Why did the Bolsheviks create a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union, and how did they determine its borders?
The Bolsheviks came to power in the age of imperial collapse, when the principle of national self-determination was being increasingly established as the foundation of a new world order.
Lenin and Stalin saw nationalism as a transitory phenomenon, characteristic of late capitalist society. Yet they could not ignore the popular slogan of self-determination, especially in the conditions of the multinational Russian Empire. In their theoretical writings both before and during the Revolution, the Bolshevik leaders accepted the right of national minorities to self-determination up to and including the creation of nation-states, but with a crucial stipulation. They inserted the hypocritical addendum that the party would be guided by the “interests of the working class” in deciding whether to support the separation of nations from empires. Ideally, the Bolsheviks would have preferred to transform the Russian Empire into a strong unitary state that they would govern in the name of the proletariat. In practice, however, they were forced to accept the separation of Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, and to adopt a federative structure for what remained of the empire.In the Ukrainian case, the Bolshevik policies were reactive from the outset. After the Ukrainian revolutionary parliament, the Central Rada, proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic in Kyiv in November 1917, the Bolsheviks responded with the creation of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets in the eastern city of Kharkiv in December 1917. Its existence was soon forgotten amidst the chaos of the civil war, which was followed by the founding in 1919 of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (the word order later changed to “Soviet Socialist” in accordance with the Constitution of 1936)—theoretically an independent state in military alliance with Soviet Russia but, in reality, a part of a united Bolshevik political space.
Regardless of the lack of real sovereignty, it is significant that the Bolsheviks felt the need to create and maintain such a polity. In 1922 Soviet Ukraine became one of the four founding (theoretically equal) republics of the Soviet Union.The non-communist Ukrainian People's Republic also established a territorial precedent that later determined the borders of its Soviet equivalent. In its negotiations with the Russian Provisional Government, the Ukrainian Central Rada had laid claim to nine provinces of the former Russian Empire where ethnic Ukrainians constituted a majority, while agreeing to exclude the ethnically non-Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula from the southernmost Taurida province. This geographic definition of Ukraine was used when the Central Powers signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk establishing peace between Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918. In defining its borders, the Ukrainian SSR also used the old administrative borders and ethnicity of the population's majority within these units.
In the mid-i92os, the old provinces were divided into a larger number of districts, and the Bolshevik authorities took this opportunity to adjust the borders among the various Soviet republics. They tried to factor in populations' ethnic makeup as well as economic rationality, but in the end they made only minor adjustments, as opposed to a complete border makeover. The most notable change involved transferring the important port city of Taganrog (the birthplace of playwright Anton Chekhov) from Soviet Ukraine to Soviet Russia. There were significant pockets of ethnic Ukrainian population left within the Russian republic and small enclaves of Russians settled compactly in Ukraine.
Beginning in the mid-i92os, the Bolshevik party introduced measures to bridge the gap between its primarily Russian and Jewish urbanite membership and the Ukrainian peasant masses. These measures were part of the larger policy of indigenization, which the party officially adopted in 1923.
Stalin had originally developed the theory of indigenization as a means of defusing national sentiment and making the Soviet Union attractive to colonized nations abroad. According to this policy, the state promoted local cultures and education in the language of indigenous nationalities in the republics, while pursuing an affirmative-action program to increase indigenous participation in Soviet republican administrations. In its application to Ukraine, the policy of indig- enization was known as “Ukrainization." It had a twofold aim of making Soviet power less alien to the Ukrainian peasantry and presenting Soviet Ukraine as a cultural beacon for the “oppressed" Ukrainians in Poland and other Eastern European countries. By the early 1930s, education and publishing in Ukrainian were flourishing, and the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians in the ranks of the Communist Party in Ukraine increased from 23 percent in 1922 to 60 percent in 1933.5The Ukrainization policy made the Ukrainian SSR more than a nominally Ukrainian polity, even if the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow held the ultimate authority. The decade of Ukrainization also made Soviet Ukraine look attractive to Ukrainians abroad. Many political emigres, including the former head of the Central Rada, the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, returned to Soviet Ukraine. At the same time, however, Stalin was growing concerned about the potential for Ukrainization to promote political nationalism in
the republic instead of disarming it. What spurred him into taking action was peasant resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine.