Conclusion

Although Stalin fought all real or perceived manifestations of “Ukrainian nationalism,” he persuaded Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to accept the Ukrainian SSR and Belarusian SSR as founding members of the United Nations.

The Soviet Ukrainian Republic’s participation in this international orga­nization reprised the paradoxes generated by its establishment in 1918 and its entry into the USSR. The Soviet Union remained a unitary state with a federal facade. But this political entity, a symbol of the apparent insti­tutionalized equality among Soviet nations, took on a life of its own, especially with the post-war increase in the levels of urbanization and edu­cational standards throughout the USSR. These socio-economic develop­ments coincided with the worldwide decolonization process, as Europe’s African and Asian overseas colonies, most with populations smaller than Ukraine’s, started to gain their independence. China, long castrated by the Western powers, became a united and truly sovereign state under the aus­pices of the Chinese Communist Party. In the post-war period, Soviet Ukrainian diplomats at the UN, alongside their colleagues from the USSR and Soviet Belarus, vociferously defended (despite the obvious ironies in­volved) the right of national self-determination and decolonization.¹²⁶

Soviet Ukraine’s joining the USSR as a “sovereign” republic in 1922 and the United Nations in 1945 raised the question of the meaning and the implementation of the term.¹²⁷ In the context of the Soviet Union, what did Ukraine’s national sovereignty represent? To what extent did “socialist sovereignty” and the international concepts of sovereignty and national self-determination (especially in the era of mass decolonization) converge and diverge? After Stalin’s successors wound down his reign of terror, this question begged a thoroughgoing response.