the Bolsheviks Were Obsessed With Inventing Ukraine?
If history is the past of politics, modern Ukrainian history is only politics
The author is a professor at the Institute of Political Sciences, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania. He wrote this article especially for RI.
The German occupation forces were the first to recognize a short-lived independent Ukraine in January 1918, during the time of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917−1921.
Re-occupied by the Red Army, the eastern and southern parts of present-day Greater Ukraine joined the USSR in 1922 as a separate Soviet Socialist Republic (without Crimea). According to the 1926 Soviet census of Crimea, the majority of the population were Russians (382.645). The second largest ethnic group were the Tartars (179.094). So Lenin should be considered the real father of Ukrainian statehood and also and its contemporary status as a nation.
Ukraine was the most fertile agricultural Soviet republic, but was catastrophically affected by Stalin’s economic policy in the 1930s which neglected agricultural production in favor of industrialization. The result was a great famine (holodomor) with around seven million people dead, the majority of whom were ethnic Russians.
The territory of the present-day Ukraine was devastated during WWII by Nazi Germany occupation forces from 1941 to 1944. They installed the puppet, criminal regime of Stepan Bandera (1900−1959), under which a genocide on Poles, Jews and Russians was committed [on Stepan Bandera, see: Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Stuttgart, ibidem, 2014].
The 12.000 strong Ukrainian militia directly participated in the 1942 holocaust of some 200.000 Volhynian Jews, together with 140.000 German policemen. The Ukrainian mass killers learned their job from the Germans and also applied their knowledge on the Poles [Timothy Snyder, Tautų rekonstrukcija: Lieuva, Lenkija, Ukraina, Baltarusija 1569−1999, Vilnius: Mintis, 2009, 183].
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Stepan Bandera declares the independence of Ukraine (June 30th, 1941)
After the war, Stalin, supported by the Ukrainian party-cadre N. Khrushchev, deported about 300.000 Ukrainians accused of collaborating with the Nazi regime and participating in the genocide carried out by the Bandera government.
However, after the war, the Ukrainians were rewarded by Moscow with the lands of Transcarpathia, Moldova (Bessarabia), Polish Galicia and part of Romania’s Bukovina in 1945, followed by the annexation of Crimea in 1954 by the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. These territories, which have never been part of any kind of Ukraine and were overwhelmingly not populated by ethnolinguistic Ukrainians were included into the Soviet Ukraine primarily due to the political activity of the strongest Ukrainian cadre in the USSR – Nikita. Khrushchev, who inherited Stalin’s throne in 1953.
Here, a parallel with Croatia is a must: for the Croats, under A. Pavelić (a Croat version of S. Bandera) committed genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma during WWII on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia. The post-war Socialist Republic of Croatia was awarded Istria, the Adriatic islands and Dubrovnik – all of which had never have been part of the Croatian state before WWII, by the Croat-Slovenian dictator of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito.
M. Gorbachev’s dissolution of the USSR originated at the Reykjavik bilateral meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1988, and boosted Ukrainian ethnic nationalists, who proclaimed independence on August 24th, 1991, confirmed by a much-boycotted referendum on December 1st, 1991, in the wake of the anti-Gorbachev military putsch in Moscow, taking advantage of the paralyzed central government. The independence of Ukraine was proclaimed and later internationally recognized within the borders of a Greater Stalin-Khrushchev Ukraine with at least 20% of the ethic Russian population living in a compact area in the eastern part of the country and also making up a qualified (2/3) majority of Crimea’s population.
The coming years saw rifts with neighboring Russia, Kiev’s main political task being to Ukrainize (assimilate) ethnic Russians (similar to the policy of the Croatization of ethnic Serbs in Croatia orchestrated by the neo-Nazi Zagreb government of Dr. Franjo Tuđman).
At the same time, the Russian majority in Crimea constantly demanded the peninsula’s reunification with mother Russia, but obtaining only autonomous status within Ukraine – a country they never considered as their natural-historical homeland.
The Russians of Ukraine were becoming more and more dissatisfied with living conditions when in 1998−2001 the Ukrainian taxation system collapsed, making the central government in Kiev unable to pay salaries and pensions. Unable to function normally Ukraine become a “failed state”, without the power to prevent a series of politically motivated assassinations followed by popular protests inspired by the country’s economic decline. [On the history of Ukraine and the Ukrainians, see more and compare with: Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2009; Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, New York: Basic Books, 2015; Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, New York: Basic Books, 2015].
As a matter of fact, it must be stressed that Ukraine’s historiography is extremely nationalistic and in many cases lacking objectivity, like many other national historiographies. It is basically political, its main task to present Ukrainians as a natural ethnolinguistic nation who have historically fought to create a united independent national state, unjustifiably claiming certain territories to be ethnohistorically the “Ukrainian”.
As a typical example of the tendency to rewrite the history of Eastern Europe according to a nationalistic and politically correct framework, the book by Serhy Jekelčyk on the birth of a modern Ukrainian nation which, among other quasi-historical facts based on the re-interpreted events, affirms that the USSR in 1939−1940 annexed from Poland and Romania the “West Ukrainian land” [Serhy Jekelčyk, Ukraina: Modernios nacijos gimimas, Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2009, 17]. In reality, this “West Ukrainian land” was never part of any Ukraine before WWII, since Ukraine as a state or administrative province never existed before Lenin in 1922 created a Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine within the USSR, without the “West Ukrainian land”, since it was not a part of the USSR. Moreover, the Ukrainians were either leaving or were a minority on this land, which means that Ukraine did not even have ethnic rights over the biggest part of “West Ukraine”.
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