Soviet Ukraine's Administrative-Territorial Structure

Even for the informed reader, the many administrative and territorial chan­ges that took place on the lands that became a united Ukraine in the twen­tieth century are confusing. Before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires held all of the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe.

In 1914, Russia’s Ukrainian-speaking provinces were split into nine gu­bernias (provinces), and subdivided into 102 povits (counties) and 1,989 volosts (rural districts). From the February Revolution in early 1917 until the mid-1950s, the political organization of Soviet Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) experienced constant fluctuations, as did Ukraine’s political architecture.

Despite the efforts of the Ukrainian Central Rada to create a new ad­ministrative framework for the Ukrainian-speaking provinces in March 1918, this reform was never implemented. At the end of the revolutionary period in 1920, the newly installed Soviet authorities restored the Russian imperial model with gubernias, volosts, and povits, increasing the number of gubernias to twelve.

With the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on 30 December 1922, the leaders of this new political entity recognized the national-territorial principle and divided the vast territories they controlled into national republics and autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts (provinces), krais (lands), okrugs (regions), raions (districts), and village soviets (councils). In the Ukrainian SSR, on 12 April 1923, 53 okrugs (regions) replaced the existing 102 povits.

In October 1924, the Soviet authorities created the Moldavian Auto­nomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) along the Ukrainian republic’s southwestern boundaries with Romania. In 1925, the authorities dissolved the gubernias, retaining only the okrugs and raions, as reflected in the first Soviet census of 17 December 1926. In August 1930 the Soviet Ukrainian government then abolished the okrugs. From September 1930 to February 1932 only raions remained as the principal administrative component of the Ukrainian SSR. At that time, this republic possessed nearly 600 raions, twenty-five of which were designated as raions for Ukraine’s national and ethnic minorities. In 1932, the authorities introduced a new political frame­work with oblasts, raions, and rural soviets. In that year, the Ukrainian SSR created seven oblasts (Chernihiv, Dniepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa, and Vinnytsia) and retained the Moldovan ASSR, as manifested in the “defective” second Soviet census of 6 January 1937. Two years later, there were fifteen oblasts and the Moldovan ASSR, as documented in the “official” second Soviet census of 17 January 1939. This oblast-raion arrangement re­mained a permanent feature of the USSR’s administrative-territorial struc­ture until its collapse in 1991.

With the Molotov-Ribbentropf Pact of 1939, the USSR acquired the Belarusan- and Ukrainian-speaking areas from Poland, and Bessarabia and Bukovina from Romania. In August 1940, the Soviet authorities separated the Moldovan ASSR from Ukraine and formed the new Moldovan SSR by incorporating the central section of Bessarabia, recently annexed from Romania. Encompassing an area of 33,843 square kilometres (13,067 square miles), it emerged as and remained the smallest republic in the USSR.

Shortly after the Munich Agreement, Hungary acquired Transcarpathia (now Carpatho-Ukraine) from a truncated Czechoslovakia in April 1939.

At the start of the twentieth century, the Ukrainian-speaking territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were divided into two crown lands, Galicia and Bukovina, which the Austrians administered. Transcarpathia belonged to Hungary. With the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918, Galicia became a part of Poland, Bukovina a part of Romania, and Trans­carpathia a part of Czechoslovakia.

In addition to Galicia, independent Poland acquired a part of the Russian Empire’s Volhynia and created a system of voivodeships (prov­inces) which encompassed the Ukrainian-speaking territories. Poland governed these territories until the Soviet invasion of that nation-state on 17 September 1939. Shortly afterwards, the USSR annexed the majority Ukrainian-speaking voievodeships of Drohobycz, Lwow, Stanislawow, Tarnopol, and Western Wofyn to the Ukrainian SSR. In the summer of 1940 the USSR acquired the Ukrainian-speaking provinces of Bukovina and Izmail from Romania, and in 1945 Transcarpathia from Czechoslovakia, which reacquired it from Hungary. The territories incorporated to the Ukrainian SSR during and after the Second World War were organized into eight new oblasts. On 21 May 1959, the Drohobych Oblast was merged into the Lviv Oblast.

Crimea - a peninsula with a territory of 27,000 square kilometres (10,425 square miles) - had been a part of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic shortly after the Soviet Union came into existence in late 1922.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991, it inherited all of the ter­ritories the Ukrainian SSR possessed after February 1954. Most of the countries of the world, including the Russian Federation, recognized its independence and territorial sovereignty.

In response to Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-14, the Russian Federation invaded the Crimea and annexed it on 18 March 2014. At the same time, it started to support the pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

Sources: V. Kubijovic, “Administrative Territorial Division,” Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 1:11-14; V. Kubijovyc, M. Miller, O. Ohloblyn, and A. Zhukovsky, “Crimea,” in Volodymyr Kubijovyc:, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, 1:611-17; Vasyl Danylenko, Ukrains’ka intelligentsia i vlada. Zvedennia sekretnoho viddilu DPU USRR 1927-1929 rr. (Kiev: Tempora, 2012), 22; Historical Dictionary of Ukraine, 2nd ed., ed. Ivan Katchanovski, Zenon E. Kohut, Bohdan Y. Nebesio, and Myroslav Yurkevych (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 14-17; R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xvi; Steven Fischer-Galati, “Moldova and the Moldavians,” in Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities, ed. Zev Katz, Rosemarie Rogers, and Frederic Harned (New York: Free Press, 1975), 415, 418; http://www.adm.dp.gov.ua (accessed 7 July 2014); and Matthew D. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), xix-xx.