Ukrainian War of Independence - Aftermath

Aftermath

In 1922, the Russian Civil War was coming to an end in the Far East, and the Communists proclaimed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia. The Ukrainian Soviet government was nearly powerless in the face of a centralized monolith Communist Party apparatus based in Moscow. In the new state, Ukrainians initially enjoyed a titular nation position during the nativization and Ukrainization periods. However by 1928 Joseph Stalin had consolidated power in the Soviet Union. Thus a campaign of cultural repression started, cresting in the 1930s when a massive famine – the Holodomor – struck the republic, claiming several millions of lives. The Polish-controlled part of Ukraine had a different fate – there was very little autonomy, both politically and culturally – but it was not affected by famine. In the late 1930s the internal borders of the Ukrainian SSR were redrawn, yet no significant changes were made.

The political status of Ukraine remained unchanged until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany in August 1939 that allowed the Red Army to enter Poland and incorporate Volhynia and Galicia into the Ukrainian SSR. In June 1941, Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union and conquered Ukraine completely within the first year of the conflict. Following the Soviet victory in World War II, to which Ukrainians greatly contributed, the region of Carpathian Ruthenia – formerly a part of Hungary before 1919, of Czechoslovakia from 1919 to 1939 and again of Hungary between 1939 and 1945 – was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR, as were parts of pre-war Poland. The final expansion of Ukraine took place in 1954, when the Crimea was transferred to Ukraine from Russia with the approval of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.