Geopolitical Pivot

In an age of long, total wars, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Poland, Romania, Germany, and the USSR struggled to control Ukraine’s land and, most importantly, its natural resources, especially its bountiful grain supply.

With the start of the First World War, the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance possessed both grain-producing and grain-consuming territories. In the Allied camp, the British and the French were grain importers; the United States - an economically self-sufficient country - supplied them during the war. Germany, the most populous grain-consuming state in Central and Western Europe, also desperately needed grain, but did not a possess a friendly source.

Although the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires included large grain-producing regions which fed enormous armies, geographic and po­litical circumstances transformed those regions from assets into liabilities. In the case of Austria-Hungary, Hungary remained the Dual Monarchy’s major agricultural zone. As antagonisms between Hungary and Austria intensified during the war, Hungarian officials obstructed efforts to feed the Austro-Hungarian armies and diverted their grain to nourish their own towns and cities. Britain’s naval blockade prevented Austria from ac­quiring more grain from overseas and Austrian cities began to starve long before those in Germany or Russia.

The Romanov Empire also experienced problems with its food supply, but not at first. Once the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia in November 1914 and closed the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, Russia could no longer import Allied supplies or export grain to Europe.

In the course of the war, the southern grain-producing zones of the em­pire, such as the Ukrainian provinces and Turkestan, could no longer ad­equately feed the northern grain-consuming industrial zones, such as Petrograd and Moscow. In response to the drop in their standard of living, peasants reduced sowing grain for the market. In light of the rapid increase in the population of the urban centres, the demand for food in the cities outstripped available supplies, and inflation skyrocketed. Starvation in the cities and hunger among front-line troops undermined the war effort, and helped ignite the revolutions of 1917, which heralded the German, Austro- Hungarian, and Ottoman victory over the Russian Empire. In and of it­self, the food crisis did not make the Russian Empire collapse. Instead, the food crisis highlighted the autocracy’s political failures, “with the war serving to radicalize and extend existing political fissures.”⁹ Tsarist Russia could not satisfy the economic and, most importantly, the political de­mands of modern war.¹⁰

The war and the severe economic downturn delegitimized the Romanov dynasty, replacing it with a Provisional Government. The new regime’s continuation of an unpopular war in the face of pressing social demands radicalized millions. Many of these angry and frustrated men and women then embraced what they earlier may have considered extremist solutions, such as nationalism or Bolshevism.

Within the context of total war, Germany’s, Russia’s, and Austria’s “food problems” became internationalized and Ukraine’s agricultural out­put, beet-sugar production, industry, and coal mines took centre stage in the conflict between Russia and the Central Powers. The brutal efforts to control this area and to acquire Ukraine’s harvests drove the aggrieved peasants to rebel against their subordinate status, resist outside interven­tion, and reconsider their identities and political loyalties. In the revolu­tionary period, the Ukrainian national movement promised them “home rule,” “national self-determination,” and more land.

In competing with the Ukrainian nationalists, the Communist Party es­tablished a new political organization, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, within the same boundaries as the Ukrainian National Republic and even created a separate, semi-autonomous communist party for the region. Although the Central Rada first delineated the borders of Ukraine and gained partial international recognition at the two Treaties of Brest- Litovsk, Soviet Ukraine consolidated these lines of demarcation, institu­tionalized them, and included the Donbass and other industrial centres within them. For the first time in its modern history, the region’s agricul­tural and industrial areas belonged to a single administrative unit, congru­ent with the territory where the majority of Ukrainians lived. Many Russians, Jews, Germans, and Poles also resided there.

The communists created Soviet Ukraine, but would not have done so had the Ukrainian movement and the Rada failed to mobilize the popula­tion in the turmoil generated after the tsarist regime fell. Bolshevik leaders did not intend their Soviet state-building project to nurture separatism. After their mission to ignite a world revolution failed, they sought to estab­lish “socialism in one country” within a multinational political entity. By recognizing the national diversity within the USSR, the new authorities believed that they could best propagate their revolutionary message at home and abroad.

In the course of its seventy-five years in power, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union conducted both “nation-building” as well as “nation­destroying” operations on its Russian and non-Russian populations.¹³ These all-encompassing experiments reflected the Communist Party’s pro­foundly transformative mission, to move the diverse peoples of the Soviet Union through all of the stages on the Marxist timeline of historical devel­opment to the final communist stage.¹⁴ In light of the Soviet Union’s eco­nomic backwardness, the party designed enormous and radical economic and social schemes necessary to accelerate the process.

The USSR sought to overcome the social inequality and the economic backwardness of its past in order to triumph over the Western capitalist powers and to create this brave new world. The new revolutionary state inaugurated ambitious modernization projects, provided health care to the masses (which resulted in lower birth and death rates), improved the role of women, abolished religious institutions and created a secular order, transformed its agricultural economy into an industrial one at an enormous human cost, and dramatically expanded its urban populations. Within a short period of time, the Soviet authorities turned a highly illiterate society into a highly literate and well-educated one. While 51 per cent of all Soviet men and women nine years old and older attained literacy by 1926, 81 per cent did so by 1939, if these statistics are accurate.¹⁵ By 1970, the majority of the Soviet population, including those in the Ukrainian SSR, lived in cit­ies and urban centres.¹⁶

Despite the Bolshevik commitment to the ideology of proletarian inter­nationalism, both Lenin and Stalin understood that national identities would not immediately disappear, not even under socialism. The Great War and the worldwide revolutions and civil wars that followed in its wake demonstrated that a rising tide of nationalism, not class war, had swept the world.

In responding to this challenge, Bolshevik leaders sought to construct a new type of state. As it emerged in the early 1920s, the USSR comprised a set of overlapping national-territorial and economic-administrative units, connected by the party, a network of union-wide institutions, and five- year economic plans.¹⁷ Although the new political entity appeared as an empire containing many nations, its political leadership defined it in anti­imperial terms. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which pos­sessed a permanent monopoly on power, served as the state’s administrative coordinator, ideological watchdog, and political enforcer.

In addition to setting up the national-territorial structure of the new state, the Bolsheviks promoted a limited national consciousness of its non­Russian populations and established for them many of the institutional foundations of the nation-state, such as precise territories, standardized languages, and national elites and cultures.¹⁸ As long as these “forms” of nationhood would not conflict with the goals of a unitary central state, this strategy (which Terry Martin dubbed “The Affirmative Action Empire”) sought to disarm nationalism.¹⁹ Communist Party leaders, in effect, want­ed to depoliticize national identities within the USSR, identities which the Great War, the revolutions of 1917, and Civil War mobilized and politi- cized.²⁰ Although the non-Russian republics would not possess any more autonomy than any administrative unit in the RSFSR, the Soviet state rec­ognized and even celebrated each republic’s non-Russian nationhood. As Richard Pipes first predicted in 1954, this structure would produce unfore­seen circumstances.²¹

The Bolsheviks wished to do more than to depoliticize national identi­ties. They sought to prepare the Soviet Union for the communist stage of history by promoting a policy which Francine Hirsch called “state- sponsored evolutionism.” This strategy possessed several short-term goals: to overcome the tsarist imperial legacy of the past, to “assist” the potential victims of Soviet economic modernization, and to differentiate the Soviet state from the “imperialistic empires” it ideologically opposed. To propel the entire population of nearly 150 million “through the Marxist timeline of historical development, to transform feudal era clans and tribes into nationalities, and nationalities into socialist-era nations - which, at some point in the future would merge together under communism” - comprised its long-term mission.²² Soviet leaders imagined that they would imple­ment this policy by means of persuasion. If logical arguments and negotia­tions would not work, violence and terror would follow.

This state-sponsored evolutionism possessed two interactive stages. In the first, the authorities would introduce a highly diverse multi-ethnic population to the categories of nations and nationalities. Simultaneously, in the second, they would assimilate those nationally categorized groups into the Soviet framework.²³

Due to the ideological challenge of Nazi racial theories and to the potential threat of Japanese and German encirclement, this dual-integration process accelerated in the 1930s.²⁴ In light of the centrifugal orientations in the non­Russian republics, the Soviet state then gave primacy to the Russians and in­termingled the ideology of proletarian internationalism with Russian state interests.²⁵ In response to Japan’s and Germany’s resurgence in the 1930s, the Soviet state persecuted “diaspora” nationalities, such as the Germans and the Poles, and hardened official attitudes towards the Ukrainian SSR and its po­litical elite.²⁶ Here, the Soviet authorities limited the national content of this homeland, which bordered the hostile West.

In constructing the USSR, the Communist Party imagined that it could control both the form and the content of national identities within the first socialist state. But by the 1930s, these national forms and contents also changed. Although the national-territorial divisions of the USSR re­mained, the Soviet state de-emphasized the role of the Ukrainian language and culture, and completely remoulded the Soviet Ukrainian political and cultural elites. The Holodomor, the purges, the Second World War, and the post-war population exchanges played an important role in pruning the Ukrainian body politic of those who emphasized dividing the world into “us” and “them” along national, not class, lines.²⁷ In assessing the state of Ukrainian national attitudes at the end of the 1930s, Sylvia Gilliam concluded that in Eastern Ukraine the regime promoted a “cultural pride devoid of aspirations of national independence.”²⁸ In light of the mass ar­rests and executions of the Ukrainian political and cultural elites, this re­sult is not surprising. The brutality of the Second World War reinforced

these trends. Until Mikhail Gorbachev’s selection as the party’s secretary general in 1985, the Soviet post-war political order sustained and even ex­panded this effort to create neutered national identities.

National identity, much like nationalism, is a “state of mind” which can be activated and deactivated internally depending on the situation, the po­litical environment, the contacts with others, and the opportunities and incentives available.²⁹ The form and content of national identity are closely intertwined. But national consciousness can emerge even without its forms (officially recognized territories, languages, elites, and cultures), although with great difficulty.³⁰

The Soviet Ukrainian Republic became a quasi-sovereign state within the Soviet Union and one of its founding member-states. Although the central authorities curbed this limited sovereignty by the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet Ukrainian state remained a “subversive institu­tion” (as Valerie Bunce phrased it) throughout its seven decades of exis­tence, due primarily to its organization as a multinational republic and as the homeland for all Ukrainians.³¹ Ukrainization and the radical industrial­ization program reconfigured the Russian-, Polish-, German-, and Yiddish­speaking towns and cities of Ukraine into Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking ones. These policies created an urban, Ukrainian, and educated elite, a far larger and more assertive ruling group than any in the past in this region. A small number of its most prominent members advocated their own version of national communism and home rule. By the late 1920s, Stalin vocifer­ously objected to their vision of the Ukrainian SSR within the USSR and to their defence of the peasantry.

Collectivization, the Holodomor, and the purges also reinforced Ukraine’s geopolitical importance as a republic bordering the contentious Polish frontier and as the Soviet Union’s primary granary. In order to transform the USSR into a garrison state to ward off potential German, Polish, and Japanese attack, the Soviet state had to import Western technology and arms and invest in heavy industry, but did not possess access to long-term foreign credits.

To compensate for this financial deficiency, the USSR had to expand its sale of grain on world markets. But as the overproduction of grain sank world grain prices during the 1920s and the Great Depression, the Soviet political leadership decided to squeeze more grain from the peasantry, launching a war against the kulaks, then against all who worked the fields. By herding the peasants into collective farms and setting procurement goals for future harvests, the party hoped to create larger harvests more efficiently and to extract more from the countryside. But the peasants, even in fertile Ukraine, could not meet these highly arbitrary targets set by bureaucrats in Moscow, Kharkiv, or Kiev. Forced collectivization, high grain procurements, and brutal Soviet punitive actions led to famine and the death of over four million men, women, and children.

Whereas the USSR justified its efforts to subjugate the countryside in the context of a worldwide class struggle, Nazi leaders openly boasted that Ukraine would serve as Germany’s primary food colony. Hitler asserted in 1939 that “I need Ukraine, so that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.”³² He and his subordinates hoped that Ukraine “would pro­duce enough food not only to feed the army, but to supplement the food supply within the Reich.”³³ To prevent German starvation, the Nazis planned to deprive the non-German populations of East Central Europe and the USSR of food. They targeted those “useless eaters” who lived in the cities. Nazi Germany’s food crisis accelerated the implementation of the Final Solution against the Jews and the deliberate starvation of the Soviet and Polish urban populations.³⁴

With Germany’s successful invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 1941, Nazi political and military leadership did not take into account Germany’s and Austria’s frustrating interventions in Ukraine in 1918.³⁵ Nazi ideolo­gy, which celebrated Germans as “the superior race,” foreclosed the op­tion of dealing with the local Ukrainian population on the basis of respect. The occupational regime did not dismantle the hated collective farms Stalin erected, but continued to extract grain from them for their own purposes. The military, officers as well as rank-and file-soldiers, internal­ized Nazi racial theories and humiliated and abused the local population, needlessly alienating them. The Ostarbeiter program estranged them even more. Not surprisingly, in light of such behaviour, the Germany army in Reichskommissariat Ukraine could not secure sufficient quantities of food to cover its own needs, much less feed Germany.³⁶

In the era of total war, Ukraine’s geographic location and its natural re­sources, especially foodstuffs, enhanced its role as a critical geopolitical pivot. Without Ukraine’s grain, no European state which did not possess the resources to feed its own armies over a long period could win control of East Central Europe or aspire to world power.