Chapter 20 Communism and Nationalism

During the interwar period (1918–1939), the Ukrainians emerged as the largest nation in Europe with an unresolved national question. Ukraine lacked a state of its own, and four European states had divided its territories: Bolshevik Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

Each of the governments that found itself in control of Ukrainian territory tried to solve its Ukrainian question in a different way, using a number of strategies ranging from accommodation to suppression. The two competing ideologies and belief systems throughout the twentieth century in eastern Europe were communism and nationalism. In the Ukrainian case, as in many others, nationalism and communism not only opposed each other but also sought accommodation in the hybrid form of national communism. As a result of different ways of mobilizing Ukrainian political and cultural identity, a number of Ukrainian national projects emerged that attempted to replace the Ukrainian liberal and socialist projects of the prewar era. The two most influential new projects turned out to be the Soviet variant of national communism in Soviet Ukraine (the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, or Ukrainian SSR) and radical nationalism, based largely in Polish-ruled Galicia and Volhynia. The interaction between these two models of Ukrainian identity would define much of the country’s twentieth-century history.

In December 1922, the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (its name would change to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1937), a communist polity that included the central and eastern lands of Ukraine, entered into a formal agreement with the Russian Federation and the republics of Belarus and Transcaucasia to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The union was created with Ukraine very much in mind. Its immediate purpose was to keep the Ukrainians in, the Poles out, and the Russians down. Moscow considered the Ukrainians, whose leaders, most notably Symon Petliura, had shown themselves capable of unleashing mass peasant uprisings, the most restive and rebellious ethnic minority under its rule, while it saw Russian nationalist aspirations as a major threat to the unity of the multiethnic state. Poland was, of course, an adversary that, with Western support, might launch another offensive against the union and tear away part of Ukraine. Between the federalism of the union treaty and the centralism of the ruling Communist Party, Ukraine enjoyed de facto autonomy, arguably with broader prerogatives than those imagined by mainstream Ukrainian politicians of the decades leading up to World War I or even the leaders of the Central Rada in the first months of the 1917 revolution.

Ukraine would realize this new stage in its nation building within the political and legal framework established by the Soviet regime, which referred to itself as the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the early 1920s, as the regime tried to solidify its control of a country devastated by war, revolution, and civil strife, it allowed some elements of the market to reenter the highly centralized Soviet economy through the back door of the New Economic Policy.

One goal that Moscow tried to achieve through its indigenization policy was the creation of loyal local elites. The policy of the Romanovs, who had extended Russia’s territory by incorporating local elites into the imperial apparatus, was not applicable in the revolutionary era. The inclusion of local revolutionary elites took place in 1920 with the admission to the party of members of the Borot’ba group of former Socialist Revolutionaries, but that strategy undermined the ideological uniformity of the party and could go only so far. Meanwhile, Ukraine lacked an indigenous communist elite in numbers sufficient to ensure the stability of the Bolshevik regime. The population of Soviet Ukraine in the mid-1920s was less than 30 million, with Ukrainians constituting roughly 80 percent, Russians less than 10 percent, and Jews 5.5 percent. The ethnic composition of the party was very different. In 1922, out of almost 55,000 members of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Russians made up an absolute majority, with more than 53 percent, while Ukrainians accounted for barely 24 percent — the same percentage as representatives of all other nationalities, most of whom were ethnic Jews. Rural Ukrainians regarded the new administration as little more than an occupying force. The party regime in Moscow wanted to change that perception in order to establish its control over the Ukrainian peasantry.

The national communists — a group in the Ukrainian party leadership that saw revolution as a vehicle for both social and national liberation of the Russian-ruled minorities — argued that in order to overcome differences between the proletarian city and the petty bourgeois world of the village, the party had to adopt the language and culture of the majority of the Ukrainian population, which happened to be Ukrainian.

The most solid resistance came from the party itself, most of whose members were non-Ukrainian. According to one report, only 18 percent of party members in the civil service could claim a good knowledge of Ukrainian, as opposed to 44 percent of the service as a whole. The Ukrainian national communists, led by Oleksandr Shumsky, demanded a harder line on Ukrainization. Shumsky wanted to replace Stalin’s Ukrainian-born protégé Lazar Kaganovich, an ethnic Jew who found the Ukrainian language a struggle, with the ethnic Ukrainian Vlas Chubar, head of the Ukrainian government, as general secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Shumsky also demanded that Stalin promote linguistic Ukrainization of the workers. From the outset, the policy had been limited to ethnic Ukrainians, excluding the Russians of Ukraine, as well as other ethnic groups, which had their own indigenization programs. The party was highly reluctant to alienate the Russian or highly Russified working class with a language policy that it was likely to resist. Shumsky was contending against heavy odds.

Stalin refused to remove Kaganovich, claiming that the proposal was badly timed. He remained obdurate even though the loyalty of the Ukrainian party organization, the largest in the Soviet Union, was essential to him in his ongoing struggle for control of the party after Lenin’s death in January 1924.

Deciding to retake the initiative from the Ukrainian national communists, Stalin ordered his own man, Kaganovich, to lead the Ukrainization drive and address Shumsky’s concerns about the slow pace of Ukrainization. Kaganovich obliged, turning what had been Ukrainization “by decree” before 1926 into a much more effective and comprehensive policy. In 1927, he managed to deliver his report to the Ukrainian party congress in Ukrainian. He also took a hard line when it came to the use of Ukrainian in educational institutions and in propaganda and cultural work among the working class. After Kaganovich’s recall to Moscow in 1928, his successor, Stanislav Kosior, an ethnic Pole, continued his policies. According to official figures, Ukrainian-language instruction in institutions of higher learning increased from 33 percent in the 1926–1927 academic year to 58 percent in 1928 and 1929.

While Ukrainization was central to the indigenization policy in Ukraine, it did not involve only ethnic Ukrainians. Jewish, Polish, Greek, and Bulgarian ethnic regions were created in Ukraine with their own administrations. Publishing houses printed books in national languages, and schoolchildren were educated in the languages of their ethnic groups. But the effects of this policy remained limited mainly to the countryside. In the cities, ethnic minorities were being Russified even more quickly than Ukrainians. In 1926, 62 percent of ethnic Ukrainians in Kharkiv gave Ukrainian as their mother tongue, but only 41 percent of Jews did so. Some Jewish intellectuals, such as Grigorii Kerner (Hrytsko Kernerenko), a native of Nestor Makhno’s capital of Huliaipole, embraced Ukrainization and chose to write in Ukrainian, but most opted for Russian as a more direct route to modernity. Many left for Moscow and made prominent careers there. The writers Ilia Ilf (Fainzilberg) and Vasilii Grossman — natives of Ukraine’s two best-known Jewish centers, Odesa and Berdychiv — both took this route.

Stalin’s support for Ukrainization was tactical and temporary. He believed that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people, and at the end of the 1920s, the party decided that the survival of the regime depended on support from the largest ethnic group — the Russians. It would have to keep Ukrainian ambitions to create a fully independent culture in check.

In 1929, the Soviet secret police began a wave of arrests in preparation for one of the first show trials to take place in the Soviet Union. Staged in Kharkiv, the trial largely targeted the leadership of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, accused of belonging to a bogus organization called the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Prosecutors alleged that members were in touch with Ukrainian émigrés and the Polish government and planning an uprising ultimately aimed at creating an independent Ukrainian state. At the top of the list of supposed plotters were the chief academic secretary of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and former deputy head of the Central Rada, Serhii Yefremov, and the former prime minister of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, Volodymyr Chekhivsky. The latter was also a leading figure in the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which was independent of Moscow and identified by the prosecutors as a branch of the plotters’ organization. The accusations were false, but the judges sentenced 15 people to death, 192 to various terms of imprisonment, and 87 to internal exile. The trial directly attacked the intellectuals at the forefront of the Ukrainization drive. The party was changing its policy, signaling by means of the trial that it was no longer targeting Russian great-power chauvinism and instead had local nationalism in its sights. The Ukrainian national communists, including the influential minister of education, Mykola Skrypnyk, lobbied Moscow to organize a similar trial against Russian “great-power chauvinism” but failed.

Linguistic and cultural Ukrainization failed to change the culture of the industrial east and south of the republic. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the new capital of Ukraine, the city of Kharkiv. There, the percentage of those giving Ukrainian as their mother tongue only grew between 1926 and 1939 from 24 to 32 percent — an insignificant increase, given the efforts to Ukrainize the city — but even more troubling was the fact that the percentage of those giving Russian as their mother tongue remained the same, around 64 percent. That remained the case even as the city’s population doubled during the same period from 417,000 to 833,000, and the share of Ukrainians grew from 39 to 49 percent. The upswing of the Ukrainization policy stalled before it could claim the city for the Ukrainian cultural cause — a failure that had profound long-term consequences for the self-identification of the Ukrainian east. But that policy also left another mark on Ukrainian society. It created conditions in which more and more urban Ukrainians claimed Ukrainian rather than Russian as their nationality, despite their predominant use of the Russian language. As Russian-speaking Ukrainians kept growing in number, they forged an all-important cultural link between Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-speaking Russians. In fact, all three groups had a lingua franca, called surzhyk, a mixture of the two languages.

In the 1920s, Soviet leaders were bent on world revolution and conducted an active undercover campaign among Ukrainians in neighboring states, trying to destabilize and weaken the multiethnic countries of eastern Europe. France and the other Western powers, for their part, were trying to turn the same countries into a buffer zone to prevent the spread of Bolshevism in Europe. The leaders of Soviet Ukraine portrayed their republic as a new Ukrainian Piedmont — a state that would bring national and social liberation to Ukrainians temporarily under foreign bourgeois rule. The term itself harked back to the era of Italian unification, when the Piedmont had led other Italian regions toward the formation of a nation-state. The Poles and then Ukrainians applied the Piedmont metaphor to Galicia, which both regarded as the center of their respective national movements, and then the Ukrainian Bolsheviks picked it up. With the Ukrainization drive under way, presenting Soviet Ukraine as a beacon of Ukrainian nationhood was not difficult. Many of the Ukrainian-populated regions to the west found themselves under de facto occupation and experienced oppression of almost all forms of their communal and cultural life.

The most difficult political and cultural situation was that in Polish-ruled Galicia. Its population was about 5 million, with Ukrainians constituting close to 4.4 million. The Versailles and Riga peace treaties, as well as the Polish constitution, guaranteed the Ukrainian minority in Poland legal equality and the right to establish its own schools and use the Ukrainian language in the public sphere. But actual conditions were not in keeping with the international obligations undertaken by the young Polish state. Bitter memories of the Polish-Ukrainian war were still fresh, with the Polish authorities having interned close to 70,000 Ukrainians during and immediately after the war. Ukrainians boycotted the Polish institutions in the region: they opened and ran their own underground university and ignored the 1920 Polish census and the 1922 elections. But these tactics proved ineffective after March 1923, when the Conference of Ambassadors created by the Paris Peace Conference decided to recognize Polish rule over Galicia. That decision deprived Ukrainians in Galicia of their last hope that Western intervention could improve their situation and left them to cope with the new political circumstances as best they might.

The Conference of Ambassadors made its decision on the understanding that the Ukrainians would get some form of autonomy. This never materialized, as the new Polish state intended its nationality policy to bring about not only the political but also the cultural assimilation of the minorities. The authorities viewed minorities — which, apart from the Ukrainians, included Belarusians, Germans, and Jews — as the main internal challenge to the stability of the regime, which in 1926 turned from a republic into a form of dictatorship. The discriminatory policies against the Ukrainian majority in Galicia manifested in the so-called Lex Grabski of 1924, a law named after the Polish minister of education, who imposed restrictions on the use of the Ukrainian language in the educational system and began the practice of turning Ukrainian schools into bilingual Polish-Ukrainian ones.

Language became a key factor in the policy of cultural Polonization of minorities. In Eastern Galicia, where in 1910 Ukrainians had accounted for 65 percent and Poles for 21 percent of the population, by the early 1930s the percentage of Ukrainians, or, rather, those who claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, had dropped to 59 percent, while the Polish share had grown to 29 percent. These changes resulted partly from the educational policies of the regime, which promoted Polish-language schools and discriminated against Ukrainian ones. In 1930, there were fifty-eight state-run Polish gymnasiums (high schools) in the Ukrainian part of Galicia, as opposed to six Ukrainian gymnasiums. Although the Ukrainians established private gymnasiums, they were outnumbered there as well: in the same year, there were twenty-two private Polish gymnasiums versus fourteen Ukrainian ones. New teaching positions went almost exclusively to Poles. Out of almost 12,000 teachers in Galicia, fewer than 3,000 were ethnic Ukrainians, while the rest were Poles. Close to six hundred Ukrainian teachers who could not find employment at home were transferred to Polish-settled areas of the state.

The increase in the number of Poles in census statistics resulted not only from official support for the Polish language but also from government policies encouraging Polish migration to Eastern Galicia, now called Eastern Little Poland. Soon after gaining independence, the Polish leadership decided to break up large landholdings and distribute the pieces among peasant farmers. In Galicia and other parts of the state settled by Ukrainians, this meant that Polish landowners, who possessed most of the land, lost as a result of the reform, while Ukrainian peasants gained. In response, the government introduced policies that privileged Polish military veterans and farmers resettling in Galicia. The same policies applied to Volhynia, a former Russian imperial possession where Poles historically constituted a lesser portion of the population than in Austrian Galicia. In Volhynia, the government allocated 40 percent of all land that became available as a result of the reform to Polish colonists. During the interwar period, close to 300,000 ethnic Poles moved to the Ukrainian lands of the Polish state — Galicia, Volhynia, and Podlachia.

Further developments encouraged Ukrainians, who constituted the absolute majority in the villages, and Jews, who made up more than 70 percent of the population in the small towns of Galicia, to leave the region and the country. Economic stagnation and neglect of the eastern borderlands were largely responsible for increasing emigration. The extraction of oil in Galicia fell 70 percent from its peak on the eve of World War I, but no other industry, short of the small forestry and agricultural sectors, existed to replace it. By the end of the 1930s, the working class of Ukrainian Galicia did not exceed 45,000. The Ukrainian peasants tried to improve their situation by reviving the cooperative movement that had existed under Austrian rule. By far the most successful was the Dairy Union, which not only competed successfully at home but also exported its products to Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, and other European countries. Almost every Ukrainian farmer joined the Dairy Union. But the cooperatives could only do so much to improve the plight of the Ukrainian village. With urban jobs almost unavailable, the land-hungry peasants (about half of peasant farms did not exceed five acres) often had no choice but to leave the country.

During the interwar period, as many as 200,000 Ukrainian peasants emigrated from Poland. Many of them ended up in the United States and, after immigration there was closed in the mid-1920s, in Canada and Argentina. Approximately the same number of Jews left Poland, with most of them (up to 75,000) going to Palestine and the rest to Argentina and the United States. Both worsening economic conditions (most Jews in Galicia and the rest of Poland lived in poverty) and rising anti-Semitism, which resulted in the boycott of Jewish shops initiated by Polish nationalists and attacks on Jewish communities, drove Jewish emigration. In the latter half of the 1930s, after the death of Jozef Piłsudski, the head of state, who tried to curb anti-Semitism, dozens of Jews were killed and hundreds injured in riots and skirmishes throughout Poland. The Polish government tried to “solve” the “Jewish question” by asking the Western powers and their Jewish communities to help the impoverished Jews of Poland or to take Jewish refugees. Western governments were not responsive, to say the least.

The economic and cultural policies implemented by the Polish authorities in the Ukrainian lands in the 1920s ran directly counter to those pursued at the time by the Bolsheviks in Soviet Ukraine. Instead of promoting rapid industrial development, Polish authorities relied on agriculture; instead of integrating Ukrainians into the state apparatus, they encouraged emigration and promoted the influx not only of Polish administrators but also of Polish colonists into the region. But the Polish state had one feature that the Soviet Union never possessed — a political system built on the principles of electoral democracy. Even after Jozef Piłsudski’s coup of 1926, the Polish state maintained elements of political pluralism and religious toleration that allowed Ukrainians to establish their own political parties, churches, and cultural organizations.

After the defeat of Ukrainian statehood in Galicia in 1919, the Greek Catholic Church reclaimed its role there as the main national institution, while its head, Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, assumed the status of generally recognized national leader. If the former was not a new phenomenon — the church had performed that function at least since the Revolution of 1848 — Sheptytsky’s undertaking the role of national leader was quite a novelty. A descendant of a Ruthenian noble family that had given the church a metropolitan back in the eighteenth century, Sheptytsky was born Roman Catholic to a family that had been culturally Polonized for more than one generation. Many in Ukrainian society regarded his adherence to the Greek Catholic Church, followed by his ascension at the turn of the twentieth century to the highest position in its hierarchy, as a Polish attempt to take over the last Ukrainian “national” institution in the land. But Sheptytsky, who felt himself more a loyal subject of Austria-Hungary than a son of Poland, did his best to protect his church and its members from the Polonizing efforts of the new Polish state. With the spread of the Polish language and the authorities’ refusal to introduce nationality as a census category, religion, in this case Greek Catholicism, became one of the main markers of Ukrainian identity in interwar Galicia.

A party with deep prewar roots, the National Democratic Alliance, dominated Ukrainian politics in interwar Galicia; its leaders came from the ranks of the Ukrainian National Democratic Party of Austrian times. Galician politics entered a new era in 1929 when the Ukrainian Military Organization, a clandestine network led by Colonel Yevhen Konovalets, who had been active in the struggle for independence in eastern Ukraine in 1918 and 1919, turned into a political party called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The new organization inherited from its predecessor the goal of Ukrainian independence and irredentism, as well as the conspiratorial structure and terrorist tactics employed to achieve its goals. New was the ideology of radical nationalism, which the veterans of the wars for independence from 1918 to 1921 had simply lacked. The new ideology condemned the liberal nationalism of the leaders of the prewar Ukrainian movement, whom the OUN accused of limiting themselves to issues of language and fostering a culture of defeatism. It proclaimed the nation as its supreme value and aimed at the creation of a “new man.” Dmytro Dontsov, a native of eastern Ukraine and a former social democrat, formulated this ideology. Dontsov never joined the OUN but shaped the new generation of its leaders and activists through his writings.

Almost immediately, the OUN, at best a marginal force on the Ukrainian political scene, proved its ability to influence that scene far beyond its actual political weight. The OUN scored big in June 1934, when its members assassinated the Polish minister of the interior, Bronisław Pieracki, claiming that he had played a critical role in the Pacification — a series of repressive measures taken against Ukrainian activists in the fall of 1930. The killing of Pieracki followed the assassination of a Soviet diplomat in Lviv in the fall of 1933 in retaliation for the 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine. The same man organized both assassinations: a twenty-five-year-old student at the Lviv Polytechnical Institute, Stepan Bandera, who became head of the OUN network in Galicia in June 1933. The public learned more about Bandera and OUN ideology after his arrest and prosecution by the Polish police. Bandera’s trial for the assassination of Pieracki took place in Warsaw; a second trial followed in 1936 in Lviv for the killing in July 1934 (after Bandera’s arrest) of a respected Ukrainian director of a Lviv gymnasium whom the OUN had accused of cooperating with the Polish police.

In his closing statement at the Lviv trial, Bandera explained why he and his comrades not only took the lives of others but also risked their own: “The OUN values the lives of its members very highly, but as we understand our idea, it is so grand that when it comes to its realization, not only individual sacrifices but hundreds and thousands must be offered in order to realize it.” Bandera was talking about the goal of an independent Ukraine. For his role in the assassination of Pieracki, Bandera received the death sentence, later commuted to seven life terms. He would go free in September 1939, when the German and Soviet invasion of Poland created chaos in Polish jails, allowing many prisoners, Bandera among them, simply to walk through their gates.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had distinct Galician roots, but in the 1930s it made inroads into Ukrainian territories beyond Galicia, especially in the former Russian province of Volhynia. Ethnic relations there were quite different from those in Galicia. According to the 1931 census, 68 percent of Volhynians claimed Ukrainian as their mother tongue, while 17 percent gave Polish and 10 percent Yiddish. Before World War I, Volhynia was a hotbed of Russian nationalism, with local Ukrainian peasants lacking a distinct national identity and sending to the Russian Duma members of the Union of the Russian People and its sister organizations. After its incorporation into the Polish state, the province had become an object of intensive Polish colonization as well as a sphere of competition between two Ukrainian nation-building projects. Both were Ukrainian, but one, modeled on Galicia, was strongly anti-Polish, while the other was culturally and linguistically Ukrainian but politically loyal to the Polish regime.

The Polish government did its best to seal off Volhynia from the “harmful” influence of Galician nationalism. It introduced the so-called Sokal border, named after a town on the boundary between Galicia and Volhynia, to limit the territorial extent of the activities of Galician Ukrainian institutions. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was allowed no representation in Volhynia, Polisia, Podlachia, or the Kholm region, as Greek Catholics there were subordinate to the Polish Roman Catholic Church. In areas north of the Sokal border, the government prohibited the activities of the Prosvita (Enlightenment) Society and limited the distribution of literature from Galicia. It made special efforts to prevent the OUN from establishing its network in Volhynia.

One of the strongest supporters and enforcers of the Sokal border was Henryk Józewski, onetime Polish interior minister and governor of Volhynia from 1928 to 1938. An ethnic Pole born and educated in Kyiv, Józewski had served as deputy minister of interior in the Ukrainian government of Symon Petliura. He became a promoter of the Petliura-Piłsudski alliance in 1921 and, as head of Piłsudski’s chancellery and interior minister, championed the cause of Polish-Ukrainian accommodation. He considered such a prospect realistic if Volhynia were shielded from the destructive influences of Galicia. Józewski worked closely with “good Ukrainians,” representatives of the Petliura emigration in Poland — his former comrades in arms from Dnieper Ukraine — to foster a version of Ukrainian nationalism in Volhynia loyal to Poland. He supported an Orthodox Church independent of Moscow under the jurisdiction of the metropolitan of Warsaw and the patriarch of Constantinople. He also supported moderate Ukrainian politicians in parliamentary elections. Among them was Petliura’s nephew Stepan Skrypnyk, a member of the Polish parliament and future Orthodox bishop, who would win election as patriarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.

Nationalist and anti-Polish ideas came to Volhynia not only from Galicia with members of the OUN but also from Soviet Ukraine with adherents of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU). The latter were significantly more numerous than the former. In the mid-1930s, the CPWU had approximately 1,600 members and the OUN about 800. Both groups offered Ukrainian peasants an ideological product that combined social and national revolution. In the late 1930s, the authorities stepped up repression against communists and nationalists alike, again with many more arrests among the communists: the police detained close to 3,000 supporters of communist organizations and about 700 nationalists. Despite political persecution unleashed by the Stalin regime in the 1930s, on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, Volhynian youth continued to listen to Soviet radio and look up to Soviet Ukraine.

Józewski counteracted Soviet influence by attempting to close the Polish-Soviet border to Bolshevik incursions and clamp down on pro-Soviet peasant insurrections in Volhynia, but he also found inspiration in the Soviet Ukrainization policy and sought to turn Volhynia into a Ukrainian Piedmont. In a major departure from the educational policies adopted by the Polish government in Galicia, Józewski supported the establishment of Ukrainian schools in Volhynia. He also helped make Ukrainian an obligatory subject in bilingual Polish-Ukrainian schools. The Volhynian experiment came to an end in 1938 with Jozewski’s resignation as governor and a general hardening of the Polish attitude toward national minorities after Piłsudski’s death in 1935. Despite all his efforts, Jozewski failed to stop the spread of nationalist ideas in Volhynia. His toleration of the Ukrainian language and identity helped turn the province, strongly influenced by Russian imperialist currents before 1914, into a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism with powerful anti-Polish overtones.

Nationalists and communists managed to cross both internal barriers (like the Sokal border in Poland) and international ones, represented by the boundaries of interwar states. The case of Ukrainians in interwar Romania attests to the ability of both groups to do just that — ignore international boundaries. Under a million ethnic Ukrainians lived in interwar Romania, settled in northern Bukovyna, southern Bessarabia, and Maramureş. Like Poland in that period, Romania varied its policies toward different groups of Ukrainians.

The Romanian government welcomed former veterans of the Petliura army and gave formerly Russian-ruled territories of Ukraine, southern Bessarabia in particular, Ukrainian schools. Official policy was quite different vis-à-vis the formerly Austrian-ruled territories, with their much higher level of ethnic mobilization. In the former Austrian region of northern Bukovyna, the increasingly dictatorial Romanian regime imposed restrictions on Ukrainian cultural and political activities that exceeded those introduced by the Polish regime in Galicia. Besides introducing an agricultural reform that favored Romanian settlement in the region at the expense of Ukrainian peasants, the government undertook a major Romanization of Ukrainians, treating them as Romanians who had somehow forgotten their native language. Romanian became the sole language of administration and education in northern Bukovyna, and even the Orthodox liturgy (the region was predominantly Orthodox) was supposed to be served in Romanian instead of Church Slavonic.

The Romanian regime was anything but popular among the Ukrainians, who looked for alternative ideologies and political parties to represent their interests. If southern Bessarabia was more open to communist propaganda, northern Bukovyna became fertile ground for the spread of nationalist ideas. The largest Ukrainian political party in northern Bukovyna, the national democrats, did their best to develop cultural organizations and defend the interests of the Ukrainian population in parliament. They had some success in the late 1920s but were generally unable to change government policies. This opened the door to more radical groups, including members of the OUN, who formed their first cell in Bukovyna in 1934. The nationalists, most of whom were students, soon became active in Bessarabia and Maramureş and published the popular newspaper Svoboda (Liberty), which had 7,000 subscribers before the Romanian authorities banned it in 1937. Repressive measures against the nationalists that year forced them underground, where the organization survived the outbreak of World War II.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the communists turned out to be more effective than nationalists in crossing one more European border, that of Czechoslovakia. The breakup of the former Habsburg Monarchy caught approximately half a million Ukrainians in Transcarpathia, part of the Hungarian realm of Austria-Hungary, before they had managed to decide who they really were — Russians, Ukrainians, or a separate ethnic group called Ruthenians. They faced the same choices as the Galician Ruthenians in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the process here took much more time and effort. In 1919, the region voluntarily joined the newly created pan-Slavic state of Czechoslovakia, where it adopted the name Subcarpathian Rus’. The Czechoslovak government, while originally neutral with regard to the identity issue, eventually backed the development of a politically neutral Ruthenian identity. This was an improvement over Austro-Hungarian times, when Budapest had attempted to Magyarize the local population. Prague also supported economic development of the region, which was an agricultural backwater, accounting for only 2 percent of national manufacturing output. As in Poland and Romania, however, the Czechoslovak government gave most administrative positions not to Ukrainians but to ethnic Czechs and Slovaks and supported a program of resettlement to the region, reserving much of its land for colonists.

Czechoslovakia was the only eastern European country that not only declared but acted according to democratic values in the interwar period. In the case of Transcarpathia, that meant free and fair elections. Given the difficult economic situation in the region, the land hunger among the peasants, and the corresponding rise of social tensions, the major beneficiaries of the democratic freedoms granted by Prague were the communist and radical leftist parties: in 1924, the communists got 40 percent of the vote. The nation builders in Transcarpathia were hopelessly split. Proponents of the three strands of Ukrainian national identity — Russophile, Ukrainophile, and Ruthenian — competed with one another. The strongest were the Russophile and Ukrainophile factions. The pro-Ukrainian Prosvita (Enlightenment) Society had 96 reading rooms in the region versus 192 established by the Russophile Dukhnovich Society. The Orthodox Church was in the hands of the Russophiles, while the Ukrainophiles made inroads into the Greek Catholic Church, traditionally controlled by pro-Hungarian elements. Modern Ukrainian identity was a latecomer to Transcarpathia, but in the 1920s it became the most dynamic political force in the region, linking it with other Ukrainian territories in a diverse but cohesive project to build a modern Ukrainian nation.

Of all the regimes that controlled parts of Ukrainian territory during the interwar period, only the communist authorities in Moscow allowed the Ukrainian national project some form of statehood and offered support for the development of Ukrainian culture. The communist project of Ukrainian nation building had broad appeal both in Soviet Ukraine and in the neighboring eastern European countries with large Ukrainian communities. But national communism as a means of resolving the Ukrainian question encountered serious obstacles to its implementation. In eastern Europe, proponents of a communist Ukraine encountered a variety of hurdles: anticommunist as well as anti-Ukrainian policies implemented by national governments; opposition from mainstream Ukrainian parties seeking a modus vivendi with existing regimes; and rising competition from the radical Ukrainian nationalist ideology. But the main reason for the failure of national communism lay in the dramatic changes in Soviet policy that occurred in the 1930s. They turned Soviet Ukraine, once imagined as a communist Piedmont, into a communist Pompeii: the eruption of the Stalinist volcano reduced to ashes the high hopes that Ukrainian nation builders had once cherished with regard to the revolutionary regime in Moscow.