Ethnic Cleansing and Neostalinism

Making of Modern Ukraine 17

This lecture focuses on the transition from war to postwar in the Soviet Union. The Holocaust, the murder of Ukraine’s Jews by the Germans and by local collaborators, changed the population structure of the country, as did ethnic cleansing by Ukrainian nationalists and wartime and postwar Soviet policies of ethnic cleansing. Territory that had been in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania was annexed by the USSR, creating a larger Soviet Ukraine. The republic as a whole, however, was treated with suspicion by Stalin and the postwar leadership. Although Ukrainians suffered more than Russians under German occupation, and although Russians were no less likely to collaborate than Ukrainians, Stalin defined Russians as the heroes and the Ukrainian republic as a terrain of risk. Although Ukraine was actually Hitler’s main target, Stalin created propaganda stereotypes that could suggest, when politically useful, that Ukrainians had been on the wrong side of the war. Although there were also Russian nationalists fighting on the side of the Germans, Stalin made of “Ukrainian nationalism” a weapon for the continued punishment of the republic. The Russians were to be the main victors and the main victims, a stereotype that redounds down the decades to this day. Stalinist russocentrism was meant as a weapon of centralization and the restoration of Stalinism after the war; it is a tool of militarism and imperialism now. No one would recall that more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans than Americans, British, and Frenchmen — taken together. Ukrainian culture was again suppressed; contained as it was now almost entirely in the USSR, it became largely invisible.

Crimea. The relationship between Ukraine and Crimea was a subject of an earlier leacture on the eighteenth century. In the next we will discuss the transfer of Crimea from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine.

The video is here and the podcast version is here or here. This is lecture number 17, despite the different title that might be given on those websites.

Reading:

Plokhy, Gates of Europe, chapter 24.

Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation, chapter 9.

Terms:

Nikita Khrushchev

Leonid Brezhnev

OUN: Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera, Melnyk

UPA: Ukrainian Insurgent Army

Galicia, Volhynia

Cheka

Dekulakization

Deportations by Cheka, apparatus

Dekulakization, peasant action

Poles, Latvians, Koreans 37-38

March 1944 180,014 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact

Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Czechoslovakia

Chernivtsi, Romania/Northern Bukovina/Paul Celan

Galicia and Volhynia

Galicia: Habsburgs and then Poland

Volhynia Poland

Urbanization