prison, began publishing The Ukrainian Herald in 1970, chronicling government repressions against Ukrainian activists. The Herald resumed publishing in 1987, after a 15-year pause, becoming the first legal independent political publication in Ukraine.

• 8. The End of the Republic

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  Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost arrived later in Ukraine than in other Soviet republics because of the conservative communist Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, appointed by Brezhnev and serving as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, combined with ongoing russification and economic stagnation, deepened opposition to Soviet rule. In 1990-95 percent of industry and agriculture was still owned by the Soviet state.

  Civil society grew rapidly. In February 1989 the Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society was established under Dmytro Pavlychko. On the 8th-the 10th of September 1989, the constituent congress of the People's Movement of Ukraine, known as Rukh, was organized in Kyiv, with Ivan Drach elected as its leader. By October 1990, Rukh's activist base had reached 633,000 people, with support from over 5 million. On the 21st of January 1990, hundreds of thousands of Rukh participants connected Kyiv with Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk in a human chain commemorating the 1919 Unification Act.

  On the 16th of July 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine adopted its Declaration of State Sovereignty. On the 24th of August 1991, following a proposal by Ihor Yukhnovskyi and other deputies, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, ending the republic's existence as a constituent part of the Soviet Union. On the 26th of August the Communist Party of Ukraine was suspended; four days later it was banned.

  On the 1st of December 1991-92.3 percent of voters approved independence in a nationwide referendum. The vote carried in every region, including Crimea where 54 percent voted for independence. On the 8th of December 1991, Leonid Kravchuk joined his Russian and Belarusian counterparts in signing the Belovezh Accords, formally declaring that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Soviet Union formally dissolved on the 26th of December 1991. Ukraine retained its UN seat, held since 1945, and has continued pursuing claims against the Russian Federation in foreign courts, seeking to recover its share of the foreign property once owned by the Soviet Union.