Non-Ukrainian Minorities
Ukraine’s largest minorities, such as the Jews, Poles, Germans, Romanians, Greeks, and others also suffered as a result of the radical shift in Soviet nationalities policy in the early 1930s.
Preoccupied with the possibility of war with Germany, Poland, and Japan, Moscow’s leaders were suspicious of the political loyalties of diasporic peoples, such as the Germans, Poles, Koreans, and Iranians - those who lived within the Soviet state’s borders but who retained the culture, if not the language, of their homelands outside the USSR’s borders.94 Soviet authorities ended their indigenization programs and arrested the leading intellectuals and party officials belonging to these groups. They disbanded the Jewish section of the All-Union Communist Party in 1930, arrested the leaders of the Jewish Autonomous Republic in Birobidzhan, reduced the number of Jewish cultural organizations and secondary and vocational schools, and shut down a large number of Yiddish and Hebrew publications. Soviet leaders also targeted German peasants in southern Ukraine and Polish peasants on the Soviet-Polish border areas during collectivization and the famine and even after.95In the 1920s the Soviet authorities sought to delineate the national identities of the population of the Right Bank. Bureaucrats implementing ko- renizatsiia programs in this region - a multi-ethnic borderland where Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, and Germans lived together for centuries - found it difficult to introduce national categories. If masses of peasants spoke Ukrainian, but practised Roman Catholicism, should they be counted as Ukrainians or Poles? In 1925, the Ukrainian NKVD decided that these peasants with hybrid identities belonged to the Polish nation. This decision led to an increase in the number of Poles in Ukraine from 90,300 in 1923 to 369,612 in 1926.96
With korenizatsiias reconfiguration by the beginning of the 1930s, the same security forces which expanded the membership of these groups now sought to destroy them. The political leadership prompted the arrest of 10,800 Soviet citizens of Polish or German nationality in 1934 in Soviet Ukraine and the resettlement of approximately 41,650 Poles, Germans, and kulaks from the western to the eastern areas of Ukraine in early 1935.97
Outside of Ukrainians, the NKVD specifically targeted Poles (the largest concentration of the Soviet Union’s 600,000 Poles lived in Ukraine), even after Pilsudski’s death in May 1935.
In the summer of 1936, for example, the authorities deported 69,283 people, mostly Soviet Poles, from Ukraine to Kazakhstan.98 On 11 August 1937, Yezhov ordered the total elimination of the Polish Military Organization, a group of imagined spies who worked on behalf of the Polish intelligence agencies.99 Of the 1.3 million people sentenced during the Great Purges, one-third were apprehended in the operations against specific national groups, and nearly half of this total were arrested during the “Polish operation.”100 Of the 55,928 people arrested in Soviet Ukraine during the Polish operation, 47,327 were shot.101 From this point onward, it appeared as if the Soviet Union would treat all Poles as enemies of the state. National identities or cultural connections, not a person’s place in the socio-economic order or his political views, now determined an individual’s innocence or guilt.In 1938 and 1939, Stalin’s men dissolved most of the twenty-one nonUkrainian national districts created in the Ukrainian SSR in the early 1920s, disbanded the German-, Polish-, Czech-, Swedish-, Greek-, and other-language schools, and reorganized them into schools with programs of instruction in Ukrainian or Russian.102 The Ukrainian Politburo ordered that the Cyrillic script replace the Latin script in the orthography of the Moldovan language.103 Only the Russian national districts and Russian- language schools remained untouched.