Crimea Handed Over to Ukraine 1954

Nikita Khrushchev inherited Stalin’s USSR. The Russian-led Soviet Socialist Republics had developed into a formidable force on the world stage. A Soviet atom bomb was developed and tested, and Russia became fully nuclear capable—the first H-bomb test was in October of the year Stalin died.

Stalin had ruled the politburo without opposition. The 13 “other-than-Russian” Soviet Republics, like Ukraine, had been battered and starved and exploited. Khrushchev realized he had to do something radical to avert rebellion. He set a massive “de-Stalinization” process in motion, trying to defuse the dangerous cult that had grown up around his megalomaniac predecessor. In the case of Ukraine, he decided that a magnanimous gesture was needed.

So, after centuries of abject suffering, something rather miraculous happened in Ukraine. Russia gave Crimea back in 1954. Russia had taken the Crimean Peninsula off the Turks in 1783, who had in turn taken it the Kyivan Rus’ centuries before. Ever since the Russian annexation, it had been administered by a dozen or so administrations. It was like a bolt rattling around inside an engine for the politburo. The politburo wanted to repopulate Crimea—Stalin’s post-war ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars had left it severely underpopulated and unproductive. In addition, giving a large piece of territory to Ukraine might have been intended as a plaster on wounds left by Stalin (although it remained treasonable to even mention the Holodomor).

Whatever the reason, everything was duly approved and signed off, and Ukraine took final, permanent possession of the Crimean Peninsula. It’s important to stress this, given events that unfolded in 2014.