Conclusion

Ukrainization was an ambitious attempt to divorce culture from politics. If the non-Russians could employ their languages in the public sphere, educate their children in their native languages, and believe that the world’s first proletarian state respected their dignity, then they would satisfy their national-cultural aspirations and would not seek to establish independent states.

In 1921, Stalin - the Communist Party’s “expert” on nationalities - pre­dicted that cities in non-Russian republics would eventually reflect the national composition of their surrounding countrysides:

It is clear that the Ukrainian nationality exists and that the development of its culture is a communist obligation. One should not go against history. It is clear that if the Russians dominated the cities of the Ukraine until now, then in time these cities will inevitably be Ukrainianized. Forty years ago Riga was a German city, but inasmuch as cities grew at the expense of the countryside, Riga is now completely a Latvian city. Fifty years ago all Hungarian cities had a German character. Now they are all Magyarized. The same will happen in Belarus, where non-Belarusans predominate.⁸²

Less than a decade later, in the late 1920s, the large-scale migrations into the cities of the Ukraine changed not only their size but their national composition as well. As a result of the rapid pace of both industrialization and collectivization, a large mass of Ukrainian peasantry began to migrate to the cities, and, by 1931, Ukrainians constituted a majority of the urban population.

As the cities acquired more Ukrainian inhabitants, Ukrainization and the increased urbanization of Ukrainians signalled a potential cultural de­Russification of the cities and of the major industrial areas. While the Soviet authorities anticipated that more Ukrainians would migrate into the cities - although not at the speed with which they did so - they did not count on the unintended political consequences which rapid urban growth engendered. Now a different pool, Ukrainian, not Russian, supplied the institutions of political power - the trade unions, the party, and the bu­reaucracy, which drew their recruits primarily from the cities.

This rapid rural to urban migration produced a radical cultural and na­tional transformation of the cities. The subsequent social dislocation ac­celerated the development and the institutionalization of a new and assertive Ukrainian national consciousness, which appeared national in form, socialist in content, and urban in residence. Although difficult to measure, Ukrainization and industrialization produced an unintended po­litical consequence for the All-Union Communist Party - the Ukrainian national communists. This small, but influential group within the newly “Ukrainized” party had viewed the use of nationalist symbolism as a “tactical expedient to drum up support for a politically isolated leadership” in the past.⁸³ Now, completely enveloped in their republic’s environment, these Ukrainian political leaders started to emphasize Soviet Ukrainian pri­orities, not Soviet ones.

These Ukrainian national communists (such as Mykola Khvylovy, Alexander Shumsky, Mykhailo Volobuev, and even Mykola Skrypnyk) be­gan to take their role as defenders of the Ukrainian cultural and historical heritage very seriously.⁸⁴ They sought to take advantage of the urban growth and to press for greater control of the cultural, political, and economic or­gans within their own republic and within the context of proletarian inter­nationalism. Stalin, who feared any split in the party along national lines, now had to choose between order and legitimacy.⁸⁵ Not surprisingly, he embraced order.