Is it true that all the Ukrainian lands were united in a single polity for the first time under Stalin?

Ukraine in its current borders is indeed largely the product of Stalinist conquests during 1939-1945, but it would be wrong to at­tribute to the Soviet dictator the “invention” of Ukraine.

Long before Stalin “reunited" western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR, all these regions had been part of Kyivan Rus. In the mid-i6oos, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky spoke of including the western regions under his rule, as they were also populated by the “Rus people." Beginning in the nineteenth century, Ukrainian patriotic intellectuals established the concept of Ukrainian ethnic territories and the ideal that one day a united Ukrainian polity would bring them all together. The two short-lived Ukrainian republics that emerged in the east and west when the multinational empires in the region began disintegrating in 1917-1918 from the very begin­ning saw themselves as two parts of a whole and indeed proclaimed their union in January 1919. Moreover, the concept of Ukrainian ethnic territories was by then receiving some international recogni­tion. In 1920, when the Allies tried to stop the Red Army's advance on Poland, British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon proposed the so- called Curzon Line as an ethnographic border between Poland and Soviet Ukraine, with eastern Galicia assigned to the latter, although both belligerents rejected it, and the war's outcome was much more favorable for Poland.

The Ukrainian SSR inherited this implicit claim to eastern Galicia, northern Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia, regions that were part of Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, respectively, during the interwar period. Such territorial claims dovetailed with the stra­tegic aims of Soviet territorial expansion in Europe.

A similar script was followed in the other two historical regions. In 1940 the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum to Romania to “re­turn” the territories that had previously belonged to the Russian Empire, including northern Bukovyna. Facing an imminent invasion, Romania accepted and withdrew from these regions, and northern Bukovyna was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. By the end of World War II, as the Red Army occupied most of Eastern Europe, Stalin's appetite for expanding the Soviet Union proper grew. The dictator's Ukrainian viceroy, Nikita Khrushchev (an ethnic Russian who grew up in the Donbas and served as the Communist Party boss in the Ukrainian SSR from 1938 to 1949), also enthusiastically promoted the expansion of “his" republic. As soon as the Red Army took Transcarpathia under its control in 1944, he organized the collection of petitions for joining Soviet Ukraine. The region was then transferred from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union according to a 1945 bilateral agreement between the two countries and constituted as the Transcarpathian province of the Ukrainian SSR.

Khrushchev even pushed for the annexation of additional ethnic Ukrainian lands from Poland, which lay beyond the Curzon Line.⁸ He organized similar petitioning campaigns there, but the effort was aborted after the Allies agreed to use the Curzon Line as the border between the Soviet Union and Poland.

As for the newly reunited regions of the Ukrainian SSR, they un­derwent Sovietization in accelerated form. In mere years, as opposed to decades, the Soviet state eliminated in the new regions its political opponents, Ukrainized cultural life, pursued forced collectivization, and started encouraging closer ties with the “elder Russian brother." However, the long history of the Ukrainian national movement in eastern Galicia under Habsburg and Polish rule could not be un­done. Even unto its final days, the Soviet Union's leaders remained suspicious of the three Galician provinces, viewing them as the bul­wark of Ukrainian nationalism.