Ukrainians in Kuban - Forced Russification of Kuban Ukrainians

Forced Russification of Kuban Ukrainians

In 1930 the Ukrainian People’s Komissar Mykola Skrypnyk as one of those involved in solving the nationalities question within the USSR put forward suggestions to Joseph Stalin:

• 1) That the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR be valid on the territory of the whole USSR
• 2) That the territories of Voronezh, Kursk, Chornomoriya, Azov, Kuban regions be administered by the government of the Ukrainian SSR
• 3) That Ukrainian colonies in the Russian Federation and other Soviet Republics be given national-political autonomy (VS. p 36)

However, the Ukrainization policies of Kuban were abruptly reversed at the end of 1932. The December 14, 1932 publication of the grain procurement resolution of CK VKP(b) and the Council of People's Commissars demanded the immediate transfer of all official paperwork and publishing of the "ukrainized" districts of Kuban into Russian language "more intelligible for the people of Kuban".

In 1932-33, the policies of forced collectivization of the Ukrainian population of the Soviet Union, which caused a devastating famine that greatly affected the Ukrainian population of the Kuban.

The mass repressions of the 1930s also resulted in the arrest and execution of over 1500 Ukrainian speaking intellectuals from Krasnodar. Many teachers of Ukrainian language were arrested and exiled from the region. By 1932 all Ukrainian language education establishments were closed. The professional Ukrainian theatre in Krasnodar was closed. All Ukrainian toponyms in the Kuban, which reflected the areas from which the first Ukrainians settlers had moved, were changed. The names of Stanytsias such as Kiev was changed to "Krasnoartilyevskaya", and Uman to "Leningrad", and Poltavska to "Krasnoarmieiskaya". The physical destruction of all aspects of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian population, and the resultant ethnic cleansing of the population, the terrorist tactics of Russification, the Holodomor of 1932-33 and 1946-7 and other tactics used by the Russian government lead to the catastrophic fall in population that associated themselves with Ukrainian ethnicity in the Kuban. Official Russian statistics of 1959 state that Ukrainians made up 4% of the population, in 1989 – 3%.

The number of self-identified Ukrainians in Kuban fell between 1927 to 2002 from 1,222,140 (55% of the 1927 total) to 61,867 (0.9% of the 2002 total).