TOPIC 6

SEMINAR 6

THE INTERWAR YEARS

Part I: Soviet Ukraine in the interwar period (1920-41)

As a result of World War I and the revolution Ukrainian territories were divided among four states. Bukovyna was attached to Romania. Transcarpathia was joined to the new Czechoslovak Republic. Poland got Galicia and western Volhynia. The lands east of the Polish border formed Soviet Ukraine.

The territories under Bolshevik control were formally organized as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. That was a tactical response to the rising Ukrainian nationalism. By declaring the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic the Bolsheviks wanted to show that they respected Ukrainians’ national rights. In such a way they planed to reduce the influence of Ukraine’s nationalistic forces. The city of Kharkiv was made the capital of Ukraine. It remained Ukraine’s main city until 1934 when Kyiv became capital again.

On Dec. 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian republic (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) – was proclaimed.[1] Soviet republics were formally independent but in reality they were under full control of a highly centralized political organization – the Communist Party apparatus. All orders from Moscow were compulsory for all “sovereign” republics.

NEP

The major task facing the Bolsheviks after the war was to rebuild the economy. The policy of “War Communism” – based on nationalization of all enterprises, forced labor, state redistribution of goods, and the forcible requisition of food – caused economic chaos. In 1921, industrial production in the Ukrainian lands was only one tenth of the prewar figure, and trains ran just once a week between the major cities. The forcible requisition of extra food and the prohibition of trade did not stimulate peasants to produce food beyond their needs. They did not sow much grain. Thus, when drought came in 1921 it caused a famine that killed over a million of peasants in Ukraine and the Volga region in Russia.

Dissatisfied with Bolshevik agrarian policy peasants rebelled in many regions of Ukraine and Russia. There were strikes in Petrograd and even the marines of the Kronshtadt fortress, the cradle of the Bolshevik revolution, staged an uprising. Faced with such problems Vladimir Lenin in March 1921 introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which denationalized small-scale industry and trade and replaced grain requisitions with a fixed tax that enabled the peasant to sell the surplus of food on the free market. The policy of creating collective farms was also abandoned. The results were quite good. By 1927, the Ukrainian economy had recovered to the prewar level.

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