When Hitler began his dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1938, Transcarpathians took advantage of the situation to press for autonomy (October) and even proclaimed the short-lived independent Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine under President Avhustyn Voloshyn (15 March 1939). Nazi Germany, however, assigned Transcarpathia to its Hungarian ally, and in the spring of 1939, Hungarian troops easily overran the Ukrainian defences in what was one of the precursor conflicts of the Second World War.
Finally, Romania spent much of the inter-war period trying to integrate Bessarabia. This effort involved agrarian reform, the construction of roads and railroads and the promotion of literacy. Naturally, the government sought in the process to promote a sense of Romanian patriotism in a backward borderland. Still, the province remained poor. Its only significant export, wine, diminished when the province was separated from the Russian regions. Large minorities such as Russians, Ukrainians and Jews complained about their treatment during the Romanian cultural offensive, and even many Moldavians found it difficult to switch from the Cyrillic alphabet to Latin script. (In addition, the modern Romanian language borrowed most new political, technical and scientific terminology from French, while Moldavians were accustomed to using the Russian words.)[305] All in all, not just minorities, but the Moldavians themselves made it difficult for Romania to 'nationalise' the region.
The Soviet Union, meanwhile, offered its own answer to the challenge of modern nationalism. The Bolshevik state attempted to disarm nationalism by promoting the forms of minority nationhood - national territories, languages, cultures and elites.[306] Duringthe 1920s and early 1930s, the policy of korenizatsiia (nativisation) resulted in the creation of national republics or autonomous units, as well as in the state's major investment in the development of non- Russian cultures. The Ukrainian and Belorussian Socialist Soviet (after 1936, Soviet Socialist) Republics were among the beneficiaries of these policies.
Although promulgated in 1923, the policy of Ukrainisation began in earnest in 1925 with the appointment of Lazar Kaganovich as the General Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) ofUkraine (CP(b)U). Although Kaganovich and his successor Stanislav Kosior were certainly not sympathetic to the
Ukrainian national cause, they felt it necessary to enforce the 'party line'. The practical guidance of Ukrainisation fell to two remarkable people's commissars of education, Oleksandr Shumsky and Mykola Skrypnyk, both subsequently denounced as nationalist deviationists. Still, the results of state-run Ukrainisation were impressive. Between 1924 and 1933, the Ukrainians' share among CP(b)U members increased from 33 to 60 per cent. Literacy increased markedly, and, by i929, an impressive 97 per cent of elementary-school students were receiving instruction in Ukrainian. In contrast to 1922, when only one Ukrainian newspaper was in existence, in 1931, 89 per cent of the republic's newspapers were published in Ukrainian.[307] A number of political emigres returned, including the leading historian and former head of the Central Rada, Mykhailo Hrushevsky.
Like the rest ofthe USSR, however, in the late i920s Soviet Ukraine began to experience a violent transition to rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation of agriculture. Stalinist social transformations went hand in hand with the denunciation of 'national communists' (i928), the trial of the fictitious Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (1930) and the condemnation of Skrypnyk (who shot himself in 1933). The state's murderous grain collection policies in the republic resulted in the catastrophic famine of i932-3, which took an estimated 4 to 6 million lives. As new archival research demonstrates, Stalin and his associates blamed problems with grain collection on nationalist sabotage within the CP(b)U.[308] This made them even more determined to starve the Ukrainian peasantry into submission. At the same time, active Ukrainisers were condemned as nationalists and many of their reforms reversed, including Skrypnyk's standardisation of the Ukrainian language, which was allegedly designed to distance it from Russian. By the late i930s, the authorities returned to the promotion in Ukraine of the Russian language and Russian culture.
In the Belorussian SSR, a similar policy of Belorussianisation was implemented during the 1920s. Commissar of Education and later president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, Usevalad Ihnatouski, initiated the Belorus- sianisation drive, but he was also among the first victims of the eventual hunt for Belorussian nationalists. (Ihnatouski committed suicide in 1930.)[309]Like Ukraine, the Belorussian SSR in the 1930s saw an official effort to bring the national language closer to Russian. The Great Terror of the late 1930s completed the elimination of the generation of radical activists for whom socialism and non-Russian nation-building were two potentially compatible projects.
Unlike Ukraine and Belorussia, Soviet Moldavia was not made a union republic, but only an autonomous republic within the Ukrainian SSR (1924). From the very beginning, a Moldavian autonomy on the eastern bank of the Dniester, in Transnistria, was designed as a political magnet for Moldavians across the river, in Bessarabia. Ethnic Moldovans constituted only 30 per cent of the republic's population (Ukrainians had a plurality, at 48.5 per cent), but their existence was important for supporting the Soviet claim on Bessarabia. Following the high-point of Moldavianisation under Commissar for Education Pavel Chior (1928-30), this policy suffered setbacks. In a puzzling turn of events specific to Moldavia, the authorities first ordered the switch from the traditional Cyrillic script to the Latin (1932) to stress the unity of Moldavian and Romanian languages and then, the return to the Cyrillic alphabet (1938) as closer to Russian.
Before the dust settled after the reversal of nativisation policies, the Soviet nationalities policy changed again with the annexation of new territories in the west. Just as mature Stalinism established the Russians' priority status in the Soviet family ofnations, Stalinist ideologues came to need an ethnic argument again in their defence of the new conquests. The secret protocol attached to the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact assigned Estonia, Latvia, the eastern part of Poland, and Bessarabia to the Soviet sphere of influence (Lithuania was added in September). The Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine and Belorussia in September 1939 was staged as the historic reunification of the Ukrainian and Belorussian nations, respectively.[310] Stalinist ideologues used the same argument to wrest Bukovina from Romania in June 1940 and Transcarpathia from Czechoslovakia in 1945. Ironically, in view of allprevious and subsequent efforts at establishing a Soviet Moldovan nationality, the annexation of Bessarabia in June 1940 was likewise justified by this land's allegedly Ukrainian character.[311]Still, Bessarabia became part of the Moldavian autonomous republic. Western Ukraine and western Belorussia joined the existing Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, while Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became new union republics.
During what post-Communist historians in these countries now refer to as the 'first Soviet occupation', Stalinist authorities did not have time to complete either a collectivisation of agriculture or industrialisation. They did, however, nationalise existing industry and large farms. While not infringing the rights of local cultures - and in fact, promoting Ukrainian and Belorussian cultures in the former Polish-controlled territories - the bureaucrats carried out mass deportations to Siberia and Soviet Asia of former government officials, bourgeoisie, intellectuals and other 'unreliable elements'. In tiny Estonia, the number of deportees reached 60,000; in Western Ukraine, estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.[312] The Katyn forest in Belorussia became the symbol of another Stalinist crime, the secret execution of thousands of Polish POWs.
306
Terry Martin,
309
Ivan S. Lubachko,
310
Serhy Yekelchyk, 'Stalinist Patriotism as Imperial Discourse: Reconciling the Ukrainian and Russian "Heroic Pasts", 1938-45',
312
Taagepera,