37 Soviet Ukraine’s Other Peoples

Like ethnic Ukrainians, other peoples (officially designated as national minorities) living in Soviet Ukraine were profoundly affected by the outbreak of revolution throughout the Russian Empire in 1917, by the subsequent efforts to create a Ukrainian state, and by the wars, peasant revolts, and widespread social upheaval that ultimately ended with the establishment of Soviet rule in 1920.

Cognizant of possible opposition and desirous of creating a state structure that would be representative of all Ukraine’s inhabitants, the Ukrainian Central Rada provided national-personal autonomy for three largest national groups—Russians, Jews, and Poles. This meant that each of these groups was treated as a corporate entity and, as such, guaranteed a certain number of seats in the Central Rada as well as ministerial portfolios. As well, each Russian, Jew, and Pole, regardless of place of residence, was guaranteed access to schools, cultural societies, and religious institutions in his or her respective language. Other peoples (Belarusans, Czechs, Germans, Tatars, Greeks, Bulgarians) were given the option to petition the Ukrainian government for nationalautonomous status.

37.1 Currency issued by the Central Rada of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1917 used, aside from Ukrainian, the Russian, Polish, and Yiddish languages.

MAP 37 NATIONALITY DISTRICTS IN SOVIET UKRAINE, 1931

The liberal program of the Central Rada was not allowed sufficient time to be effectively implemented. At the same time the political and social turmoil of the revolutionary era took its toll on all peoples of Ukraine. Large landowners, many of whom were of Russian or Polish ethnicity, were displeased with the socialist tendencies of the Central Rada and Ukrainian National Republic and then were driven out of the country on the eve of the full onset of Soviet rule in 1920. The Jewish population (and to a large degree Poles, Germans, and Mennonites) faced the brunt of destructive pogroms that in particular during 1919 raged throughout Ukraine in the wake of the various invasions of White Russian, Polish, and Bolshevik armies. Estimates during the years 1917-1920 suggest that between 30,000 to 60,000 Jews were killed, while the number of Poles decreased by one-third (685,000 to 410,000) and the number of Germans, including Mennonites, by two-fifths (750,000 to 514,000) as a result of forced flight and death.

TABLE 37.1 Nationality composition of Soviet Ukraine, 1926

The Tatars in Crimea were a special case.

Despite the decline in numbers caused by the upheavals of 1917-1920, peoples other than ethnic Ukrainians still comprised twenty percent of the population of Soviet Ukraine. The other peoples were accorded a status in keeping with general Soviet policy toward national minorities, which were defined as inhabitants of an ethnonational background different from the one for which the republic in which they lived was named. In the case of Soviet Ukraine, the national minorities referred to peoples other than the “titular” ethnic Ukrainians.

With regard to administrative structure, the Soviet regime beginning in 1924 set up nationality districts (raiony), town soviets (selyshchni rady), and village soviets (sil’s’ki rady) to serve the interests of national minorities who formed the majority of the population in a given locale. Within each of these administrative entities the national minority was allowed to use its own language in education (generally primary schools), in government-funded cultural institutions and publications, and in local courts and state administrative offices. The number of nationality districts, town soviets, and village soviets for the various peoples in Soviet Ukraine generally reflected the numerical size of the group.

TABLE 37.2 Nationality administrative divisions in Soviet Ukraine, circa 1930

As in the nineteenth century, Russians continued to form the largest minority population in Soviet Ukraine, with over 2.6 million (9 percent) of the republic’s inhabitants. The 388 Russian village/town soviets and 8 nationality districts were located primarily in the northeast and southern steppe regions of Ukraine (including the Moldavian A.S.S.R.) where Russians lived in largest numbers. Aside from the largest numbers who worked in the country’s eastern and southern industrial centers, Russians also formed a high percentage of personnel throughout Soviet Ukraine’s government and Communist party apparatus and its cultural and especially higher educational institutions. Although Russians had the highest number of national minority schools (1,539 in 1929-1930), nearly 19 percent of the student body of Russian background had no access to Russian-language schools and attended Ukrainian ones instead. This statistical fact was often used by the internationalist faction within the Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine which, to justify its opposition to the Ukrainianization program, argued that ethnic Russians were being discriminated against in Soviet Ukraine.

There were, however, individuals of full or partial Russian ethnicity who were born in Ukraine and who both welcomed and participated actively in the revival of Ukrainian culture during the 1920s. Among the best known were Mikhail Volobuev, a scholar who supported the view that Soviet Ukraine should control its own economic development and national budget, and Nikolai Fitilev, better known as Mykola Khvyl’ovyi, a prominent Ukrainian-language writer who argued that modern Ukrainian culture must break “away from Moscow” and re-orient itself toward “progressive” Europe.

37.2 Sketch map from the 1920s of the Fel’shtyn Jewish village soviet in the Volhynia okruh. Jews

The third largest nationality in Soviet Ukraine were Jews who numbered nearly 1.6 million inhabitants. Although the vast majority of Jews resided in cities and towns, already in the nineteenth century the tsarist government encouraged their resettlement to rural areas, so that by 1913 over 42,000 Jews resided in 38 rural communities in the southern steppe Ukraine (Kherson and Katerynoslav provinces). These Jewish communities were largely destroyed during the revolutionary era and the pogroms of 1919-1920. The Soviet government, aided by Jewish organizations abroad, renewed the colonization program, so that between 1923 and 1927 the number of Jews living in rural villages nearly doubled (from 56,000 to 107,000), which represented seven percent of Soviet Ukraine’s Jewish population.

It was in the rural areas of steppe Ukraine where three Jewish national districts were established, two of which were named after leading Bolshevik revolutionaries and Soviet officials of non-Jewish background, Iosif Stalin (Stalindorf) and Mikhail Kalinin (Kalinindorf).

37.3 Jewish students at the Ratmansky school in Kiev under a portrait of Lenin and a banner in Yiddish which reads: “Long live the Komsomol tribe, the powerful reserve force and reliable helper of the Communist party.”

In an attempt to undermine the traditionally dominant role of religion in Jewish life, the Soviet regime closed numerous synagogues, Hebrew schools, religious institutions (yeshivas), and “bourgeois” political and cultural organizations. Instead, through the work of special Jewish sections within the Communist party, the so-called Ievsektsiia, the Soviet authorities set out to create a Communist-oriented Jewish culture through the medium of the “proletarian language,” Yiddish, instead of biblical and “counter-revolutionary” Hebrew.

Somewhat parallel to the program of Ukrainianization was Yiddishization, which in particular during the 1920s promoted a wide range of cultural, educational, and scholarly activity devoted to Jews and the Yiddish language and literature. By the 1929-1930 school year there were 786 Yiddish-language schools in Soviet Ukraine, although only 53 percent of students of Jewish background attended them, with virtually all rest attending Russian-language schools. Yiddish was also the language of instruction in technical (20), agricultural (5), and pedagogical (3) schools. There was a Department (Katedra) of Jewish Culture in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, a Museum of Jewish Culture in Odessa, a State Jewish Theater in Kharkiv as well as seven other Yiddish theaters, and several state supported Yiddish newspapers and publishing houses.

Most Jews living in Ukraine did not participate in activities that promoted a specific Jewish secular culture, whether in Yiddish or Hebrew. Instead, they traditionally associated with the dominant culture and language of the state in which they lived: Russian in the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union (like the writer from Odessa Isaak Babel’), and German or Polish in Austrian and later Polish- or Romanian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina (like the writers Joseph Roth and Bruno Schultz), and German in Romanian-ruled Bukovina (like the writer Paul Celan). There were a few Jews, however, who allied themselves with Ukrainian cultural aspirations and, in some cases, adopted a Ukrainian ethnic identity. Among the earliest of these was the late nineteenth-century writer Grigorii Kerner (pseud. Hryts’ko Kernenko) and his twentieth-century successors, such as Illia Hurevych (pseud. Leonid Pervomais’kyi), Abram Katsnelson, and Abram/Aleksander Heites. Some Jews were also closely associated with Ukrainian humanistic scholarship in Soviet Ukraine, such as the historian Iosyf Hermaize and the linguist Olena Kurylo. Poles

The vast majority of the nearly half million Poles recorded in 1926 lived in the westernmost regions of Soviet Ukraine around the cities of Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, Proskuriv, and Kamianets’-Podil’s’kyi. It was in these areas not far from the border with Poland where beginning in 1925 the Soviet government established village soviets that by 1931 numbered 157 and one nationality district just west of Zhytomyr named after the Polish Communist activist Julian Marchlewski. The Polish minority was known for its strong adherence to the Roman Catholic Church and opposition to collective-style agriculture. Consequently, the Soviet government believed that such inbred attitudes could best be changed through education and cultural institutions. A network of 381 Polish-language elementary schools was set up, although by 1929-1930 it encompassed only 42 percent of eligible students of Polish nationality. Kiev in particular became a center of the group’s institutional life, with an Institute of Polish Culture, Central Polish Library, Central Polish Workers’ Club, and several Polish-language newspapers and journalists.

37.4 The Polish-language daily newspaper Sierp (The Sickle), renamed in 1936 Glos Radziecki (The Soviet Voice), published in Kiev from 1922 to 1941 to serve Polish urban workers and collective farmers living in Soviet Ukraine. Germans

Soviet Ukraine’s Germans (including Mennonites), who in 1926 numbered 394,000, had 252 village soviets and 7 nationality districts. The nationality districts, some of which were named after Germany’s famed Communist activists (Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht) and organizations (Spartacus party), were all located in rural areas in the steppe region north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. Other village soviets were not only spread throughout the steppe region but also concentrated in an area west of Zhytomyr which since the nineteenth century had been home to the so-called Volhynian Germans. At least during the first decade of Soviet rule the tradition of German-language education and cultural institutions that were widespread in pre-World War I tsarist Russia was continued, albeit with an emphasis on proletarian and internationalist values. Nearly 90 percent of all students of German ethnic background were by the 1929-1930 school year studying in German-language schools. These included not only elementary schools, but also middle-level technical and agricultural schools, nursing and veterinary schools, teaching colleges, and a pedagogical institute in Odessa.

37.5 Gathering the harvest on a German village soviet collective farm in the steppe Ukraine. Greeks

About 90 percent of Soviet Ukraine’s 108,000 Greeks worked as farmers in the steppeland north of the Sea of Azov between the port of Mariupol’ and the city of Stalino (today Donets’k). It was there that the Soviet government set up 30 village soviets, about half of which were in three Greek nationality districts. The village soviets were divided according to the two basic waves of Greek colonists in Ukraine: 16 were comprised of Hellene Greeks mostly from Walachia (in present-day Romania), who had first settled in and around Odessa; the other 14 included so-called Tatar Greeks from the Crimea who settled in and around Mariupol’. A high percentage of Greeks had already become russified in the course of the nineteenth century; consequently, the Soviet program known as Hellenization to promote proletarian Greek culture had limited results. By 1929-1930 there were only 16 Greek-language schools in which a mere 26 percent of ethnic Greek students studied. Further efforts at Hellenization were promoted by Greek-language newspapers, a pedagogical college that taught both the Hellene and Tatar (Crimean) variants of the Greek language, and a theater all based in Mariupol’, where Greeks made up 10 percent of the population. Bulgarians

The Bulgarians, who in 1926 numbered 92,000, were primarily agriculturalists who specialized in cultivating vegetables, fruit orchards, and vineyards. Ninety percent of the group resided in 45 village soviets and 3 nationality districts that were concentrated along the Sea of Azov between Melitopol’ and Berdians’k; just north of the port city of Odessa; and along the lower valley of Southern Buh River. Bulgarians had schools in their language already under tsarist Russian rule and this policy was continued by the Soviet government. By the 1930-1931 school year, there were 73 Bulgarian-language schools where 85 percent of all students of Bulgarian background studied.

37.6 School children from the Greek village soviet of Buhas (south of Stalino), mobilized in 1932 under a Greek-language banner calling on village residents to go to work on the collective farm. Other peoples

The numerically smaller Belarusans (76,000), Czechs (16,000), and Armenians (10,000) had fewer nationality village soviets. Two other groups, however, enjoyed special status. These were Moldavians and Crimean Tatars, each of whom was associated with a particular administrative-territorial entity.

In 1924, the Moldavian Autonomous Republic was formed within the administrative framework of the Soviet Ukraine. Although the Moldovians were the autonomous republic’s titular nationality they numbered only 170,000, or 31 percent of the inhabitants. In order to enhance their status the Soviet regime set up 63 Moldavian village soviets within the Moldavian A.S.S.R. An additional 17 Moldavian nationality village soviets were established in other parts of Soviet Ukraine, mostly along the lower Southern Buh river valley and its tributaries. Throughout Soviet Ukraine, including the Moldavian A.S.S.R., there were 121 Moldavian-language schools by 1930-1931, although they served only 63 percent of all students of Moldavian background, with the rest attending Ukrainian-language schools.

The Crimean Tatars were all concentrated in the Crimean peninsula, which at this time was not part of Soviet Ukraine but rather an autonomous soviet socialist republic (A.S.S.R.) within the Russian S.F.S.R. Numbering 179,000, the Tatars made up only 25 percent of the population of the Crimean A.S.S.R., where East Slavs formed the majority of the population (42 percent Russians and 11 percent Ukrainians). Despite being a numerical minority, the Crimean Tatars became for a while (1923 to 1928) the dominant political and cultural force on the peninsula. This was largely because of the policy of Tatarization. Tatarization was the local variant of indigenization implemented by the former Crimean nationalist leader and now chairman of the local Communist party, Veli Ibrahimov. Under Ibrahimov’s direction, a concerted effort was undertaken to salvage what was still left of the Tatar heritage in the Crimea. A network of elementary schools with Crimean Tatar (using the Arabic script) as language of instruction was established, as were teachers’ colleges, an Oriental Institute, publishing house, newspapers, and journals, mostly in the Crimean administrative center of Simferopol (which was also allowed to be called by its former Tatar name, Aqmescit).

The administrative, educational, and cultural achievements of various peoples of Soviet Ukraine were, like Ukrainianization, part of the general Soviet policy of indigenization, that is rooting the Communist party apparatus and inculcating socialist values in the population, especially in the rural countryside. The various indigenization programs—whether Ukrainianization, Yiddishization, Polonization, Hellenization, Tatarization—all flourished during the 1920s. And while it is true that these programs were to continue for a few more years, their ultimate fate was to be determined by the economic transformation that was set in motion in 1928 throughout the Soviet Ukraine.