Why was the Crimea transferred from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954?
Following the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the Soviet authorities dissolved the autonomous republic, turning the Crimea into an ordinary province within the Russian SFSR. The share of ethnic Russians among the population, which stood at 49.6 percent in 1939, shot up to over 70 percent in the postwar years because of the Tatars' disappearance and a substantial migration from Russia proper.
The only other significant ethnic group on the peninsula was now the Ukrainians, who formed just over 20 percent of the population during the first postwar decade.Nevertheless, in February 1954, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, initiated the transfer of the Crimea from the Soviet Russian to the Soviet Ukrainian republic. He was probably motivated by two considerations. First, the exact accommodation of ethnographic borders seemed far less important in the 1950s than it did immediately after the revolution. The Soviet leaders saw nationalism as having been largely disarmed and were convinced that the merging of ethnic identities into a single, all-union (read: Russian) one was close at hand. Efficient administration of more compact economic regions appeared far more important at the time. The Crimean Peninsula presented a reasonable case on these grounds because it had no land connection to Russia but was linked to Ukraine in the north by the narrow Perekop Isthmus, through which trains packed with vacationers and most goods arrived. The peninsula also received its electricity and fresh water from Ukraine.
Khrushchev's other motive likely involved pleasing the Ukrainian elites by enlarging their domain. An ethnic Russian whose working-class family moved to the Donbas when he was 14, Khrushchev began his party career in the Ukrainian SSR. After returning to Ukraine as its party boss, a post that he held between 1938 and 1949, Khrushchev considered the republic his power base, where he sought to keep the local functionaries happy and promoted many of them to important positions in Moscow.
Of course, the official pronouncements did not mention this second reason, emphasizing instead the symbolic occasion for the transfer: the tercentenary of the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav, which brought the Ukrainian Cossack polity under the tsar's protection.
In the official interpretation, the transfer served as a token of eternal Russo-Ukrainian friendship. According to the Soviet Constitution, the procedure involved the executive organ of the Russian republic's parliament proposing the transfer, the executive of the Soviet parliament approving it, and the Ukrainian counterparts accepting it. However, after the Soviet collapse, some Russian politicians questioned the legality of a procedure that did not entail full parliamentary discussions, even though such a process would have been meaningless in Soviet times.Furthermore, the decrees did not spell out that the city and naval base of Sevastopol was also included in the transfer. Sevastopol's situation was unclear because it had enjoyed special status as an “exempt” municipality since 1948, which meant that it was not subordinated to provincial authorities and received funding directly from Moscow. After 1954 the Soviet authorities used elections and various party structures to place the city more explicitly under Ukrainian administration but never really legalized the de facto transfer of its special economic-administrative status from Russia to Ukraine. This, too, seemed insignificant in Soviet times, but this lapse paved the way for Russian-Ukrainian discord after the collapse of the communist system.