Anti-Ukrainian Sentiment - Soviet Union

Soviet Union

"In their time Marko Kropyvnytsky, Ivan Tobilevych, Mykola Sadovsky, Maria Zankovetska, Panas Saksahansky all should have been hanged. Then no one would even have heard about Ukraine."

Under Soviet rule in Ukraine, a policy of korenization was adopted after defeat of the Ukrainian People's Republic and initially supported Ukrainian cultural self-awareness. This policy was phased out in 1928 and terminated entirely in 1932 in favor of general Russification. In 1929 Mykola Kulish wrote a theatrical play "Myna Mazailo" where the author cleverly displays the cultural situation in Ukraine. There was supposedly no anti-Ukrainian sentiment within the Soviet government, which began to repress all aspects of Ukrainian culture and language as contrary to the ideology of Proletarian Internationalism. In 1930 in Kharkiv took place the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine process after which number of former Ukrainian politicians or their relatives were deported to the Middle Asia. During the Soviet era, the population of Ukraine was reduced by the artificial famine called Holodomor in 1932-33 along with the population of other nearby agrarian areas of the USSR. Many prominent Ukrainians were labelled as nationalists or anti-revolutionaries, and many were repressed and executed as enemies of the people.

In January 1944 during a session of Politbureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Stalin personally gave a speech "About anti-Lenin mistakes and nationalistic perversions in a film-tale of Alexander Dovzhenko "Ukraine in flames".

On July 2, 1951 the Communist newspaper Pravda published an article "On Ideological Perversions in Literature" in regards of the Volodymyr Sosyura's poem "Love Ukraine" where it stated the following: "This poem could have been signed by such foes of the Ukrainian people as Petliura and Bandera ... For Sosiura writes about Ukraine and the love of it outside the limits of time and space. This is an ideologically vicious work. Contrary to the truth of life, the poet sings praises of a certain ‘eternal’ Ukraine full of flowers, curly willows, birdies, and waves on the Dnipro."