History of Ukraine: Encyclopedia II - History of Ukraine - The 20th century

History of Ukraine - The 20th century

When World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia shattered the Austrian and Russian empires, Ukrainians were caught in the middle. Between 1917 and 1918, several separate Ukrainian republics manifested independence, the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, the Directorate, the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian People's Republic. However, with the defeat in the Polish-Ukrainian War and then the failure of the Piłsudski's and Petliura's Kiev Operation, by the end of the Polish-Soviet War after the Peace of Riga in March 1921, the western part of Ukraine had been incorporated into Poland, and the larger, central and eastern part became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian SSR.

The Ukrainian national idea persevered during the inter-war years, and Ukrainian culture even enjoyed a revival due to Bolshevik concessions in the early Soviet years (see Korenization. Moreover large territory with traditionally mixed population in the east and south became part of the Ukrainian republic. However, in the early 1930s, the Soviet Ukrainianization policies were abruptly reversed..

To satisfy the state's need for increased food supplies and finance industrialization, Stalin instituted a program of collectivization of agriculture, which profoundly affected Ukraine, often referred to as the "breadbasket of the USSR". In the late 1920s and early '30s the state compounded the peasants' lands and animals into collective farms. Starting in 1929 a policy of enforcement was applied, using regular troops and secret police to confiscate lands and material where necessary.

Many resisted, and a desperate struggle of the peasantry against the authorities ensued. Some slaughtered their livestock rather than turn it over to the collectives. Wealthier peasants were labeled "kulaks", enemies of the state. Tens of thousands were executed or deported to labour camps.

Forced collectivization had a devastating effect on agricultural productivity. Despite this, in 1932 the Soviet government increased Ukraine's production quotas by 44%, ensuring that they could not be met. Soviet law required that the members of a collective farm would receive no grain until government quotas were satisfied. The authorities in many instances exacted such high levels of procurement from collective farms that starvation became widespread. At least four million starved to death in a famine, called the Holodomor in Ukrainian.

The Soviet Union suppressed information about the famine, and as late as the 1980s admitted only that there was some hardship because of kulak sabotage and bad weather. Today, its existence is accepted. Some historians consider the famine of 1932–33 to be the unavoidable consequence of Stalin's program of industrialization and collectivization. Others maintain that the famine was an avoidable, deliberate act of genocide.

In 1939 German and Soviet troops divided the territory of Poland. In 1940, after the Soviet demands, Romania ceded Bessarabia and the northern Bukovina. Ukrainian SSR incorporated Bessarabia's northern and southern districts and the northern Bukovina and ceded the western part of Moldavian ASSR to the newly created Moldavian SSR. Thus, following the partition of Poland and forced consessions extracted from Romania, most of predominantly Ukrainian populated territories in the Eastern Europe were united with the Ukrainian SSR

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 (see: Operation Barbarossa), many Ukrainians, particularly in the west, initially regarded the Nazis as "liberators", and some hoped to establish an autonomous Ukrainian state. Their hopes did not come to realization under the Nazi rule and their movement was brutally crushed. However, most Ukrainians utterly resisted the Nazi onslaught from its start and a partisan movement immediately spread over the occupied territory. Also some elements of the Ukrainian nationalist underground formed a Ukrainian Insurgent Army that fought both Soviet and Nazi forces along with being involved in driving out or murdering much of the Polish and Jewish population in the Western regions, especially in Volhynia. After 1944 the surviving Polish Population was expelled. In some western regions of Ukraine, Ukrainian Insurgent Army survived underground and continued the resistance against the Soviet authorities well into the 1950s, though many Ukrainian civilians were murdered in this conflict by both sides.

The Nazi administrators of conquered Soviet territories made little attempt to exploit the population's possible dissatisfaction with Soviet political and economic policies. Instead, the Nazis preserved the collective-farm system, systematically carried out genocidal policies against Jews, and deported many Ukrainians to forced labour in Germany. In their active resistance to the Nazi Germany, the Ukrainians comprised a significant share of the Red Army and its leadership as well as the underground and resistance movements.

Total civilian losses during the War and German occupation in Ukraine are estimated at seven million, including over a million Jews shot and killed by the Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian collaborators. Jews were also targeted by Ukrainian nationalists in Nazi-backed pogroms, such as the ones in Lviv that killed over six thousand people.

The great number of civilians fell victim to atrocities, forced labor, and even massacres of whole villages in reprisal for attacks against Nazi forces. Of the estimated eleven million Soviet troops who fell in battle against the Nazis, about a fourth (2.7 million) were ethnic Ukrainians. Moreover Ukraine saw some of the biggest battles of the war starting from the encirclement of Kiev (later acclaimed as a Hero City) where more than 660,000 Soviet troops were taken captive, to the fierce defence of Odessa, to the victorious storming across the Dnieper river.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The 20th century", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki