Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

• 1. Founding And Early Struggles

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  The Bolsheviks convened a separate congress and declared the first Soviet Republic of Ukraine on the 24th of December 1917. Warfare ensued against the Ukrainian People's Republic for the installation of the Soviet regime in the country, with direct support from Soviet Russia. The government of Ukraine appealed to foreign capitals, finding support in the face of the Central Powers as others refused to recognize it. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian SFSR yielded all captured Ukrainian territory as the Bolsheviks were forced out of Ukraine. The government of Soviet Ukraine was dissolved after its last session on the 20th of November 1918.

  A second Soviet Ukrainian government formed after re-taking Kharkov in February 1919. This government enforced Russian policies that did not adhere to local needs. A group of three thousand workers were dispatched from Russia to take grain from local farms to feed Russian cities and were met with resistance. The Ukrainian language was also censured from administrative and educational use. Eventually fighting both White forces in the east and Ukrainian forces in the west, Lenin ordered the liquidation of the second Soviet Ukrainian government in August 1919.

  A third Ukrainian Soviet government formed on the 21st of December 1919 initiated new hostilities against Ukrainian nationalists. They lost their military support from the defeated Central Powers. On the 30th of December 1922, along with the Russian, Byelorussian and Transcaucasian republics, the Ukrainian SSR became one of the founding members of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The first iterations of the Ukrainian SSR were established during the Russian Revolution, particularly after the Bolshevik Revolution.

• 2. Famine And Demographic Catastrophe

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  In 1932, the aggressive agricultural policies of Joseph Stalin's regime resulted in one of the largest national catastrophes in modern history for the Ukrainian nation. A famine known as the Holodomor caused a direct loss of human life estimated between 2.6 million to 10 million people. Some scholars and the World Congress of Free Ukrainians assert that this was an act of genocide. The International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932, 1933 Famine in Ukraine found no evidence that the famine was part of a preconceived plan to starve Ukrainians.

  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. Moscow exported over a million tonnes of grain to the West, decimating the population. The General Assembly of the UN has stopped shy of recognizing the Holodomor as genocide, calling it a great tragedy as a compromise between tense positions of United Kingdom, United States, Russia, and Ukraine on the matter.

  The famine was caused by a combination of factors including Soviet policies of compulsory grain requisitions, forced collectivization, dekulakization, and Russification. The policy of partial Ukrainisation also led to a cultural thaw within Ukraine after Stalin's death. In 1954, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic transferred Crimea to Ukraine during the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of Ukraine's reunification with Russia.

• 3. World War II Destruction

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  During World War II the Soviet Union lost about 8.6 million combatants and around 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. 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 Kiev's city centre was destroyed, as was 70 percent of the city centre of the second-largest city in Ukraine, Kharkov. 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.

  The material devastation was huge, yet victory also led to territorial expansion. As a victor, the Soviet Union gained new prestige and more land. The Ukrainian border was expanded to the Curzon Line. Ukraine was also expanded southwards near the area Izmail, previously part of Romania. An agreement was signed by the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia whereby Carpathian Ruthenia was handed over to Ukraine. The territory of Ukraine expanded and increased its population by an estimated 11 million.

• 4. Post-Stalin Thaw And Stagnation

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  When Stalin died on the 5th of 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. On the 4th of June 1953, Aleksey Kirichenko succeeded Leonid Melnikov as First Secretary of the CPU. This was significant since Kyrychenko was the first ethnic Ukrainian to lead the CPU since the 1920s.

  In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed by a joint Central Committee and Politburo plenum and succeeded by another collective leadership led by Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev's rule would be marked by social and economic stagnation, a period often referred to as the Era of Stagnation. The new regime introduced the policy of rastsvet, sblizhenie and sliianie 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.

  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.

• 5. Chernobyl And Political Collapse

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  Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost failed to reach Ukraine as early as other Soviet republics because of the influence of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, a conservative communist appointed by Brezhnev and the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the russification policies, and the apparent social and economic stagnation led several 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.

  Following the failed August Coup in Moscow on 19, the 21st of August 1991, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine declared independence on the 24th of August 1991 and renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as Ukraine. A referendum on independence was held on the 1st of December 1991. 92.3% of voters voted for independence nationwide. The referendum carried in the majority of all oblasts including Crimea where 54% voted for independence, and those in Eastern Ukraine where more than 80% voted for independence.

  In the 1991 Ukrainian presidential election held on the same day as the independence referendum, 62 percent of voters voted for Verkhovna Rada chairman Leonid Kravchuk. For most of the Soviet Union's existence, Ukraine had been second only to Russia in economic and political power, and its secession ended any realistic chance of the Soviet Union staying together even on a limited scale.

• 6. Economic Industrialization And Agriculture

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  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 policy in Ukraine attached importance to developing the economy. With the New Economic Policy and the partial introduction of free markets, an economic recovery followed. After the death of Lenin and the consolidation of his power, Stalin was determined to industrialisation and reversed policy again.

  Within a decade, Ukraine's industrial production had quintupled mainly from facilities in the Donets Basin and central Ukrainian cities such as Mykolaiv. In 1945 industrial output totalled only 26 percent of the 1940 level. The Fourth Five-Year Plan would prove to be a remarkable success and can be likened to the wonders of West German and Japanese reconstruction but without foreign capital. By 1955 Ukraine was producing 2.2 times more than in 1940 and the republic had become one of the leading producers of certain commodities in Europe.

  From 1965 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, industrial growth in Ukraine decreased and by the 1970s it started to stagnate. Significant economic decline did not become apparent before the 1970s. During the Fifth Five-Year Plan industrial development in Ukraine grew by 13.5 percent while during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan industry grew by a relatively modest 3.5 percent. An ongoing problem throughout the republic's existence was the planners' emphasis on heavy industry over consumer goods.