Thread by @RealLoriSpencer

Even now, many pages in the history of the Soviet Union remain a mystery.

Documents released shortly before the dissolution of the #USSR confirmed that many of its statesmen, politicians, diplomats, as well as military and intelligence officers, had been born in #Ukraine.

In the very first years of the Soviet Union’s existence, Ukrainian Bolsheviks played an important role in building what became the world's largest ever state.

They engaged in the ‘Ukrainization’ that aimed to replace Russian language and culture there during the #Stalin years.

Soviet policy allowed the Ukrainian SSR to become a fairly independent entity. Moreover, many Party officials from Ukraine held key positions in the USSR right up until its collapse.

This thread seeks to explore what influence Ukrainians had on the Soviet Union’s development.

Although born in the very center of #Ukraine, Leonid #Brezhnev preferred not to talk about his nationality.

#Stalin considered him a Moldavian. Until the 1950s, he had passed himself off as a Ukrainian and, after that, as a Russian, according to documents.

However, former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing wrote that his friend Edward Gierek, de facto ruler of #Poland for a decade, had told him that Brezhnev's mother was Polish.

“Brezhnev hid this because Russians tend to treat Poles with sarcasm and contempt,” he wrote.

Many who originated from Ukraine were registered as ‘Russian’ or simply as ‘Soviet’.

This is why it is so difficult to assess the full scope of political influence Ukrainians had on the decision-making process in the Soviet Union.

It is true that Ukrainians contributed a great deal to building socialism. 

Nikita #Khrushchev and Leonid #Brezhnev, ruled the country as general secretary of the #Communist Party’s Central Committee.

The country’s final ruler, Mikhail #Gorbachev, was the descendant of Ukrainian peasants who had moved to Stavropol.

A list of many more more Ukrainians who held important positions in the Soviet government:

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was managed by local elites, which is completely at odds with the modern myth of Ukraine having been an ‘oppressed nation’ in the Soviet Union.

So many Ukrainians held key positions in the Soviet government that any allegations made by the present-day Ukrainian authorities about the Ukrainian SSR struggling under the yoke of the Russian SFSR and being de facto Soviet #Russia’s colony simply don’t have a leg to stand on.

On the contrary, by the 1950s, the Ukrainian SSR had become a full-fledged statelet that had its own constitution and flag and parliament.

In fact, its structure mirrored that of the government of the Soviet Union itself.

Ukraine’s policy was determined by the Communist Party of Ukraine with the Politburo being its highest body of power; its legislative branch was represented by the Supreme Council (this later became the Verkhovna Rada); and executive power was wielded by the Council of Ministers.

The truth is that Soviet #Russia had none of the above-listed privileges.

The All-Union government allowed republics to have their national branches of the Party but did not permit this for Russia. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic had no government of its own.

Joseph #Stalin feared that an empowered #Russia might grow to challenge the All-Union government.

This policy was so severe that in 1949 a number of senior officials were charged with treason for their intention to create the #Communist Party of Russia. (the #Leningrad Affair)

Thus, attempts to misrepresent Soviet Russia as a colonial power in charge of the other republics in the USSR are very misguided.

Other republics even enjoyed more autonomy than Russia did during the Soviet Union era.

The Belarusian SSR and Ukrainian SSR had their own missions at the United Nations from 1945, while Russia did not — an unprecedented level of autonomy for a republic that is part of a larger state.

For example, it is not something granted to Scotland by the United Kingdom.

Each Soviet Socialist Republic, including #Ukraine, had its national language recognized as official – for example, Soviet currency bills stated their value in all of the national languages.

More importantly, the republics were governed by locals.

It was through the collaboration of the local elites and the All-Union government that a policy of indigenization, or nativization, was promoted from the 1920s.

In the case of Ukraine, it was the ‘Ukrainization’ project.

The idea was to kill two birds with one stone: promote the Communist ideology and to preempt any possible nationalist movements in the republics by giving them privileges and powers.

Since local nationalists were unavoidably part of the republics’ governments, nativization was perceived by the #Communists as a viable solution to win them over and encourage them to cooperate.

In order to build a new socialist state, the Bolsheviks decided to nip any potential resistance in the bud by supporting #Ukraine’s culture and downplaying #Russia’s.

The main goal of the campaign was to replace the Russian culture and language in the Soviet republics with local cultures and languages, which was touted as a fight against the ‘Great-Russian chauvinism’ inherited from Russia’s imperial past.

“We, Great-Russian Communists, must make concessions when there are differences with the Ukrainian Bolshevik Communists concerning the state independence of #Ukraine, the forms of its alliance with #Russia, and the national question in general,” #Lenin wrote back in 1920.

Ukrainian language classes were introduced in all institutions where educational workers and teachers were trained across the Ukrainian SSR. a result, the share of workers who increasingly started identifying themselves as Ukrainians grew from 41% to 53% between 1926 and 1932.

However, the ‘Ukrainization’ process was largely imposed from above, forced upon the Russian-speaking population.

De-Russification was coupled with propaganda campaigns launched in Soviet newspapers, while publishing in the Ukrainian language was growing rapidly.

It was not until the late 1930s — as #WWII was looming — that the Ukrainization project was finally scrapped due to apprehensions that it could revive the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

Even after the project was abandoned, the surge of nationalist feeling it had triggered persisted for many more years. Soviet policies effectively made the Ukrainian SSR a self-sufficient entity within the Soviet Union, which paved the way for #Ukraine’s eventual independence.

The post-war Ukrainian Soviet Republic went in the opposite direction and began promoting the Russian language and culture.

This happened after Nikita Khrushchev hammered scholars in 1946 at the Communist Party of Ukraine for errors in their interpretations of history.

He challenged them to cultivate “zero tolerance for any manifestation of bourgeois nationalism”among Ukrainian citizens.

All of that changed after Stalin died in 1953 and his cult of personality was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev, who had been raised in Eastern Ukraine, at the 20th Party Congress.

Dictionaries of the Ukrainian language were compiled and most universities switched to Ukrainian as their language of instruction.

the Crimean Autonomous SSR, where Russian prevailed, was transferred from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by a decree from Khrushchev.

“The victory in the Great October Socialist Revolution and Lenin’s policy on nationalities allowed the Ukrainian people to create their first nation state,” the first secretary of the Central Committee of Ukraine’s Communist Party, said of the “Khrushchev Thaw” with Ukraine.

And he was right – the national Communist party’s top brass enjoyed a special status in Ukraine, both in the party and government structures.

In the 1980s, the Ukrainian SSR was called the last stronghold of communism.

But history would have none of it.

Ukraine doesn’t like to talk about it’s Soviet history anymore.

It’s being erased almost as if it never existed.

A fateful phrase by the president of independent Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk comes to mind in this regard:

“#Ukraine can be proud to be the state that has shattered the Soviet Union.”

Despite Ukraine being among the USSR’s leading economies and in the top ten most developed European nations, it was the Ukrainian leadership that played a key part in the collapse of the Soviet Union, a country in which the Ukrainian people had always held a special position.