The War in Ukraine — Interwar Soviet Ukraine (1922-1939)

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization--in effect a second Russian revolution--which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic's borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum's compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nation s, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers?who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context?produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories. Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

In the early 1920s the Bolsheviks, who were overwhelmingly urban, proletarian, and Russian, believed that rapid industrialization would dissolve the non-Russian national identities and create a solid base of support for the new political order. By the end of the decade, however, the social changes initiated by rapid economic development strengthened national assertiveness. This book analyzes the precarious relationship between Soviet legitimacy-building and the consequences of rapid industrial development in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the most populous non-Russian republic in the USSR, during the 1920s and 1930s. The author shows how the interplay between industrialization, urbanization, and Soviet preferential policies produced a modern, urban Ukrainian identity. This, he argues, explains why the Stalinist leadership changed its course on the nationality question in the 1930s and gave precedence to the Russians in the USSR.

In 1917, the Russian Empire disintegrated into a number of local regimes, presaging what would happen to Austria-Hungary the following year. In contrast to what happened in the Habsburg lands, Lenin's Bolsheviks, self-proclaimed anti-imperialists, managed to reconquer most of Russia's former colonies but discovered that they could not create stable regimes without granting some concessions to national aspirations. This led in 1923 to the adoption of a policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization): official sponsorship of non-Russian cultural development and active recruitment of non-Russians into the regimes of the so-called borderlands of the empire. The twenty-three million Ukrainians who found themselves under Soviet rule after the defeat of the independent Ukrainian Peoples Republic largely accepted the opportunities afforded by Ukrainization, the local version of korenizatsiia, and pushed it farther than any of its counterparts. Many prominent émigrés returned to help develop their national culture and sparked a flowering of aesthetic and intellectual creativity unique in Ukrainian history. Ukrainians refer to this brief period as the rozstriliane vidrodzhennia, the executed rebirth, because of its abrupt and violent suppression in the 1930s. Ukrainization originally meant active recruitment of Ukrainians into the Communist Party and Soviet state. Soon it became apparent that it had actually legitimized a certain measure of Ukrainian aspirations within the Party itself. Ukrainian communists came to demand far greater self-determination than Moscow would tolerate. Those who made such demands in the 1920s were labelled "national deviationists" and cast beyond the pale, but not before the issues they raised engulfed the regime in a major political crisis.

Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s focuses on the economic and social problems in Ukraine, particularly during the war years, and the collectivization of agriculture in Western Ukraine in the late 1940s. It compares the imposition of the Stalinist system in Eastern Ukraine in the 1930s to that in Western Ukraine in the following decade, using recently released Soviet archival information and historical works.

The Soviet Union was the first of Europe's multiethnic states to confront the rising tide of nationalism by systematically promoting the national consciousness of its ethnic minorities and establishing for them many of the institutional forms characteristic of the modern nation-state. In the 1920s, the Bolshevik government, seeking to defuse nationalist sentiment, created tens of thousands of national territories. It trained new national leaders, established national languages, and financed the production of national-language cultural products.This was a massive and fascinating historical experiment in governing a multiethnic state. Terry Martin provides a comprehensive survey and interpretation, based on newly available archival sources, of the Soviet management of the nationalities question. He traces the conflicts and tensions created by the geographic definition of national territories, the establishment of dozens of official national languages, and the world's first mass "affirmative action" programs. Martin examines the contradictions inherent in the Soviet nationality policy, which sought simultaneously to foster the growth of national consciousness among its minority populations while dictating the exact content of their cultures; to sponsor national liberation movements in neighboring countries, while eliminating all foreign influence on the Soviet Union's many diaspora nationalities. Martin explores the political logic of Stalin's policies as he responded to a perceived threat to Soviet unity in the 1930s by re-establishing the Russians as the state's leading nationality and deporting numerous "enemy nations."

Breaking the Tongue examines the implementation of the Ukrainization of schools and children's organizations in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Based on declassified materials from eight Ukrainian and Russian archives, Stalin's Empire of Memory, offers a complex and vivid analysis of the politics of memory under Stalinism. Using the Ukrainian republic as a case study, Serhy Yekelchyk elucidates the intricate interaction between the Kremlin, non-Russian intellectuals, and their audiences. Yekelchyk posits that contemporary representations of the past reflected the USSR's evolution into an empire with a complex hierarchy among its nations. In reality, he argues, the authorities never quite managed to control popular historical imagination or fully reconcile Russia's 'glorious past' with national mythologies of the non-Russian nationalities.Combining archival research with an innovative methodology that links scholarly and political texts with the literary works and artistic images, Stalin's Empire of Memory presents a lucid, readable text that will become a must-have for students, academics, and anyone interested in Russian history.