Urban Growth and National Change

Many peasants could not conceive of themselves as Ukrainians before 1914. The First World War, the revolutions, and the subsequent civil and national wars aroused their national consciousness.

The 1926 Soviet census revealed that 80.1 per cent of the people in the Ukrainian Republic identified themselves as Ukrainians, 9.2 per cent as Russians, and 5.4 per cent as Jews.⁶⁷ Ukrainians comprised a majority in each of the six regions of the republic (see map 6). The regions with the highest percentage of Ukrainians were - not surprisingly - the agricultural ones: Polissia, the Left Bank, and the Right Bank, as well as the Dnieper Industrial Region. The areas with the lowest Ukrainian population were the newly industrialized ones: the Steppe and the Donbass (see map 6 and table 6.1). Ukrainians constituted the overwhelming majority of the urban populations in Polissia and the Left Bank, a plurality in the Right Bank and the Dnieper Industrial Region, but a minority in the other two regions.⁶⁸

The Ukrainian peasants who migrated to the cities before the early 1920s gradually absorbed the Russian urban ethos and soon came to iden­tify themselves as Russians. But as the cities and towns grew rapidly in the late 1920s, a product of the overall Soviet industrialization effort, the large number of migrating Ukrainians threatened to reverse this process of ac­culturation and assimilation.

Between 1920 and 1933, the urban population nearly doubled - from 3,916,300 to 7,158,700.⁶⁹ According to the unofficial census of 1937, the urban population of Ukraine amounted to 10,021,767; according to the official census of 1939, the towns and cities contained 11,190,370 men, women, and children. If in 1926, the urban population of the Ukrainian

SSR constituted 18.5 per cent of the total, by 1939 36 per cent of those liv­ing in Ukraine resided in urban centres.⁷⁰ In the two decades before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ukraine’s urban growth and level of urbanization outpaced that of the Soviet Union as a whole.

The highest degree of urbanization occurred in regions with highly de­veloped industrial centres.⁷¹ Following the pattern set in the late nine­teenth century, the urban centres of the Donbass, the Dnieper Industrial Region, and the Steppe (regions outside the historic Ukrainian core area) grew at a faster pace than did cities in Polissia, the Right Bank, and the Left Bank, the regions which comprised the core.

From 1920 to 1934 the number of cities within the Ukrainian SSR with more than 100,000 inhabitants grew and their share of the entire urban population increased. In 1926 there were six such cities: Kiev, Odessa, Kharkiv, Dniepropetrovsk, Stalino (today’s Donetsk), and Mykolaiv. They constituted 33.5 per cent of the entire urban population of Ukraine. By January 1934 there were eleven cities with a population of over 100,000, comprising approximately 40.8 per cent of the total urban population. Most importantly, the cities - breaking with the previous pattern - now contained more residents who identified themselves as Ukrainians.

In the 1920s the number and percentage of Ukrainians in the republic’s cities grew - from 32.2 per cent of the total urban population in 1920 to 47.2 per cent in 1926.⁷² The percentage of urbanized Ukrainians in 1926 varied inversely with the size of the town or city, reaching 69.4 per cent of the population of towns under 20,000, but only 33 per cent in cities over 100,000.

This pyramid subsequently became more elastic. It began to expand in the 1920s and early 1930s as the number of Ukrainian migrants came to outnumber other migrants. The most dramatic increase in the percentage of Ukrainians took place in the Donbass, the Steppe, and in the Dnieper Industrial Region, where the percentage of Ukrainian growth far sur­passed that of the overall population.⁷³ Such dramatic increases in the numbers of Ukrainians among urban dwellers unquestionably led to the Ukrainization of the cities.

Although 47.2 per cent of the total urban population identified them­selves as Ukrainians in 1926, Russian culture dominated the cities and towns. Ukrainians constituted a plurality of the population in Kiev (41.2 per cent), Kharkiv (38.4), and Dniepropetrovsk (36.0), while Russians constituted a majority in Stalino (56.2), and a plurality in Odessa (38.7) and Mykolaiv (44.5). As these statistics demonstrate, Kiev, the centre of the Right Bank and the Ukrainian core, remained the Ukrainian bulwark, however fragile.⁷⁴

As the cities and towns grew in the years following 1926, so did the number of Ukrainians in them. As the Soviet government increased in­vestment in urban industrial centres and built new factories, it also attacked the Ukrainian traditional way of life by introducing forced collectiviza­tion (see chapter 6). One migrant described the differences between the life of a worker and a peasant in the late 1920s and why the latter would choose the urban life:

The worker received wages, i.e., something permanent and steady, even if they were low. But the collective farmers worked the same (amount of hours) or even longer hours and did not receive any steady income. During the first years of industrialization the workers were better off. They received potatoes and bread and other food in larger quantities. This was done especially so as to draw more people into industry.⁷⁵

The most likely candidates for migration included the poor, those who possessed no land or at best small plots (with no draft animals), those of working age (between 16 and 59), and those accused of being “kulaks” (those with large plots of land who hired labour).

On the eve of the industrialization period, well over half the population of the Ukraine was of working age, and of these a significant number were moved by their poverty to opt for city life.⁷⁶ Thus, land hunger, the lack of draft animals, the abundant labour supply in the countryside, and finally, forced collectivization shifted the previous migration patterns. These fac­tors contributed to the increase in the number of people in the urban la­bour force, especially in the period between 1928 and 1932. Now, as a result of the pull of the cities and the push of the countryside, more Ukrainian peasants entered the Russified cities. Some urban centres, such as Kiev, became more important than others.

In the nineteenth century, Kiev, the most important urban area in the Ukrainian historic core area, did not serve as Ukraine’s “primate city,” defined as the region’s most populous and most socially and economically developed metropolis.⁷⁷ Although it possessed an ancient and important historical legacy, its population (248,000 in 1897) and socio-economic de­velopment did not surpass Odessa’s (404,000); Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav remained close competitors. As towns and cities started to grow in the 1920s after the war and the national and civil wars, Kiev took the lead. According to the 1926 Soviet census, Kiev possessed 514,000 residents, Odessa 421,000, and Kharkiv 417,000.⁷⁸ With industrialization and the Kremlin’s decision to transfer Ukraine’s capital from Kharkiv to Kiev in 1934, Kiev solidified its top spot.⁷⁹

In the 1920s, all of Ukraine’s towns and cities experienced an unprece­dented growth spurt. At first, a significant number of those drawn to the cities were actually returning: they were workers who had abandoned the cities in the early 1920s after the collapse of the early Soviet economy.

Ukrainian migrants played a significant role in this migratory process. By 1933, perhaps even by 1931, Ukrainians constituted over half of the urban population of the Ukrainian Republic, especially in some of the ma­jor cities. This suggests that the immigration from the RSFSR and other Soviet republics slowed and that the radical urban growth that occurred in Ukraine after 1926 must have happened at the expense of its countryside, which was overwhelmingly Ukrainian.⁸¹

Soviet industrialization ignited a radical change in Soviet Ukraine’s so­cial composition. In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Republic, long identified with its countryside and peasants, started its long march towards a mod­ern, more urban era. Willingly or unwillingly, those who identified them­selves as Ukrainians also entered this new non-rural environment.