Territorial Settlements and Population Changes

For the Ukrainians the most important territorial settlement brought about by the war was the incorporation of Western Ukraine into the USSR. TO the great dismay of the Poles, Stalin persuaded Great Britain and the United States to accept his annexation of lands in which West Ukrainians constituted the majority of the population.

Why was Stalin so insistent on annexing Western Ukraine? Formally, his argument was that it was only natural that the oppressed West Ukrainians should be united with their brethren in Soviet Ukraine. But since Stalin’s concern for Ukrainian needs was questionable, political self-interest clearly played a role. Because the Poles were in no position to challenge him militarily or otherwise, Stalin simply felt no need to return Galicia and Volhynia to them. Moreover, possession of Western Ukraine gave the Soviets a convenient strategic position with respect to Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Finally, Stalin was anxious to destroy Ukrainian nationalism and to do so he needed to control its hotbed in Western Ukraine.

Map 26 Territorial gains of Soviet Ukraine, 1939–54

The territorial settlement with the Poles also included provisions for an exchange of populations. Therefore, between 1944 and 1946, the Soviets allowed about 1 million Poles (including a significant number of Jews and Ukrainians masquerading as Poles) to move from Galicia and Volhynia to Poland.

Shortly after the war, Moscow also persuaded Czechoslovakia and Romania to surrender their claims to Transcarpathia and Bukovyna, respectively. Thus, Western Ukraine, with its more than 7 million inhabitants and 110,000 sq. km of territory, was permanently incorporated into the USSR. By late 1945, the territory of Soviet Ukraine expanded to over 580,000 sq. km, inhabited by about 41 million people.

The Poles were not the only ethnic minority whose presence in Ukraine decreased sharply as a result of the war. Prior to 1939 there were about 650,000 Germans in Ukraine, mostly descendants of 18th-century colonists. Fearful lest they join their invading compatriots, Stalin had almost all of them evacuated to Central Asia. A similar fate befell the approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars whose homeland was later incorporated into the Ukrainian republic. Convinced that they had been overly cooperative with the Germans, Stalin ordered their mass expulsion from the Crimea in 1944. Brutally ejected from their homes in that year, only about one-half of the Tatars survived the journey to Central Asia.

In sharp contrast to these shrinking minorities, the Russian minority in Ukraine increased dramatically in size. After the war, there was a great shortage of industrial workers, government bureaucrats, and party functionaries in Ukraine, especially in the newly annexed western lands. Encouraged by the Soviet government, hundreds of thousands of Russians moved into Ukraine, particularly into the cities, to fill these positions. Their rapidly rising numbers are evident from the following statistics: in 1939 there were 4 million Russians in Ukraine constituting about 12% of the population; by 1959, the figure had grown to 7 million or 16%. In Western Ukraine, where there had been practically no Russians before the war, by 1959 their number had risen to 330,000, representing 5% of the population.

In the radical restructuring of Ukraine’s ethnic composition that took place after the war, peoples such as the Poles, Jews, and Crimean Tatars, who had long played a crucial role in the history of Ukraine, adding greatly to its cultural and ethnic mosaic, faded in importance or practically disappeared. Their places were taken largely by the Russians. Meanwhile, the incorporation of the West Ukrainians did not greatly raise the proportion of Ukrainians in the land because they only made up for the population losses suffered by Ukraine during the war. In this process, Ukraine changed from a multinational into a largely binational society, one in which a demographically stagnant Ukrainian majority existed side by side with a continually growing Russian minority.