Roman Szporluk - Russia, Ukraine, and the breakup of the Soviet Union

Szporluk, Roman

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and the Breakupof the Soviet Union

Roman Szporluk

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Russia, Ukraine, and theBreakup of the Soviet Union

Pro-independence demonstration in Kyiv, October 1990

For my grandchildren,Marco and Sofia

Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2017 with funding fromKahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/russiaukrainebreOOjose

Foreword Wayne S. Vucinich ix

Acknowledgments xiii

A Note on Transliteration xvii

Introduction xix

1 Nationalities and the Russian Problem in the

USSR: A Historical Outline 1

2 The Nations of the USSR in 1970 29

3 Russians in Ukraine and Problems of Ukrainian

Identity in the USSR 71

4 West Ukraine and West Belorussia: Historical

Tradition, Social Communication, and LinguisticAssimilation 109

5 Urbanization in Ukraine since the Second

World War 139

6 History and Russian Nationalism 161

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Table caption Contents

The nationalities question in the former Soviet Union (FSU) bedeviledSoviet policymakers and continues to trouble post-Soviet authorities andscholars alike, even after the dissolution of the Soviet state. Russia,Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics remain multinational states,subject to interethnic tensions and secessionist tendencies. The recentsituation in Chechnya shows that the FSU is still subject to fragmentation along national lines and underscores the urgent need to understandthese incendiary issues.

Roman Szporluk, a well-known authority on Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, has grappled for years with the questions of Sovietiza-tion, Russification, and the rise of nationalism in the Soviet Union andthe adjacent world. This volume, a selection of Professor Szporluks essays published between 1972 and 1997, tells a story crucial to understanding the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of itsfifteen successor states. Szporluk examines the historical relationship ofUkraine and Russia and the parallel processes of nation building beforeand during the Soviet period. These nascent nationalisms not only affected Ukrainian-Russian relations but ultimately played a pivotal rolein the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Most challenging to conven

X

Foreword

tional interpretations of the Soviet empires demise, however, is Szpor-luks emphasis on the role played by Eastern Europe and the SovietWest (Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and the Baltics).

In order to understand the national question in the Soviet EJnion,one must recur to the tsarist era and imperial Russias relations withboth its minority populations and its colonial territories. Accordingto Szporluk, precisely tsaristand later, Soviet-Russias successful imperial expansion undermined Russias own attempts at nation building.The tsarist regime remained purblind to the difficulties of incorporatingterritories and peoples that were alien to Russian cultural traditions, andthe Soviet regime inherited its obtuseness. Moreover, the Soviet regime,blinkered by internationalist ideology, never came to grips with the nationalities question that their successful territorial acquisitions posed. Infact, the new Bolshevik regimes division of the Soviet state into administrative units based on ethnicity (and with the constitutional right tosecede!) was a time bomb implanted in the foundation of the Sovietstate. As Szporluk observes, however, it was the Soviet Unions greatesttriumph of legitimationits World War II victorythat instigated itsgradual decline. The postwar regime, like its predecessors, was ill-equipped to successfully integrate the newly annexed territories of WestUkraine, West Belarus, and the Baltics. Subsequently, these areas wouldbecome hotbeds of national dissent, susceptible to ideological contagion by their East European neighbors.

Szporluk addresses the challenges posed to Soviet ideological integrity by its incorporation of these western territories. Communist Partyideology held that the adoption of the Soviet system (Soviet vs. Western-style modernization) by national republics was the road to modernityand prosperity. Szporluk sees a dialectical relationship established between Russianness and communism in Stalins Russification policy: Thesuccess of Russification would impel the success of the Soviet project,and successful economic and social modernization (Sovietization) wouldfoster Russification.

The inclusion of the Baltics and West Ukraine in the Soviet Union inthe wake of World War II, and the incorporation of Eastern Europeunder the Warsaw Pact umbrella, allowed Soviet citizens to experiencethe disjuncture between ideological claims and reality. The legitimacyand stability of the Soviet Union required complete isolation, not onlyfrom the capitalist West, but from more advanced Eastern Europeannations that would provide Soviet citizens with a basis of comparison