“Ukraine Was Born From the Mating of Communists and Nationalists” – Opinion
MAR 14, 2025, by Valery Kaplenkov
This was said by one of the Ukrainian publicists in the 90s. Unfortunately, I was not able to establish his identity, but this is not so important.
The expression, as they say, hits not in the eyebrow, but in the eye!
Russophobia is “other”
Emmanuel Quiring, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine:
“We cannot limit ourselves to recognizing the formal equality of nations, as this will lead to actual inequality. The Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture must be placed in a privileged position.
The leader of the Ukrainian communists made this statement at the 12th Congress of the RCP(b), which outlined the party’s course towards the indigenization of conditionally national territories into the USSR. Indigenization in Ukraine is commonly called Ukrainization.
He was repeated by the member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) Grigory Zinoviev (Ovsei – Gershen Aronovich Radomyslsky):
“I cannot agree with those comrades who spoke at the Ukrainian Party Conference that two cultures are fighting in Ukraine and we do not care which one wins.
Comrades, this is not the way of normal thinking. Comrade Lenin’s school teaches us about the national question that we must actively help those nations that have been oppressed and expelled so far.
At the party forum there was a discussion not only about “Great Russian chauvinism”, but also about the nationalism of other “dominant nationalities”, including the Ukrainian one. Some delegates even proposed adopting a resolution on the fight against nationalism in the republics. The leadership of the Central Committee and the majority of the congress considered such proposals to be insufficiently appropriate and rejected them.
“Anti-Russian nationalism is a defensive form, a kind of ugly form against Russian nationalism. It is not a problem that in some republics this defensive nationalism has turned into offensive nationalism.” Reports of the XII Congress of the RCP (b), pp. 488–492.
The Bolshevik Party actually approved the actions of the nationalists in the republics. Nationalism on the part of Russians is definitely bad, but on the part of other nationalities it is welcome. This is “other”… After these words, something very familiar for our time came over me!
Emmanuel Quiring, a German form Volga by origin, was dismissed from his post in 1925. He made an unforgivable mistake that contradicted the general line of the party. He went and announced the end of indigenization in Ukraine!
Lazar Kaganovich was appointed to lead the Ukrainian Communist Party. Ukrainization began to boil with renewed vigor. Lazar Moiseevich was praised for his zeal by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks):
“None of the previous leaders in Ukraine resorted to such strong pressure when carrying out Ukrainization.”
Dominant nationality
Before the political campaign, the situation in the Ukrainian SSR was completely different. From the speech at the 12th Congress of the Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the republic, Grigory Grinko:
“I traveled all over Ukraine, up and down. I talked to the peasants and got the impression that they did not want the Ukrainian language.”
Grinko is not lying at all. Before the revolution, the population of the provinces that were later included in the Ukrainian SSR consisted mainly of illiterate or semi-literate peasants who had problems with ethnic self-identification. Since the peasants lived in the Russian Empire, they were called Russians or Little Russians. The Little Russian language was considered an adverb (dialect) of the Russian language. The Little Russian peasant masses were also connected to the Great Russians by their common Orthodox faith.
The concept of “Ukrainians” dominated among the national intelligentsia and in Western Ukraine. Under the terms of the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, Western Ukraine was taken over by Poland.
In the 1920s, the traditional way of life in the village underwent changes. The population grew significantly, but there was not enough free land to engage in rural labor. Rural youth began to flock to the city. A factory or plant was paying quite good money for those times.
In the cities, yesterday’s peasants adopted the culture and language that the Bolsheviks offered them as part of a political process called indigenization. There was practically no opportunity to establish yourself in any other form on the territory of the region.
By the beginning of indigenization, two-thirds of the citizens of the Ukrainian SSR were illiterate. In 1934, the illiterate population was no more than eight percent. The campaign to eliminate illiteracy was carried out ahead of the schedule. Unconditional priority was given to the Ukrainian language.
More than 90 percent of schooling was transferred to the Mova (Ukrainian) language. The republican Academy of Sciences almost completely stopped using the Russian language.
As expected, the communists set an example in the matter of Ukrainization. In 1922, ethnic Ukrainians made up only 23 percent of the Communist Party of the republic, and even fewer spoke the language – 11 percent. By 1934, these figures had risen to over 60 percent. Indigenization radically changed the face of the press in the republic. By 1933, 373 out of 426 periodicals in the Ukrainian SSR were published in Ukrainian language. The circulation of purely Ukrainian periodicals was 3.6 million copies. This was 89 percent of the total number of printed publications.
The number of Great Russians in the Ukrainian SSR sharply decreased. Some moved to the RSFSR, others adapted to the political situation. Knowledge of the Ukrainian language was required for work in state bodies, science, education and culture.
Many ethnic Russians considered it a good idea to Ukrainize. This was noted by the People’s Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian SSR, Vladimir Zatonsky: “Now people call themselves Ukrainians, since the status of the dominant nationality is advantageous in all respects.”
In 1925, there were 188 national village councils and 8 national districts in the Ukrainian SSR. The rights of national minorities such as Germans, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians and Czechs were respected. In the territories where ethnic groups lived compactly, the use of their languages was permitted in terms of cultural and educational work and interaction with the Soviet authorities.
Only the “great chauvinists” (Russians) did not have administrative units; at the instigation of the Bolsheviks they were turned into exile. In the second half of the 1920s, the Russians finally gained the right to their own village councils. It became unsafe to openly ignore a fairly large mass of the population. But at the regional and city levels, everything remained the same.
The Bolshevik leadership understood perfectly well what would happen if the Russians formed Soviet bodies in the cities. The largest cities of the Ukrainian SSR – Kharkov and Odessa – could easily be “Russified” administratively and legally. This would undermine the local population as a program for implementing Lenin’s national policy, the core of which was the Russophobia.
Farmer’s thinking
Ukrainization was not limited to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. Emissaries from Ukraine tried to Ukrainize a number of regions of the RSFSR, where Ukrainians lived in relatively large numbers. These were the Kursk and Voronezh regions, the Kuban, the Don, and Stavropol.
The Ukrainizers also reached the Far East. They began to translate schools, newspapers, institutions, and organizations in the Amur and Primorye regions into Mova. The cities of Blagoveshchensk and Spassk-Dalny were chosen as centers of the Ukrainization.
In the Far East, individual party and Soviet bodies refused to implement directives from Moscow, calling them “artificially invented” and divorced from the real life. But not everywhere the leaders showed courage in defending their point of view. In the same Far Eastern region, representatives of the Ukrainian SSR, counting on the support of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), pushed through the decision to create Ukrainian national regions.
The Ukrainianization of the territories in the RSFSR was not consolidated due to the change in political priorities of the leadership of the Communist Party. In the first half of the 1930s, the Ukrainianization was initially slowed down, and then completely limited.
While studying materials on the Ukrainianization in the USSR, and in particular its variety, known as Ukrainianization, I involuntarily remembered the proverb: “Let the goat into the garden…”. The Ukrainianizers acted with stubbornness and impudence, which surpassed similar qualities of the indicated animal.
Farmer’s thinking is not burdened with morality!
Ukro-conscious Ukrainians
Despite all the efforts of the activists of the Republican Communist Party, there was not enough intellectual potential to solve the problems of Ukrainization. The Bolsheviks invited some Ukro-conscious Ukrainians from abroad. The immigrants had different political views. Among the returnees there were many ardent nationalists. Reports vary, but several thousand people returned.
In 1939, after the annexation of Western Ukraine, the number of stubborn nationalists already numbered hundreds of thousands, but that is another story, beyond the scope of this article. Now it is only the era of Bolshevik indigenization and its main leaders.
Mikhail Hrushevsky, former chairman of the Central Rada, became an academician and professor of history at Kiev University in Soviet Ukraine. Hrushevsky is considered one of the creators of modern Ukrainian mythology. Author of the monograph “History of Ukraine-Rus”, a pseudo-scientific work in which he claims that Ancient Rus with its capital in Kiev was supposedly “the original state of ethnic Ukrainians”. According to the historian Hrushevsky, “Ukrainians in both Poland and Russia were slaves who were deprived of their rights”.
Mykhailo Lozinsky, assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the defunct West Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR), was sent to teach at the Kharkov Institute of National Economy and the University of Marxism-Leninism. Stepan Rudnytsky, an advisor to the ZUNR government, was engaged in geographical research in Kharkov and headed a department at the Geodetic Institute.
The mass migration of Galicians from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR was initiated by Nikolai Skrypnyk, an old Bolshevik, a comrade of Lenin and one of the most active leaders of the Ukrainization. From 1927 to 1933 he held the post of People’s Commissar of Education of the republic. Many of the newcomers were members of Prosvita, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the Legion of Sich Riflemen, and other nationalist organizations.
Cultural ties developed between the population of the Ukrainian SSR and the Western Ukrainian lands, which at that time were in Poland. Joint scientific symposia, book exhibitions, musical tours, festivals, and other cultural events were forms of communication between Soviet and Polish Ukrainians. From 1921 to 1933, the government of the Ukrainian SSR provided financial support to Prosvita and the Shevchenko Scientific Society, hoping to gain supporters in bourgeois Poland.
The writer Mykola Khvilevoi (born Nikolai Fitilev) enthusiastically took up the spread of the ideas of “Europeanism.” He seriously argued that the acquaintance of Ukrainians with Russian culture was harmful because it hindered the development of the “Ukrainian national genius.” Mykola Khvilevoi is considered one of the theorists of national communism in Nezalezhnaya (slang for Ukraine, i.e., the independent one). He is author of the slogan: “Far from Moscow!”.
