War Losses

The war’s extensive mass atrocities triggered the construction of new frontiers. Of the nearly forty million deaths in Europe, approximately 70 per cent occurred on the eastern front, where the Germans waged an extremely brutal war.⁴ Almost twenty-seven million Soviet citizens (including men, women, and children) died during this conflict.

This estimate includes “servicemen and partisans who were killed in action or died of wounds, ordinary civilians who died of hunger or disease or were killed during air raids, artillery shelling and punitive actions, and prisoners of war and underground fighters who were tortured and shot in concentration camps.”⁵ Of these twenty-seven million, the armed forces of the USSR suffered a loss of 8.7 million men and women between 1941 and 1945. But the civilians represented the overwhelming majority of the Soviet war dead, over 18.3 million, according to this conservative account.⁶ Most of the civilians, as chapter 8 demonstrates, did not die as an accidental by-product of the war. The Nazis planned to annihilate the Jewish and Romani populations, and as Heinrich Himmler, the head of the dreaded SS, asserted, they arranged to bring the civilian population in the East “to a minimum.”⁷ In addition to these losses, the Germans forcibly drafted nearly five million Soviet men and women to work as slave labourers in Germany.⁸ Twenty- five million became homeless.⁹

The most brutal areas of the Soviet-German conflict in the East took place in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. Civilian losses in Poland reached at least 18 per cent of its pre-war population, and in Belarus around 25 per cent.¹⁰ By the end of the war, half of Belarus’s population experienced death, expulsion, deportation, or evacuation, the highest of any European country.¹¹ The territory of the Ukrainian SSR constituted about half of the area of the Soviet Union under German occupation and experienced the destruction of 40 per cent of its natural wealth.¹² If Belarus lost a higher percentage of its civilian population than any other European state or Soviet republic, Ukraine lost the highest absolute number.¹³

According to the best available analysis, the Ukrainian SSR experienced a total of 13.8 million human losses, including a net out-migration of 2.3 million, a deficit in births of 4.1 million, and a loss of 7.4 million due to exceptional mortality, including the murder of approximately 1.7 to 1.8 million Jews.

The Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, the German-Soviet War, the German occupation, and Soviet repressions during the war produced these catastrophic results.¹⁴

Although Ukraine lost approximately 15 per cent of its total population, demographers - according to Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver - cannot estimate the direct losses individual Soviet national groups experienced during the chaos of war.¹⁵ Soviet authorities did not provide a breakdown by nationality of Soviet casualties during or after the war. They identified the war’s victims as “Soviet” citizens. Because of the republic’s geographic position at the western borders of the USSR, Ukrainians (who comprised nearly 76 per cent of the republic’s population in 1939) must have suffered disproportionately more casualties within their own republic than any other national group, with the exception of the Jews in Ukraine and the Belarusans in Belarus. Despite Stalin’s post-war claims, in fact, more Jewish (above all), Belarusan, and Ukrainian civilians more likely had been killed on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory than Russians.¹⁶

In addition to deaths of millions of civilians and military personnel from Ukraine between 1939 and 1945, this republic also experienced waves of deportations, evacuations, and forced labour conscriptions, which removed millions from its soil. Not all of the deportees, evacuees, or conscripts survived the war, and, of those who did, not all returned home.¹⁷ Migrants from other republics replaced them. The war and population transfers, as Anderson and Silver pointed out, resulted in a disproportionate change in the sex ratios of many non-Russian nationalities in the western republics and “appears to have accentuated and accelerated the process of Russification” in the post-war period.¹⁸

The absence of large numbers of males forced the Soviet state to attract as many as possible from outside Ukraine, especially in administrative positions.

With the enormous losses the Soviet Union experienced, the government and party concentrated on replacing men in the urban centres, not the countryside, which in turn drove the changes in the national composition of the Ukrainian SSR over the long term. Many of those who administered Ukraine before the war and who were evacuated in the summer of 1941 returned. The majority of newcomers and evacuees must have identified themselves as Russians. This expedient solution would bring more Russians into Ukrainian cities in the post-war period and reinforce the number of Russian speakers in them.

The brutal war produced radical demographic changes. While the number and percentage of those who identified themselves as Ukrainians increased slightly between the 1939 and 1959 censuses, the number and percentage of Russians increased dramatically. In 1939, Russians constituted 13 per cent of the population of Ukraine (or 4,175,300). In 1959, as the

first post-war census recorded, they comprised 17 per cent (or 7,090,810). Ukraine’s Jews suffered the most extensive losses during the war and some migration to Poland after the war. They experienced a sharp decline in their percentage of the total population between the two censuses, from 5 per cent of the republic’s population (1,532,776) in 1939 to 2 per cent in 1959 (840,311). In light of the war’s extermination of the Jewish population in Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s Jews in 1959 must have arrived after the war ended or returned after their evacuation. The Polish population increased only slightly, from 357,710 in 1939 (before the war) to 363,297 in 1959. (These censuses did not take into account the Soviet Union’s acquisition of a large number of Poles in 1939 and their repatriation to Poland in 1945-6.) The 392,458-strong German population in 1939 did not appear as a national category in the 1959 census.¹⁹

Besides the devastation unleashed by the war, the population of the Ukrainian SSR experienced other demographic convulsions between the Soviet censuses of 1939 and 1959. Border changes and coerced population exchanges within the Ukrainian SSR, between Ukraine and Poland, and between Ukraine and the rest of the USSR also helped transform the national composition of the Ukrainian SSR in the post-war period. In April 1944, after the Red Army retook the Crimea, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar population, most of them to Uzbekistan.²⁰ The NKVD also removed the majority of Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks from the peninsula. Following in the footsteps of the deportations of the German and Polish populations in the 1930s, these wartime expulsions targeted national groups the authorities considered disloyal to the Soviet state. But the post-war population transfers overshadowed the ones conducted before and during the war.

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Source: Liber G.O.. Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954. University of Toronto Press,2016. — 453 p.. 2016

War Losses

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