Minority Peoples in Soviet Ukraine

With the establishment of Soviet (Bolshevik) rule in Dnieper Ukraine, Ukrainians ceased to be a minority people. This change was a product of Lenin’s attempt to resolve the nationality problem in the former Russian Empire by providing its numerous peoples with various kinds of territorial and administrative entities.

Nationality administration in the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union itself consisted initially of four and by 1929 of nine republics, whose very names were intended to reflect the state, or titular, nationality living within them. In addition to the national republics, there were other administra­tive subdivisions, also based in principle on criteria of nationality: autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts, autonomous regions, nationality districts, and nationality village soviets. The number, size, and boundaries of these administra­tive entities changed frequently during the interwar years.

Soviet Ukraine had only some of these nationality subdivisions within its terri­tory. In 1924, near its border with Romania, the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was established along a small strip of territory east of the Dniester River. More widespread were the nationality districts {natsional'ni raiony) and nationality village soviets (natsional'ni sil'rady). By the second half of the 1920s, Soviet Ukraine had 26 nationality districts and 1,097 nationality village soviets (see table 43.1).

The purpose of the nationality districts and village soviets was to enhance the status of minorities in places where they formed a majority of the population. It was to be achieved through guarantees for their separate cultural development, for primary education in their native language, and for their self-expression in local political institutions, including the right to use their own language in courts and administrative offices.

TABLE 43.1

Nationality subdivisions in Soviet Ukraine, circa 1930

TABLE 43.2

Nationality composition of Soviet Ukraine, 1926¹

Not surprisingly, the status of the various minority peoples during the interwar years was directly influenced by the policies adopted by the Soviet Ukrainian government and the CP(b)U toward the state’s titular nationality, the Ukrainians.

The Russians

Of all the national minorities in Soviet Ukraine, the Russians continued to main­tain a special status. Their number alone - nearly 2.7 million in 1926 - guaranteed that they would play an important role in Soviet Ukrainian society. This was particularly the case in those geographic areas where they were most densely concentrated, specifically the eastern industrial regions around Kharkiv and the Donbas, where they comprised 31.4 percent of the population. Russians had 9 nationality districts and as many as 450 village soviets in which schools, courts, and other administrative bodies operated only in Russian.

Regardless of numbers and administrative status, Russians never regarded themselves as a minority. They continued to perceive themselves as representa­tives of the dominant culture and language in what remained their ‘Little Rus­sian’ homeland. If the Russian language and culture was already dominant during tsarist days, under the Bolsheviks its status was raised to an even higher level as the medium in which the worldwide socialist revolution was unfolding. The revolu­tion was to be led by an industrial proletariat, and this forecast seemed to fit well with the social status of Russians in Soviet Ukraine, 37 percent of whom were urban dwellers. Aside from the Russian industrial work force, a high percentage of governmental bureaucrats and intellectual elite, especially in the universities, were Russians or russified Ukrainians and Jews who continued to function in terms of language and cultural preferences as if the Bolshevik Revolution had never taken place.

It is not surprising that, furnished with such attitudes, many Russians found the linguistic aspects of Ukrainianization bothersome at the very least.

The Jews

Numerically, the second-largest minority living in Soviet Ukraine during the inter­war period were the Jews. While Soviet theory on nationalities, as formulated by Lenin and Stalin, recognized the need to protect national minorities, on theoreti­cal grounds the Jews did not qualify for such treatment. This is because Jews lacked their own territory, one of the four essential characteristics (alongside lan­guage, economic life, and community of culture) which, according to Stalin, determined the existence of nationalities. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, for instance, Lenin had argued: ‘The Jews in Galicia and in Russia are no longer a nation; unfortunately, they remain a caste.’² Castes such as the Jews, argued Lenin, should become assimilated.

While in theory assimilation seemed the ideal solution, when the Bolsheviks took over the reigns of government, they were faced with the reality that several million Jews spoke a distinct language, Yiddish, lived a unique mode of life, pos­sessed their own culture, and even lived in compact masses on certain territories, especially along the western frontiers of the former Russian Empire. By 1926, Jews numbered nearly 1.6 million inhabitants, or 5.4 percent of the population of Soviet Ukraine. Although they were most densely settled on the Right Bank and the Black Sea littoral (especially around Odessa), they were also found in large numbers in all parts of the republic.

When, during the early years of Soviet rule, private enterprise, even on a small scale, was abolished, Jews experienced widespread unemployment and poverty. In 1924, in an attempt to alleviate the conditions created by Soviet policy, the all­union government established special organizations (Komzet and Ozet) whose purpose was to encourage Jews to move to rural areas. Between 1924 and 193° alone, 162 new Jewish agricultural colonies were established in the Ukrainian countryside, which together with previous ones brought the total to 210. There were also another 40 Jewish agricultural colonies in the Crimea. This movement to the land, which by 1931 accounted for 172,000 Ukrainian Jews engaged in agri­culture, was the result of both governmental policy and private initiative assisted by organizations in the West such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Com­mittee. Some Soviet enthusiasts even thought a Jewish national homeland could be created on the steppes of southern Ukraine.

The status of the Jews under Soviet rule varied greatly during the interwar years and was directly related to the government’s and party’s changing attitudes toward the nationality question. Initially, during the period of ‘war communism’ (1918­1921), the Bolsheviks were convinced they could create immediately an inter­nationalist or nationality-less society. Armed with such ideological self-confidence, they adopted a negative attitude toward traditional close-knit Jewish communities (shtetlakh) under rabbinic leadership. Hence, most community organizations were abolished, synagogues were closed, Hebrew-language religious education was banned, and the number of publications in Yiddish declined. Large numbers of Jews, in particular shop owners and small-scale entrepreneurs, also suffered eco­nomic hardship during these early years when free-market commerce was out­lawed and private businesses nationalized.

Jews were given full equality, however, alongside all other peoples under Soviet law. For those who continued or chose to adapt to the new social and political conditions, there were, indeed, certain advantages. Many joined the CP(b)U, which, like other republic Communist parties, set up a special Jewish section (ievsektsiia) to accommodate them. But although the proportion of Jews in the CP(b)U (13.6 percent in 1922) was higher than their proportion in Soviet Ukraine’s population (5.4 percent in 1926), the percentage of Jews who became Bolsheviks remained minuscule - less than one percent of the group as a whole. Despite such statistics, the popular image of Jews in Soviet Ukrainian society was that they dominated, if not predominated, within party and governmental ranks.

Some of the more traditionalist forms of Jewish life experienced a rebirth when the internationalist and war-communist phase of the revolution ended. For instance, with the introduction of NEP in 1921, Jewish business activity was revived. By 1926, 13 percent of all Jews were involved in some form of business, which included ownership of 78 percent of all private factories. Nevertheless, while NEP proved advantageous to some Jews, it did not alleviate the unemploy­ment problem among thousands of Ukraine’s Jews.

As a national (not religious) minority, however, Jews were entitled to self­government. By 1930, they had three nationality districts (Kalinindorf, Novyi Zlatopil', and Stalindorf) located in the steppe region that were founded in con­junction with the movement of Jews to the land. Subsequently, two more Jewish nationality districts were established in the neighboring Crimean ASSR (Freidorf, 1931; Larindorf, 1935). By the early 1930s, within as well as beyond the nationality districts Jews had 168 nationality village soviets and 46 Jewish divisions of Soviet courts throughout Soviet Ukraine. In the Kalinindorf district (the only one where Jews actually formed a majority of the population) as well as in the village soviets, Yiddish was the principal language of the local administration, schools, news­papers, and rural theaters.

Yiddish, in particular, was to experience a renaissance after 1923, when the policy of indigenization was implemented in Soviet Ukraine. Having rejected Hebrew because of its intimate association with the Jewish religion, the Bolshevik ideologues promoted the Yiddish language as the instrument through which a new Jewish proletarian culture could be created. To create new ‘Soviet’Jews, a Yiddish-language school system was established with 4 pedagogical institutes, an Institute of People’s Education in Odessa, and, by 1931, 831 schools at all levels, serving 94,000 students. This last figure represented approximately one-third of all Jewish students in Soviet Ukraine’s schools. At the more advanced level, Jewish scholarship was encouraged within the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which had the Hebraic Historico-Archeographic Commission and the Department (kate- dra), transformed in 1926 into the Institute, of Jewish Culture.

Other institutions were founded that not only preserved Jewish culture, but also made its achievements available to the larger public. Among these were the All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Culture in Odessa, the Central Jewish Library in Kiev, and eleven Jewish theaters, including permanent ones in Kiev and Odessa. Yiddish poetry and prose flourished, especially during the 1920s with the appear­ance of works by Leib Kvitko, Itzik Fefer, Pinkhes Kahanovich (Der Nister), and others. Several Jewish authors from Ukraine made their mark in Russian literary circles, the most outstanding of whom was the prose writer Isaak Babel, whose short stories about his native Odessa and popular novel The Red Calvary (1926) were both set in Ukraine. Jewish intellectuals also took an active part in the Ukrainian cultural renaissance, including the writers Leonid Pervomais'kyi, Abram Katsnel'son, and Natan Rybak; the literary historian larema Aizenshtok; the historian Osyp Hermaize; and the linguist Olena Kurylo. Finally, there was a vibrant Yiddish-language Jewish press with numerous journals and, by 1935, ten newspapers, the largest of which was Der Shtern (1925-41), the Kharkiv daily organ of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U.

Following the Stalinist revolution of 1928 and the transition to a more central­ized and integrated Soviet Union, Jewish cultural achievements like those of the Ukrainians began to be dismantled. Jews who owned small businesses and facto­ries were deprived of their livelihood with the end of NEP. At the same time, forced collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks put an abrupt halt to the movement into rural areas. Of the Jewish agriculturalists who survived collectiviza­tion and the famine, many returned to live in the cities. Although the nationality districts and village soviets continued to exist until 1941, the number of Jews resid­ing in them declined, in most cases below the 50 percent minimum of the popula­tion which in theory they were required to have.

In political and cultural life, Jewish activists were persecuted at the same time and in the same way as other intellectuals in Soviet Ukraine who were suspected of ‘nationalist deviation.’ In 1930, the Jewish section of the CP(b)U was dissolved, and most of its leaders were purged from the party. The following years witnessed the closing or curtailment of many Jewish institutions, with the result that by the late 1930s there were only five Yiddish newspapers, only four theaters, and a decreasing number of students in Yiddish schools. Thus, the favorable environ­ment for Jewish culture in Soviet Ukraine that prevailed in the 1920s - albeit in a secular, anti-religious, Yiddish form - had been largely undermined by the late 1930s.

The Poles

During the Soviet period, the Poles of Dnieper Ukraine not only decreased in number, but experienced as well a sharp decline in socioeconomic and cultural influence. The revolution, civil war, and Polish-Soviet war of 1920 prompted a large-scale exodus of Poles from their traditional stronghold, the Right Bank and the city of Kiev. Wealthy landowners and urban intellectuals in particular fled westward to the new Polish state. For instance, whereas in 1919 there were 685,000 Poles, by 1926 their number had declined to only 476,000, in Soviet Ukraine. As before, as many as 86 percent lived in the Right Bank.

The traditional Polish political, cultural, and social organizations as well as the newer ones created during the revolutionary years were abolished by the Soviet authorities, who were intent on creating a new proletarian framework for the Polish minority. The Poles were given their own sections (bureaus) in the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, as well as in party organizations at the regional and vil­lage levels where Poles predominated. By the late 1920s, there were 1 Polish nationality district (the Marchlewski district, centered at Dovbysh in eastern Volhynia), 151 Polish village soviets, and 6 Polish-language courts.

In the realm of culture, by 1926 the Poles had 337 schools (with 20,550 stu­dents), a Polish bureau in the National Commissariat of Education, the Central Polish Library in Kiev, and even the short-lived Institute of Polish Proletarian Cul­ture within the framework of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Several Polish books were published in that year, as well as seventeen newspapers, includ­ing one daily (Sierp, later Glos Radziecki).

By 1933, the Poles, like the Ukrainians and most other peoples in Soviet Ukraine, were feeling the negative effects of Stalin’s drive toward greater centrali­zation and conformity. Leading Polish Communists in the CP(b)U were purged, their nationality district and village soviets were abolished, and much cultural activity ceased - among other things, the number of Polish schools had dropped to 134 by 1936. There was even a show trial against purged CP(b)U party members accused of belonging to the so-called Polish Military Organization, which suppos­edly was plotting to overthrow Soviet rule in Ukraine in favor of the ‘reactionary’ Polish state. Numerous Polish peasants on the Right Bank also fell victim to the collectivization of agriculture in 1929, and the recalcitrant Polish kulaks, like their Ukrainian counterparts, were deported.

The Germans

As with the Poles, the number of Germans living in Dnieper Ukraine decreased as a result of World War I, the revolution, and civil war. Whereas in 1911 they numbered 489,000, by 1926 only 394,000 lived within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. The greatest decreases occurred in Volhynia. Consequently, more than half the group (206,000) now lived in the steppe region, with as many as 91.3 per­cent residing in rural farming areas. Yet even in the steppe region there was a decrease in their number, especially among the Mennonites, who during the 1920s organized associations to help more than 20,000 of their co-religionists to emigrate, mainly to Canada.

Because of their concentration in rural areas, the Germans had a higher number of nationality districts (7) and village soviets (254) than the numerically larger Jewish and Polish minorities. Although efforts were made to find local lead­ers, most of the nationality districts were headed by Germans from Germany or Austria-Hungary who had found themselves in the Russian Empire during World War I and had joined the Bolshevik ranks. The Germans were also permitted to create their own socialist cooperatives and cultural organizations. A German press, albeit Communist in spirit, continued to appear, and at least during the 1920s the churches - Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and Mennonite - were permit­ted to function and even experienced a certain revival. German-language educa­tion, the traditional preserve of the churches, was placed in governmental hands, however. Training for teachers was provided at the state-run German Pedagogical Institute in Odessa. Although in general the Germans remained distanced from the Ukrainian revival of the 1920s, one author, Oswald Burghardt, writing under the pseudonym lurii Klen, became an important Ukrainian poet, translator, and literary scholar.

After the revolution, a modus vivendi developed between the Soviet govern­ment and the Germans living in rural areas which allowed them an existence that was not substantially different from that of tsarist times. The situation was radi­cally altered, however, as a result of the socioeconomic changes that began with collectivization in 1929. Since the Germans were for the most part well-to-do agri­culturalists, especially in comparison with their Slav neighbors, a proportionately larger number of Germans were labeled kulaks. About ten percent of the Black Sea Germans were deported during dekulakization, and thousands more died during the famine of 1932-1933.

The second half of the 1930s witnessed the almost complete destruction of Ger­man religious life in Soviet Ukraine. Protestant and Roman Catholic ministers and bishops were arrested, and many of the Gothic-style churches on the steppe were made into warehouses or used for other non-religious purposes. At the same time, German intellectuals - teachers, clerics, writers - were arrested, and in the uncertain atmosphere many agriculturalists fled to the cities. Thus, even before the end of the interwar period, the distinct German life in Soviet Ukraine had been substantially undermined.

The Tatars

Among the larger national minorities living on Ukrainian territory during the interwar years, the Tatars held a unique position. All of them lived in the Crimean Peninsula, which at the time was not even part of Soviet Ukraine. In October 1921, when the post-revolutionary political situation in the Crimea was finally clar­ified (see chapter 38), the peninsula became the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) within the Russian SFSR. The Crimean ASSR was administered by the Republican Council (Soviet) of Workers, Peasants, and the Black Sea Fleet, which in turn elected an executive organ, the Crimean Central Executive Committee. The government was directed by the twelve-member Coun­cil of People’s Commissars chosen by the Central Executive Committee.

Despite the Crimea’s centuries-long association with the Tatars, by the 1920s they actually made up only one-quarter of the population (see table 43.3). Although a numerical minority, the Tatars at least for a while were the dominant political and cultural force in the Crimean ASSR. So much was this the case that the period 1923 to 1928 came to be known in Tatar emigre circles as the golden age of the Soviet Crimea.

TABLE 43.3

Nationality composition of the Crimean ASSR, 1926³

This development was in large part due to the activity of Veli Ibrahimov, a former member of the Crimean Tatar National party (Milli Farka) who by 1920 had become a committed Bolshevik and nationalist Communist. Moscow entrusted Ibrahimov with the political and social reconstruction of the Crimea, which during the period of war communism and an accompanying famine (1921­1922) had suffered a 21 percent loss in its population. As chairman of both the Crimean Communist party Central Committee and the government’s Council of People’s Commissars, Ibrahimov oversaw the introduction of NEP throughout the peninsula and, on the political and cultural front, the local version of indigeniza- tion, known as Tatarization.

Ibrahimov achieved his goals in several ways. As part of the policy of indigeniza- tion, he brought Tatars into all levels of the Crimea’s government. Most of the new officials were, like Ibrahimov himself, former members of Milli Farka, the non-Communist Tatar nationalist party outlawed in 1921. In the economic sphere, he facilitated the return of land to its former owners, whether large land­owners or peasant villages, and of industrial enterprises to whatever former man­agement was still around. Finally, in the cultural sphere, he promoted the policy of Tatarization.

Tatarization took different forms. Elementary schools were established in which the Crimean Tatar language (still using the Arabic alphabet) was the lan­guage of instruction. In 1924, Taurida University was opened in Symferopol' (now allowed to be called by its former Tatar name, Akme? et), where the following year the Oriental Institute was established to study Crimean Tatar language and litera­ture. Four Crimean Tatar teachers’ colleges were also set up. In general, Tatariza­tion was directed at cultural preservation, especially the salvaging of Tatar cultural and religious monuments which had been ravaged under tsarist rule. As part of this effort, the newly founded Crimean State Publishing House issued literary works and scholarly studies in the Crimean Tatar language, and it promoted the publication of folktales collected systematically by a team of trained scholars. The Crimean government even attempted to stop the continued influx of Russian, Ukrainian, and other settlers from the north, whose presence decreased the Tatar character of the peninsula. Tatars who had fled during the civil war and period of war communism (mostly to Turkey) were granted total amnesty and encouraged to return home.

The Tatarization of the Soviet Crimea changed with the coming of the Stalinist revolution in 1928. In January of that year, Ibrahimov was arrested, ostensibly for disagreeing with Moscow’s decision to settle a few thousand Jews from Belarus in the Crimea. Four months later, he was executed on charges of bourgeois national­ism, and his policies were totally discredited. The regimentation of Stalinism thus started even earlier in the Crimean ASSR than in neighboring Soviet Ukraine. The results, however, were the same. In 1928-1929, dekulakization brought the removal of between 35,000 and 40,000 peasants. The forced collectivization and grain requisitioning which followed led to scattered armed resistance and refusals to sow crops. The drastic reduction in agricultural production combined with gov­ernmental confiscations of grain resulted in a prolonged famine between 1931 and 1933 and the loss of close to 100,000 lives - Russians, Ukrainians, and other inhab­itants of the Crimea as well as the Tatars. As in Soviet Ukraine, the authorities refused to acknowledge the famine or provide the starving with any relief.

Ibrahimov’s downfall was also followed by a purge from government, schools, and other institutions of all Tatars suspected of being ‘tinged with Veli Ibrahi- movism.’ Tatar intellectuals were arrested, certain Tatar literary journals were banned, and, in an effort to bring Tatar culture more in line with ‘modern social­istic’ currents, the traditional Arabic alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet in the remaining Tatar-language publications. The number of Tatar newspapers and journals dropped precipitously, from a high of 23 in 1935 to only 9 in 1938. A year later, Tatar publications could appear only in the Cyrillic alphabet. The new linguistic trends even saw Russian words and grammatical rules introduced into the Crimean Tatar language. The result of such radical linguistic change over such a short period of time was pedagogical confusion and the eventual isolation of a new generation of Tatars from the wealth of the pre-revolutionary and early post-revolutionary Tatar literature in the traditional Arabic script. In short, by the end of the 1930s all the achievements of the era of Tatarization led by Veli Ibrahi- mov before 1928 had been effectively dismantled.

The Greeks

Nearly 60 percent of the 108,000 Greeks recorded in 1926 lived in the far south­east corner of Soviet Ukraine, mostly in twenty-nine large rural villages between Mariiupol' and Stalino. Another 16,000 lived in the Crimean ASSR, particularly in the Black Sea coastal cities. In contrast with the last half century of tsarist rule, when the Greeks lost their national institutions and became rapidly russified, the interwar period witnessed attempts to encourage a revival of their national life that came to be known as Hellenization.

During the 1920s, Greek was taught in several elementary schools, whose teach­ers were trained in a pedagogical tekhnikum established in Mariiupol'. This city was also home to a Greek-language agricultural school, a Greek newspaper, and a publishing house called Kolehtivistis (The Collective). There was as well a small group of Greek writers in Ukraine, led by Georgii Kostoprav, who in 1931, after having written in Russian, returned to the language of his forefathers. In the area of administration, the Greeks had 30 village soviets and, by the late 1920s, 3 nationality districts.

Despite the concerted efforts at a Greek cultural revival in Ukraine, the results, at least in terms of language retention, were minimal. Three-quarters of all Greek children continued to attend Russian-language schools, and even graduates of the Greek pedagogical tekhnikum reportedly did not have a mastery of their ‘own’ language. Yet even the minimal progress under Hellenization came to an end during the Stalinist political repression of the 1930s. The short-lived nationality districts were abolished, all Greek schools were closed, and leading members of the newly emerging Greek intelligentsia, including Kostoprav, were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms for ‘nationalist subversion’ of Soviet society. The Greek agricultural colonies in the Mariiupol' region were, like many other agri­cultural areas of Soviet Ukraine, hard hit by dekulakization, forced collectiviza­tion, and famine.

Thus, with the partial exception of the Russians, all the national minorities in Soviet Ukraine as well as the Tatars of the Crimean ASSR experienced a similar fate during the interwar period. Until 1928, the Soviet regime permitted a rather high degree of unhindered cultural and small-scale economic development that encouraged the evolution of each nationality, whether Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, German, Crimean Tatar, or Greek. But when the Stalinist revolution began after 1928, with its emphasis on central planning, the collectivization of agriculture, and the general administrative regimentation of all aspects of Soviet life, the national minorities were required to fulfill the demands of the Communist party’s directives from Moscow or suffer the consequences. More or less equally for all, the consequences were usually the destruction of the groups’ secular and reli­gious leadership and the deportation of large numbers of their rural agricultural­ists. Of the various national cultures in Soviet Ukraine, all were weakened, and some, like the German and Crimean Tatar, proved unable to survive the radical changes.