Ukrainizatsiya

Why Ukraine was the test case

Ukraine was the most populous republic after Russia, and its language line ran between town and countryside: cities, industry and administration used Russian, villages used Ukrainian. To the Bolsheviks this looked like the class question and the national question laid on top of each other. Reaching the peasantry meant speaking its language, and that meant changing the language of the party and the administration themselves.

The policy moved fast. By the late 1920s most primary schools taught in Ukrainian, the Ukrainian share of newspapers and book titles had risen steeply, and the proportion of Ukrainians in party and state posts rose with it.

What reversed it

The turn came at the end of 1932. The Central Committee and Sovnarkom decisions of 14 and 15 December dealt with grain procurement and nationality policy in the same breath. Ukrainization outside the republic, in the Kuban above all, was described as a channel used by bourgeois nationalist elements and abolished, and Ukrainian-language papers and schools there were switched back to Russian. Inside the republic the policy was curtailed under the language of 'correct implementation'.

The purge that followed struck the cultural world. The writer Mykola Khvylovy killed himself in May 1933 and Mykola Skrypnyk, the commissar of education who had driven Ukrainization, in July. Pavel Postyshev was sent as plenipotentiary to reorganise the party and the cultural apparatus. The generation lost in these years later came to be called the Executed Renaissance.

How it entangles with the famine

The famine was under way in Ukraine at the same moment, and the December documents covered grain seizure and nationality policy together. Interpretation divides here.

Scholarship that treats the famine as a deliberate act against Ukrainians as a nation (the Holodomor) takes this simultaneity as decisive: the measures that squeezed out grain and the measures that rolled back national-language institutions sat in the same file. Scholarship that treats it as the outcome of an all-Union procurement policy and a failed collectivisation points to comparable or greater mortality in Kazakhstan and the Volga, and reads the retreat in nationality policy as flowing from the leadership's perception of rural resistance as a nationalist channel rather than from a plan of extermination. The archival opening has not settled the argument, and official designations still differ from state to state.

What is not in doubt is that after 1933 Ukrainization disappeared as a policy goal, and that its place was taken by national operations of the NKVD and by an increasingly Russocentric narrative.