Population Losses, 1926-1939

Although the Soviet authorities introduced collectivization throughout the USSR, the famines of 1930-4 primarily struck Ukraine (especially its Kiev and Kharkiv oblasts) (see map 7), the northern Caucasus, the middle Volga region, and Kazakhstan, quickly surpassing the famine of 1921-2.¹⁷² As the Russian Empire’s and the Soviet Union’s long-term breadbasket, Ukraine suffered disproportionate population losses during the collectivization drive, implemented more rapidly and more violently in this republic than in any other Soviet region save Kazakhstan.¹⁷³ The politically induced famine constituted one of the twentieth century’s greatest demographic catastro­phes among the people of Ukraine, producing an even greater impact than that of the First World War.

Serious estimates of the number of deaths in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 vary from two million to seven million.¹⁷⁴ The most skilful analyses, those by a joint team of French and Ukrainian demographers and those by Oleh Wolowyna and his Ukrainian colleagues, provide more precise fig­ures. The French-Ukrainian team estimated between four million and five million deaths, and the Wolowyna team 4.5 million for 1932 and 1933, representing approximately 15.3 per cent of the total population of the Ukrainian SSR.¹⁷⁵

According to the most recent research conducted by Wolowyna and his colleagues, between 1932 and 1934 Ukraine lost 3.9 million people in di­rect losses (excess deaths) and 600,000 in indirect losses (lost births).¹⁷⁶ The total losses in the rural areas equalled 19 per cent of the total 1933 rural population; the corresponding relative total losses in the urban areas ap­proximated 5 per cent of the total 1933 urban population.¹⁷⁷ The largest number, 90 per cent of the total, died in 1933.¹⁷⁸ Possibly 80 per cent of the four million or more Ukrainians who died during the Holodomor “did so in the compressed period of time between March and May 1933.”¹⁷⁹ Between 1922 and 1941 more men, women, and children died in the coun­tryside than in the cities, and males suffered higher direct losses than fe­males, both in absolute and relative terms.¹⁸⁰ Excess deaths for children under ten years of age comprised about 25 per cent of all deaths in 1933, both in urban and rural populations.¹⁸¹

In conjunction with these losses, changes in Soviet policies towards the non-Russians and the purges of the Soviet Ukrainian political and cultural elites in the 1930s reinforced and accelerated the mass shift from a Ukrainian identity to Soviet and Russian ones, especially in the rapidly expanding urban centres.

current disaster will bring about a preponderantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer be able to speak of a Ukraine, or of a Ukrainian people, and thus not even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will be­come a de facto Russian region.¹⁸²

Although Gradenigo’s prognosis did not unfold in this manner, Ukraine’s demographic catastrophe played a serious and indelible role in the making of Stalinist, post-Stalinist, and post-Soviet Ukraine, especially its political crises after 1991. The population of the Soviet Union expanded by fif­teen million between 1926 and 1937 (from 147 million to 162 million), but all Soviet republics or national groups did not grow at the same rate.¹⁸³ The overwhelming majority of republics, including the RSFSR, enjoyed an up­surge. Others, such as Ukraine, garnered only a modest accrual from 29 million in 1926 to 30.1 million in 1937, an average annual increase of 100,000.¹⁸⁴ Kazakhstan, however, experienced the most dramatic popula­tion loss, from 6.5 million in 1926 to 4.8 million eleven years later.¹⁸⁵

Rapid collectivization, mass industrialization, the adoption of pro- Russocentric policies, the famines, and the purges upset the demographic balance between Ukrainians and Russians in the USSR (see table 6.2) and within the Ukrainian SSR. Between 1932 and 1933, the number of those who identified themselves as Ukrainians within the USSR declined by ap­proximately 20 to 30 per cent.¹⁸⁶

Between 1926 and 1937, the population of the USSR shifted radically in favour of the Russians, who increased their proportion of the total Soviet population from 53 to 58 per cent, while the Ukrainians dropped from 21 to 16 per cent.¹⁸⁷ In the RSFSR itself, the self-identified Ukrainian population declined from 7.9 million in 1926 to 3.1 million in 1937.¹⁸⁸ (In 1937, 549,859 self-identified Ukrainians lived in Kazakhstan, which formed part of the RSFSR until 1936, when it became a full union republic.)¹⁸⁹ The changes in the administrative borders within the Soviet Union and the dismantlement of all Ukrainization programs outside the Ukrainian SSR with the 14 December

Table 6.2 Number of Russians and Ukrainians within the USSR, 1926-1939

Source: The statistics come from: (1926): Kommunisticheskaia Akademiia, Komissiia po izucheniiu natsional'nogo voprosa, Natsional’naia politika VKP(b) v tsifrakh (Moscow: Izd. Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 1930), 36, 38; (1937): Akademiia nauk SSSR, Vseso- iuznaia perepis naseleniia 1937 g.

1932 Stalin-Molotov decree, may explain the “decline” of nearly half of the self-identified Ukrainian population in Russia from 1926 to 1937.

Although the overall number of residents of Soviet Ukraine increased in this period, its self-identified Ukrainian component shrank from 23.2 mil­lion in 1926 to 22.2 million in 1937, then advanced slightly from 1937 to 1939 (23.7 million), if the results of the 1939 census are to be believed. The Ukrainian percentage of the republic’s population ebbed away from 80 in 1926 to 78.2 in 1937 to 76.5 by 1939.¹⁹⁰ Parallel to this trend, the rural com­munity plummeted from 23.6 million (in 1926) to 20.1 million (1937), while the population of the urban communities rose from 5.2 to 10 million.¹⁹¹ But the radical decrease in the number of those self-identified Ukrainians living in the countryside did not necessarily represent an exodus to the cities or assimilation into the Russian culture.

In contrast to the Ukrainians within the Ukrainian SSR, the republic’s Russian population increased not only in number, but also in percentage of the total population. The number of Russians surged from 2.7 million (1926) to 3.2 million (1937) to 4.1 million (1939), from 9 per cent of the re­public’s total population to 13.5 per cent.¹⁹² This represented nearly a 50 per cent increase. Although 100,000 fewer people identified themselves as Jews in 1937 than in 1926, they remained the third most populous national group in Ukraine, still constituting 5 per cent of the total population.

Ukraine’s Holodomor of 1932-3 caused this extreme demographic dis­tortion. Marriage and birth rates plunged dramatically and the mortality rate skyrocketed. The people of Ukraine, especially those in the country­side, suffered a monstrous number of excess deaths and lost births.

Kazakhstan also experienced a ruthless collectivization drive, which fo­cused on extensive grain and livestock procurements, not the forced settle­ment of the republic’s nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. Famine broke out shortly after the Soviet authorities seized most of the Kazakh herds, in part “to replenish the stocks of Kazakhstan’s Russian and Ukrainian re­gions already devastated by collectivization.”¹⁹³ Recognizing this state ef­fort as an act attacking their way of life, the nomads and pastoralists resisted passively and actively.¹⁹⁴ Almost 1.5 million Kazakh men, women, and chil­dren died between 1930 and 1934 and hundreds of thousands fled the re­public.¹⁹⁵ Between 33 and 38 per cent of the Kazakh population and 8 to 9 per cent of the Slavic/European population passed away.¹⁹⁶ The propor­tion of Kazakhs within the USSR fell from 2.6 per cent of the total popula­tion in 1926 to 1.7 in 1937, mirroring the overall Ukrainian decline within the Soviet population.¹⁹⁷ Although the Kazakhs lost fewer in absolute numbers than the Ukrainians during the famine, they experienced the deaths of a greater percentage of their total population.¹⁹⁸ There were also several hundred thousand victims in the North Caucasus (including many Ukrainians living there) and, on a smaller scale, in the Volga region.¹⁹⁹