Conclusion

The Holodomor of 1932-3 and the mass purges of the Ukrainian intelli­gentsia and the CP(b)U in the 1930s represented more than just a demo­graphic catastrophe for Ukrainians. It also symbolized the destruction of a Ukrainian peasant-centred cultural ecosystem and the integration of its survivors into a new, uncharted, Soviet world.

Having painfully learned lessons from the Civil War, the party did not want to help strengthen the nationalisms of the non-Russians any further. Its introduction of moderate nationality policies in the early 1920s sought to tolerate the non-Russian identities and cultures by divorcing them from any political aspirations. By the early 1930s the party leadership accepted the idea that it could legitimize an urban-based revolution in a multina­tional agricultural society by promoting non-Russian cultures, but it could not do so and economically transform that society at the same time. To engage in both projects would cause major social disorders and encourage forces which might challenge the state’s unity and the party’s political mo­nopoly. The party’s Holodomor, the abandonment of korenizatsiia, and the purges of the non-Russian cadres followed this conclusion.

The party highlighted a single Soviet identity, with Russian culture as its primary modern component. Stalin’s insistence on Russian culture as the only key to modernization promoted stratification and ultimately Russification. In the 1920s non-Russians could perceive themselves as modern; by the 1930s the Soviet mass media identified modernization solely with Russia and with those who spoke Russian. In the early 1920s, the Soviet political leadership, grasping that “national” did not necessarily equal “nationalist,” subsidized the blossoming of non-Russian national cultures. But in the harsh political climate of the 1930s, “national” increasingly corresponded with “national­ist.”¹⁵² The Soviet state then responded to all “national” and “nationalist” manifestations with unprecedented ruthlessness.

With collectivization and industrialization, Stalin did not completely nullify the 1918-23 arrangements between the Russian centre and the non­Russian periphery. Instead, he left a contradictory legacy for his succes­sors. Even though he purged the indigenous elites and intelligentsia in the non-Russian regions, the multinational structure of the USSR remained, although more so in name only (it now operated on more hyper- centralized, not federal, lines). Although the party leader dissolved or rearranged many Ukrainian institutions, he did not abandon the commitment to national homelands or the party’s national-territorial divisions (both became more symbolic than real). Instead, he replaced the more assertive elites (and their potential supporters) with his own compliant ones. Stalin, in effect, forged a unitary state divided against itself.¹⁵³

After 1933, the Soviet government and Communist Party limited the idea of a Ukrainian imagined community. By narrowing the social func­tions of “Ukrainian” in public life, blurring the differences between Ukrainians and Russians, and marginalizing Ukrainian culture, Soviet in­stitutions (even those that survived Stalin’s purges) reduced the options Ukrainians could use to define their own national identity and narrowed the already slender psychological distance between the Ukrainians and Russians.

The Ukrainian SSR started to recover demographically from the famines and the Holodomor after the end of the Great Terror in 1938, its popula­tion replenished to a large degree by the Soviet conquest and incorporation of majority Ukrainian-speaking territories in Poland and Romania in 1939 and 1940. But the German invasion of 1941 and the long, bloody German, Hungarian, and Romanian occupation skewed the demographic rela­tionship between Russians and Ukrainians within the USSR and within Ukraine even further, to the disadvantage of the Ukrainians.

This page intentionally left blank