Urbanization in Ukraine since the Second World War

The Second World War marked a significant change not only in the history of the urbanization of Ukraine but in the history of the Ukrainian people as well. For the first time since the middle of the seventeenth century, all Ukrainian ethnic lands were united under a single political authority; Kiev and Lviv were no longer separated by an international boundary.

The Second World War also witnessed a profound ethno-demographic transformation in Ukraine. This subject is too complex to discuss here; suffice it to say that some five to seven million persons lost their lives in the war, and that those killed included no less than four million civilians. Proportionately, the most extensive were the losses suffered by the Jewish population, but in terms of absolute numbers they were equalled and even surpassed by the deaths of Ukrainian civilians and military personnel. Besides direct loss of life, the war and its aftermath witnessed mass population losses due to migration. Their overall, long-term effect was to cut drastically the number of Poles, Tatars, Germans, Czechs and other smaller groups living in the present boundaries of Ukraine and to establish conditions for the immigration into Ukraine of vast numbers of Russians.¹

Perhaps the following very general data will convey something of the vastness of the population change brought about by the war and its aftermath. Since Ukraine did not exist in its present shape until 1939, let us first cite the data for the Ukrainian SSR in its boundaries prior to 17 September 1939 and then compare them with the figures for the same territory after the war. In 1939 the population of the Ukrainian SSR was

31,785,000, of which 73.5 per cent was Ukrainian by nationality (this should make the Ukrainian total 23,362,000), and 12.9 per cent Russian (4,100,000)? The balance of 13.6 per cent consisted primarily of Jews, Poles and Germans.

The change in “Western Ukraine” was no less dramatic. On 1 January 1933 the Ukrainians formed about 66 per cent of the population of “Polish Ukraine,” i.e., Galicia and Volhynia; 60.0 per cent in Bukovyna, and 61.2 per cent in Transcarpathia.⁴ (In Western Ukraine, Poles, Jews, Czechs, Romanians and Hungarians were more numerous than Russians, who basically consisted of emigres from the Soviet state.) In 1959 the demographic scene in Western Ukraine bore little resemblance to the prewar situation. The Ukrainians increased their share of the population in all parts of the historical region and constituted 87.2 per cent of Western Ukraine’s population (6,797,780 Ukrainians out of a total population of 7,799,058). The “historic” nationalities of the region had been greatly reduced in size, and the Russians now made up the second largest group: numbering 402,938, they constituted over 5 per cent of the population?

Before the Second World War Ukrainians were in a minority in the cities and towns of Ukraine. According to the 1926 Soviet census, they constituted 41.3 per cent of Ukraine’s urban population.

As an urban system, prewar Ukraine was characterized by the lack of a primate city. In 1897 Odessa was the largest city but also the least Ukrainian of the major cities located in Ukrainian territory. By 1939 Kiev was the largest city in Ukraine with a population of 851,000, followed by Kharkiv with 840,000 and Odessa with 599,000. The other principal cities were Dnipropetrovske (528,000), Donetske (474,000) and, across the Polish border, Lviv (340,000).’ If one defines a primate city as one which is at least twice the size of the second largest, in accordance with what Mark Jefferson has called “the law of the primate city” (“a country’s leading city is always disproportionately large and exceptionally expressive of national capacity and feeling”),’ Ukraine clearly was not an integrated entity as late as 1939. If one counts the population of Kiev in 1939 as 100, the population of Kharkiv was 99 and that of Odessa, 70: this would place Ukraine at the bottom of a list of fifty-one cases illustrating the position of primate cities in relation to the second and third cities of their respective countries.

In 1939 Ukraine was still a predominantly rural country (only 34 per cent of the population in the present boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR, and 37 per cent in the former boundaries, lived in urban locations; the urbanization level of Western Ukraine was lower).¹¹ Large-scale urbanization in Soviet Ukraine commenced only after 1945. Because the Ukrainians had historically been so closely identified with the village, their relationship with the Russians and Poles, the two nationalities most closely linked with Ukrainian history, had reflected itself in terms of an urban-rural dichotomy. In popular perception—and in sociological fact—Ukrainian ethnicity came to be identified with village ways of life, values and styles, and Poles and Russians in Ukraine became associated with the city and the world of high social, cultural and economic life. It was therefore of critical importance for the Ukrainian national movement in modern times to establish a Ukrainian presence in urban areas. To a considerable extent, the Ukrainians accomplished this goal in the Austrian part of their land, in that Ukrainians who were employed in the cities or who were otherwise occupied outside agriculture, forestry or fishing de­fined themselves politically and culturally as members of the Ukrainian nation. Under Austria and Poland the Ukrainians succeeded in establishing socially-mobilized but culturally-differentiated (from the Poles and to a lesser extent from the Romanians, Czechs and Hungarians) strata to pro­vide leadership for the masses. By their example, these strata demonstrated that one could be urban, educated, high on the occupational ladder, in short, “modern”—and Ukrainian.

The development of analogous processes in Russian Ukraine proceeded more slowly and faced virtually insurmountable obstacles until 1917. The policy of Ukrainianization, which was proclaimed in the 1920s, aimed at the establishment of a Ukrainian presence (if not Ukrainian hegemony) in the modern urban environment.

The cities are... fortresses from which dominant ethnic forces sally forth to control the countryside economically and politically, and (through control of rural socialization and communication processes) to effect a measure of assimilation even there.¹³

When rapid industrialization (and thus urbanization) begins, large numbers of the younger-brother group enter the city and one of two possi­ble results emerges: either this influx “swamps” the hitherto dominant group or the dominant group maintains its position by means of continuing in-migration from the outside.

Armstrong’s scenario, which is inspired by the work of Karl Deutsch on nationalism and social communication, has to be amended in application to Ukraine. Stalin’s treatment of Ukraine in the 1930s shows, in our opinion, that political violence on a mass scale can be used to regulate ethno-demographic processes in a period of rapid social change, urbanization and industrialization. It became quite clear in the late thirties that Ukraine was to become a modern region, but in the process the cities, industry, high culture and the world of science were to be Russified rather than Ukrainianized.

However, Stalin did not as yet control the western portions of Ukraine, in which, as we have already observed, the Ukrainians had succeeded, however modestly, in establishing their presence in the city. Moreover, their struggle for a place in the urban sun had been fought not against the Russians but against their western neighbours. The West Ukrainians were free, accordingly, of an inferiority complex toward Russia, and in general associated modernity with centres such as Warsaw, Vienna, Prague, perhaps Berlin or Paris, even New York, but certainly not tsarist or Stalinist Moscow or Leningrad.

This preliminary discussion may now be concluded and the principal concerns of this essay laid out. Urbanization being a complex, multi-faceted process, with wide ramifications, connections and consequences,¹⁴ this paper is limiting itself to a discussion of two themes. First, we would like to examine the processes of population growth in postwar Ukraine with regard to ethnic change. Is urbanization accompanied by a change in the ethnic composition of the urban population? Are urban Ukrainians becoming assimilated to the Russian culture, or do they maintain their ethnic identity as city residents? Our ex­amination of this problem will be conducted along with, and we hope will be illuminated by, a review of urbanization processes pertaining to the question of the primary city in Ukraine. Ukraine before 1939, we remember, lacked a really dominant urban centre. What changes have occurred since 1945? In the conclusion, we will attempt to tie these two themes—assimilation and urbanization, the rise of the primate city—together. What is the position of Ukrainians in the primate city—or its closest equivalent—of their land?

First of all, let us briefly characterize general population trends in Ukraine as revealed in data assembled in Table 1. Two southern regions of Ukraine, the South (proper) and the Dnieper, registered significantly higher population growth between 1959 and 1970. This trend (southward migration) was continued in 1970-7, when these two regions, especially the South, grew much faster than the republic as a whole. The North East and Central West on the other hand were increasing at a below-average rate. The growth rate of the Central West was about half the republican aver­age, whereas the North East region grew slightly faster in 1959-70 but dropped behind the Central West in 1970-7. As will be seen later, both these regions owed their gains to the two main cities of their respective areas, Kiev and Kharkiv. Some oblasts located in these areas of Ukraine were actually declining in population. The West, on the other hand, appears to have stayed close to the republic average: it was very slightly

In the post-1959 period urban population (Table 2) has grown relatively slowly in the Donets basin, but one should take into account this region’s already high degree of urbanization. The North East has also been relatively high on urbanization indices owing to the location in this area of the major city of Kharkiv. Moreover, there appears to have been a continual growth of urban population also in Poltava and Sumy oblasts. The urban population of the Dnieper region showed only a slight increase, but this region which includes Dnipropetrovske, Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih, remains the second most highly urbanized part of Ukraine.

The South has increased its urban population considerably throughout the postwar period, improving its share of Ukraine’s urban population from 12.9 per cent in 1959 to 14.7 per cent in 1977. There has also been an above-average increase of urban population in the Central West (Kiev, Vinnytsia, Cherkasy and Chernihiv being among the fastest growing cities), and in the West, where the population of such oblast capitals as Rivne, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivske and Lutske increased especially rapidly.¹⁵ On the whole, however, Western Ukraine has remained a rural region and as late as 1977, less than 40 per cent of its population lived in the cities (Table 3). The figures for the Central West region were higher—50 per cent—due to the presence of Kiev in the region.

In the intercensal period of 1959 to 1970 the Ukrainian share in the population of the Ukrainian SSR declined from 76.8 to 74.9 per cent. In the republic as a whole the Ukrainians increased by 9.7 per cent while the overall population increased by 12.6 per cent; with a gain of 28.7 per cent, the Russians were maintaining a rate of growth three times higher than the Ukrainians. In the component regions, the rates of growth of Ukrainians and Russians varied, but the general trend was toward a decline of the Ukrainian majority (Table 4).

In view of these figures, brief comments on the ethnic scene may be in order. First, we note that in only one major region, the West, did the Ukrainians improve their relative strength; conversely, the Russian population declined, albeit very slightly. Secondly, Ukrainians seem to be facing the prospect of becoming a minority in two important areas: the Donets basin and the South (particularly the former). In relative terms, the Ukrainian population was growing in the South and Dnieper regions but the Russian population was increasing at an even faster rate. This illustrates our earlier comment about the southern migration of population. One should not exclude the possibility that the census of 1979 will reveal an improved Ukrainian standing in the Crimea or Kherson oblast, if not the South as a whole; such an outcome will depend on the intensity of

TABLE 1. POPULATION OF UKRAINE AND REGIONS, 1939-77

186 Roman Szporluk

source: Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda. Ukrainskaia SSR (Moscow, 1953), Table 5; Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1970 goda (Moscow, 1973), vol. 1, Table 2; Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 60 let. Iubileinyi Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1977), 52. Donets basin: Voroshylovhrad and Donetske; South: Odessa, Crimea, Kherson, Mykolaiv; Dnieper: Dnipropetrovske, Zaporizhzhia, Kirovohrad; North East: Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy; Central West: Kiev, Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytsky; West: Lviv, Rivne, Volyn, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivske, Transcarpathia, Chernivtsi.

note: 1939 figures do not include Transcarpathia.

TABLE 2. URBAN POPULATION OF UKRAINE AND REGIONS, 1939-77

Cities: Since World War II

source: Itogi 1959, Table 5; Itogi 1970, vol. 1, Table 2; Nar. khoz. 1977, 52.

note: 1939 figures do not include Transcarpathia. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding off.

Oo

Russification and the volume of Russian in-migration from other areas of Ukraine and the USSR. Finally, Ukrainian strength has declined in

TABLE 3. URBAN POPULATION AS PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL POPULATION OF UKRAINE AND REGIONS. 1939-77

source: Tables 1 and 2.

note: 1939 Figures do not include Transcarpathia.

TABLE 4. ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF UKRAINE AND MAJOR REGIONS

Ukrainians Russians

source: Itogi 1959, Table 54; Itogi 1970, vol. 4, Table 8.

note: Percentage change 1959-70 is based on absolute figures; the figures for 1959 are taken as equal to zero.

traditional centres of Ukrainian life: the North East, which includes Poltava and Sumy oblasts (this may be due to Russian immigration to the cities of the region, Kharkiv, Poltava and others), and the Central West. The latter had a 30 per cent increase in Russian population from 1959 to 1970 due mainly to in-migration.

The 1959 census revealed that the cities and towns of Ukraine possessed Ukrainian majorities (Table 5). The overall majority was only 61.53 per cent, but significant nevertheless. The Russian population was virtually half the size of the Ukrainian (29.9 per cent), and the number of Russian-speakers was much higher. Other nationalities traditionally present in Ukrainian urban life were much reduced in size by 1959.

TABLE 5. ETHNIC COMPOSITION OF URBAN POPULATION: UKRAINE, WEST, CENTRAL WEST AND EAST AND SOUTH, 1959 AND 1970

source: Itogi 1959, Tables 53 and 54; Itogi 1970, vol. 4, Tables 7 and 8. ^a East and South includes North East, Donets basin, Dnieper and South regions.

The distribution of Ukrainians in the cities was uneven. They were strongest in the West (a remarkable change from the pre-1939 era) and had a clear lead also in the Central West, where they constituted a majority in Kiev, but were much weaker in the cities of the East and South, traditionally more urban and more Russian. The regions of the South, Donets basin, Dnieper and North East together registered a Ukrainian majority of 57.9 per cent. Donetske oblast had a Ukrainian majority of 52 per cent in 1959, Voroshylovhrad one of 53 per cent. In Odessa oblast Ukrainians had a plurality of 44 per cent. In the Crimea, a new Ukrainian region (added to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954), 18 per cent of the urban population were Ukrainians. Ukrainians were particularly weak in the principal cities: Odessa (42 per cent), Kharkiv (47 per cent), Donetske (51 per cent) and Dnipropetrovske (59 per cent); they were better represented in the smaller towns, hence their regional totals were higher than those in the centres.¹⁶ The population of the Central West had a Ukrainian share of 71.2 per cent, while Kiev itself reported 60.1 per cent (an impressive gain over the 1926 figure). In the West, there was a Ukrainian majority in Lviv (60 per cent), and an even higher one in the cities of Ternopil, Lutske, Rivne and Ivano-Frankivske, a plurality in Chernivtsi, and in Uzhhorod Ukrainians accounted for 50 per cent of the population.¹’

By 1970, the year of the next census, the Ukrainians had slightly increased their 1959 majority from 61.5 to 62.9 per cent. Considering that the urban population grew by more than one third, mostly through migration, one has to conclude that there was either an inordinately large inflow of Russians into Ukraine or widespread assimilation of Ukrainians into the Russian nationality. At any rate, the Ukrainian component of the urban population increased at a rate barely above the average and in the East and South fell somewhat below the average. (See Table 5.)

Focusing on the oblasts where regional centres are located, we note that Ukrainians suffered a relative decline in the cities of Donetske, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovske; they improved their position in the oblast of Odessa, without, however, achieving a majority there; and they registered substantial growth in Kiev (city and oblast combined) and Lviv (Table 6). (The national composition of individual cities, revealed for 1959 by Naulko, has not been disclosed for 1970, except for Kiev.)

Perhaps more important and in the long run more threatening to Ukrainian survival in the cities was the disclosure that among the Ukrainians, the Russian speakers were increasing more rapidly than those who declared Ukrainian as their mother tongue. (Again, this suggests a high degree of linguistic assimilation which some scholars consider a transitional stage toward a change in ethnic self-identification.) From 1959 to 1970 the former increased by 53.4 per cent, the latter by 34.2 per cent. In the West (especially) and Central West the proportions were reversed. However, in the eastern and southern regions it was clear that urban Ukrainians were becoming Russified linguistically on a mass scale: those assimilated increased at a rate three times higher than those who retained the Ukrainian language. In the oblasts of Donetske and Voroshylovhrad (the Donets basin) there was actually an absolute, not merely a relative, decline in the number of Ukrainians who considered Ukrainian as their

TABLE 6. UKRAINIANS AND RUSSIANS IN URBAN POPULATION OF SIX OBLASTS (IN PERCENTAGES)

source: Itogi 1959, Table 54; Itogi 1970, vol. 4, Table 8.

Cities: Since World War II

þ Kj

TABLE 7. URBAN UKRAINIANS IN THE DONETS BASIN (BY NATIVE LANGUAGE), 1959-70

source: Itogi 1959, Table 54; Itogi 1970, vol. 4, Table 8.

Roman Szporluk

native language; simultaneously the total urban population of the region increased by almost 17 per cent (Table 7).

A question arises: since the Donets basin is also the most highly urbanized region of Ukraine (see Table 3), will urbanization elsewhere in the republic be accompanied by a similarly intensive linguistic assimilation of Ukrainians? The answer, it seems, depends on which parts of Ukraine are involved. The rates registered for the oblasts of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovske and Odessa in 1959-70 are presented in Table 8.

TABLE 8. UKRAINIAN URBAN POPULATION IN THE OBLASTS OF KHARKIV, ODESSA and Dnipropetrovske: percentage rates of change 1959-70

source: Calculated by the author from sources in Table 7,

In Kharkiv, from 1959 to 1970, assimilated Ukrainians grew 3.7 times faster than those who considered Ukrainian their native language. In Dnipropetrovske, they increased 2.5 times as fast, but in Odessa the rate was much slower at 1.3, perhaps because of the rapid growth of the Ukrainian urban population in that oblast (50.5 per cent), compared with a 30 per cent increase in Dnipropetrovske, 22.4 per cent in Kharkiv and even lower rates in the Donets basin. One may further surmise that the migrants in Odessa were coming from less assimilated areas of Ukraine, such as the Central West or West. These figures confirm the strong assimilationist currents in the South and East, but they also suggest that the Donets basin represents an extreme case.

We have yet, however, to find data that would positively disprove the example of the Donets basin as a trend-setter in the urban development of the Ukrainians. The case of Lviv may provide such evidence (Table 9). In Lviv the situation was dramatically reversed: the increase in the numbers of non-assimilated urban Ukrainians exceeded that of Russified Ukrainians by twenty times. If official statistics are to be believed, the cities of Lviv oblast were less Russified linguistically in 1970 than they had been in 1959. In order to forecast the likely course of linguistic assimilation in those parts of Ukraine which lie outside the zone which we designated as “South and East,” one should turn to Kiev. Let us look at the urban population of Kiev oblast together with that of the city itself. (As Kiev is the capital of the republic, information about the city is more

TABLE 9. URBAN UKRAINIANS IN LVIV OBLAST BY NATIVE LANGUAGE,

1959-70

source: See Table 7.

readily available than is the case with other cities of Ukraine.) We note that Ukrainians increased in Kiev and in the urban population of Kiev oblast at a higher rate than the total average; also, that those Ukrainians who declared Ukrainian as their native language increased twice as fast as those who preferred Russian. In consequence, by 1970, the proportion of Ukrainians, and among them those who declared Ukrainian as their mother tongue, was higher than in 1959. By disaggregating the data on Kiev oblast from the combined figures in Table 10, we discover that in the towns of the oblast the total population increased by 47.6 per cent, Ukrainians by 49.6, including Ukrainian-Speakers by 50.0 and Russian speakers by 38.3 per cent. (The Russian urban population outside Kiev increased by 53.4 per cent, which exceeded the Ukrainian total.) Table 11 presents data for the city of Kiev itself. This summary also includes data on the Russian segment of Kiev’s population in order to compare the posi­tion of both principal nationalities in the Ukrainian capital.

In the city of Kiev, the Ukrainians were more Russified linguistically in 1959 than the “provincials.” This is not surprising: we saw in the South and East that the larger a city is, the greater is its Russian population, and the higher the proportion of assimilated Ukrainians. But by 1970 some­thing rather unexpected had happened in Kiev: Ukrainian speakers emerged as the fastest growing segment of the city’s population in the intercensal period. Those assimilated Ukrainians maintained a rate of growth somewhere near 40 per cent of that of the non-assimilated. Moreover, the Ukrainians increased faster than did the Russians and by 1970 Kiev had not only a Ukrainian majority—it had acquired this by 1959—but also a Ukrainian-speaking majority, or, to be more precise, a majority had declared to the census takers that they considered Ukrainian to be their first language. (Besides 77.4 per cent of the Ukrainians, self-declared Ukrainian speakers included nine thousand non-Ukrainians, mostly Russians, Poles and Jews.)

TABLE 10. URBAN UKRAINIANS IN KIEV OBLAST, INCLUDING THE CITY OF KIEV, 1959-70

source: See Table 7. ^aAs percent of total urban population.

Cities: Since World War II

How is one to explain this development which differs so significantly from the tendency prevailing in the East and South? Of the several

TABLE 11. UKRAINIANS AND RUSSIANS IN KIEV. 1959-70

source: See Table 7. ^aAs percentage of all Ukrainians.

explanations that come to mind, two appear most sound. One is that both Kiev and Lviv had experienced especially marked population displacement during the war and thus their population underwent a more fundamental change that the rates of growth would indicate (see Table 12). Lviv lost its Jewish and Polish citizens and although it had a Russian in-migration after 1944, this was not large enough to prevent the city adopting a definitely Ukrainian—new Ukrainian—appearance. Kiev also suffered heavy population losses in the war and seems to have drawn heavily on the Ukrainian countryside for its post-1945 growth. In this respect the situation after 1945, including the intercensal period of 1959-70, was very different from that before 1939, when the fastest growing cities were located in the East and when the population growth could not draw on migration from the western regions of Ukraine (at that time located in Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia). Iu. I. Pitiurenko has compiled a statistical table estimating the volume of migration to the cities cited in Table 12.“ We have adapted his data to produce Table 13.

Since 1945, in contrast to the prewar period when its growth rates were rivalled and even surpassed by Kharkiv and Donetske, Kiev has maintained a migration-based growth rate larger by far than any of its competitors for the status of the primate city in Ukraine. This may in turn have been due to such geopolitical factors as the westward expansion of the Ukrainian SSR, which opened up a densely populated hinterland, to the improved security after the establishment of socialist states in East-Central Europe and last but not least, to Kiev’s role as Ukrainian capital. (We remember that Kiev did not become capital of the Ukrainian SSR until 1934. Had all those bureaucrats, apparatchiks, media people and so on, who customarily live and work in the capitals, not moved from Kharkiv to Kiev between

TABLE 12. POPULATION OF SUPRA-REGIONAL (INTER-OBLAST) CENTRES IN UKRAINE, 1939-77

Cities: Since World War II

source: Nar. khoz. 1977, 61-3, 65 and 67.

^aZaporizhzhia is shown here because by 1959 it had outdistanced Lviv and improved its lead over Lviv in 1970 and 1977.

^bIn 1939, Kryvyi Rih was number 11 (after three cities in the Donets basin), in 1959-number 9, in 1970-number 7 (surging ahead of Lviv), but by 1977 it had dropped behind Lviv and became number 8, while Lviv regained seventh place.

1934 and 1939, Kharkiv would have been the largest city of Ukraine in 1939.)

TABLE 13. POPULATION INCREASE DUE TO IN-MIGRATION IN SELECTED UKRAINIAN

CITIES, 1926-39 and 1959-70 (THOUSANDS)

source: Iu. I. Pitiurenko, Rozvytok mist ³ miske rozselennia v Ukrainskii RSR (Kiev, 1972), 121.

Besides the administrative aspect of city-building, one might distinguish a more clearly national contributory element in the rise of Kiev. V. V. Pokshishevsky has noted that certain cities of the Soviet Union have become “the centers of national culture and ethnic consciousness.”¹⁹ For Ukrainians, Kiev has been such a city: it houses the most important research institutes, publishing houses, libraries, editorial boards of journals and theatre companies. Such institutions are to be found also in Lviv (al­though on a smaller scale, especially in so far as the press and publishing are concerned), but much less so in Donetske or even Kharkiv. The cities in the East and South are mainly industrial and transportation centres, as well as seats of research and teaching in technology and science. For political reasons, work in the latter fields is carried out in the Russian lan­guage. Thus in contemporary Ukraine only two cities are both large and (relatively) Ukrainian: Kiev and Lviv. Of these two the more important is Kiev, since Lviv cannot aspire to national leadership. (In 1569, when Kiev and Lviv found themselves within one polity, Lviv appears to have been the more important; but it was also the larger then.) To what degree is Kiev the primate city of Ukraine in terms of urban hierarchy, not just as an administrative centre?

Table 14 applies Mark Jefferson’s index of primacy—a ratio of population of the largest city to the combined population of the second and third cities in a given country or region—to Ukraine. The results suggest, first, that Kiev still does not possess a commanding lead over its immediate rivals, and second, that its relative position has nonetheless been improving throughout the entire period under discussion. (In 1939 four cities of Ukraine were more than half Kiev’s size; in 1977 only Kharkiv remained so, and Odessa was only half the size of Kiev.)

TABLE 14. PRIMACY INDEX FOR UKRAINE

source: Table 12.

^aKharkiv and Donetske (Donetske was number 3 in 1959).

Some scholars believe that Kiev is too small to be the central city of Ukraine. Chauncy Harris believes that in 1959 Kiev was “only about a third as large as would be expected from the network of 301 cities and towns of more than 10,000 population in the Ukraine.”²⁰ Peter Woroby, on different grounds, also concludes that Kiev is undersized.²¹ Russell B. Adams, in a recent study, divides Ukraine into two major regions in his classification of the Soviet Union’s regions: one centred in Kiev (including Odessa and Lviv), the other based in Kharkiv and consisting of the industrial eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.²² On the basis of the 1959 census, Harris divided Ukraine into five urban-network regions (Kiev, Kharkiv, Donetske, Odessa and Dnipropetrovske).²³ David J. M. Hooson seems to have taken the most affirmative view of Kiev’s rise to pre-eminence in Ukraine:

The regaining of Kiev’s capital function in 1934 has ensured a steady growth, in spite of its destruction during the War. It is a minor edition of Moscow in some ways.... Its industrial structure is well balanced.... Its historical significance in the Russian nationality, State and Church make it something more than a politico-regional centre for the Ukraine. Kharkov may conceivably grow larger, but cannot now challenge Kiev’s preeminent position, anymore than Milan can supplant Rome as capital of the Italian State.²⁴

Conclusions

This writer does not consider himself competent to evaluate the processes of urbanization in postwar Ukraine from the point of view of demography, geography, economics or urban studies. As a political historian, he is interested to discover that after 1945 the Ukrainians appeared in the cities of Ukraine in numbers large enough to make it pos­sible to modify that old distinction between “Ukrainian village” and “Russian city,” or “Ukrainian village West” and “Russian urban East.” The East has clearly remained Russian: but the West, including the “Central West,” has become more urban and more Ukrainian in its urban component. This outcome has to be connected with the territorial unification of the Ukrainian nation during the Second World War. Secondly, a historian notes the rise of Kiev to a position of primacy (even if precise definitions of what constitutes primacy may be lacking) and he connects this with the westward shift of the Ukrainian SSR. He observes with interest the re-emergence of the Lviv-Kiev axis in Ukrainian life—after a three-hundred-year break. Finally, the example of Kiev and Lviv suggests that it may be possible even under the political conditions now prevailing in the USSR to emancipate the Ukrainians from the status of “younger brother” to the Russians: certain parts of Ukraine are both urbanized and remain loyal to the Ukrainian language. It might be argued that the contemporary phenomenon of dissent in Ukraine is a result of this fact. Our discussion suggests that behind the individual figures represent­ing that phenomenon there may well exist a sizable constituency of socially mobilized (urbanized) but linguistically non-assimilated people.

Notes

1. See Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, ed. V. KubijovyC₁ 2 vols. (Toronto, 1963-71), 1: 200-7; V. Kubiiovych [KubijovyC], ^uNatsionalnyi sklad naselennia Radianskoi Ukrainy v svitli Sovietskykh perepysiv naselennia z 17. 12. 1926 ³ 15. 1. 1959,” offprint from Zbirnyk prysviachenyi pamiati Z. Kuzeli (Paris 1962) (Zapysky NTSh 169); and S. G. Prociuk₁ “Human Losses in the Ukraine in World War I and II,” The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States 13, no. 35-6 (1973-7): 23-50.

2. V. I. Kozlov, Natsionalnosti SSSR (Etnodemograficheskii obzor) (Mos∞w, 1975), 109. I am grateful to Bohdan Krawchenko, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, for drawing my attention to this item of information in Kozlov’s book. According to Professor Krawchenko, this is the first published disclosure of the ethnic composition of the Ukrainian SSR in 1939.

3. Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda. Ukrainskaia SSR (Moscow, 1963), Table 53; Kozlov, Natsionalnosti, 109; and Kubiiovych₁ ^uNatsionalnyi sklad,” 6.

4. Ukraine: Encyclopaedia, 1: 212.

5. Calculated by this writer from Itogi 1959, Table 54; for a breakdown by historic regions (such as Volhynia and Galicia), see Ukraine, 1: 219. Ethnic composition of Western Ukraine by oblasts (in 1930 and 1970) is given by Y. Bilinsky₁ “The Incorporation of Western Ukraine,” in R. Szporluk, ed., The Influence of East Europe and the Soviet West on the USSR (New York, 1975), 204.

6. Kubiiovych, ^uNatsionalnyi sklad,” 6, and Ukraine, 1: 216. For the occupational breakdown of the Ukrainians, Russians, Jews and Poles in prewar Ukraine (Soviet and Western), see Ukraine, 1: 174-5.

7. Calculated by this writer from Itogi 1959.

8. Itogi 1959, Table 6; see also Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 60 let. Iubileinyi Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow, 1977), 59-68, for a listing of all Soviet cities with a population of 50,000 and above in 1939, 1959, 1970 and 1977. (This source will be cited later as Nar. khoz. 1977.)

9. M. Jefferson, “The Law of the Primate City,” Geographical Review 29 (1939), 227 and 231.

10. Ibid., 228.

11. Itogi 1959, Table 1.

12. J. A. Armstrong, “The Ethnic Scene in the Soviet Union,” in E. Goldhagen, ed., Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union (New York, 1968), 14-15. See also my own discussion of Ukrainian-Russian relations in “Russians in Ukraine,” in P. J. Potichnyj, ed., Ukraine in the Seventies (Oakville, Ontario, 1975), 195-217.

13. Armstrong, “Ethnic Scene,” 15.

14. For a comprehensive treatment of urbanization in Ukraine, see P. Woroby, “Effects of Urbanization in the Ukraine,” The Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States 13, no. 35-6 (1973-7): 51-115.

15. Nar. khoz. 1977, 59-68.

16. V. I. Naulko, Karta suchasnoho etnichnoho skladu naselennia Ukrainskoi RSR (Kiev, 1966).

17. Figures in Bilinsky, “Incorporation,” 207.

18. Pitiurenko has an interesting classification of Ukrainian cities in terms of their functions. He places Kiev in a special category and then in the class of oblast centres, which he terms “multi-functional cities,” he distinguishes a group of multi-functional centres of supra-regional importance. These supra-regional centres are Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovske, Odessa, Donetske and Lviv. See Iu. I. Pitiurenko, Rozvytok mist ³ miske rozselennia v Ukrainskii RSR (Kiev, 1972), 80-1.

19. V. V. Pokshishevsky, “Urbanization and Ethnodemographic Processes,” Soviet Geography 13, no. 2 (February 1972): 116-19. More recently Pokshishevsky has written on the role of ethnic composition as a factor in the rise of the service sector in the cities. See “Differences in the Geography of Services and the Characteristics of Political Structure,” Soviet Geography 16, no. 6 (June 1975): especially 359-64.

20. C. D. Harris, Cities of the Soviet Union (Chicago, 1970), 134-5.

21. P. Woroby, “Effects of Urbanization,” 113. He notes, however, an improvement in the rank of Kiev between 1959 and 1970 (114).

22. R. B. Adams, “The Soviet Metropolitan Hierarchy: Regionalization and Comparison with the United States,” Soviet Geography 17, no. 5 (May 1977): 314-15 and ff.

23. Harris, Cities, 135.

24. D. J. M. Hooson, The Soviet Union: People and Regions (Belmont, Cal., 1966), 163. This was confirmed by the preliminary results of the 1979 census which were published when this work was in press. Kiev further strengthened its leading position among Ukrainian cities (it had 2.144 million inhabitants compared with Kharkiv’s 1.444 million and Dnipropetrovske’s 1.066 million), and the Ukrainian share in its population rose to 68.7 per cent even though in Ukraine as a whole Ukrainians dropped from 74.9 per cent in 1970 to 73.6 in 1979. See Roman Solchanyk’s analyses: “The Ukraine and Ukrainians in the USSR: Nationality and Language Aspects of the Census of 1979,” Radio Liberty Research no. 100/80, 11 March 1980, and “The Ukrainization of Kiev Continues: Partial Results of the 1979 Census,” Radio Liberty Research no. 68/80, 15 February 1980.