What reason had Nikita Khrushchev, in 1954, to give Crimea to Ukraine?
Quora Digest
In 1954, we celebrated a 300 anniversary of the “re-unification of Ukraine and Russia”. Soviet rulers decided to make it the largest nationwide celebration after the death of Stalin.
Which they did.
Celebration
They unveiled one of the Stalin’s sky scrapers that became a major upscale hotel and gave it the name Hotel Ukraina. In the vicinity of the edifice, they also gave “Ukrainian” names to a couple of major streets and raised a monument to a Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko (whom our Nobel-prize taker in literature Joseph Brodsky considered second-rate, at best). A richly ornamented palace-like subway station was called “Kiyevskaya” in a reference to the Ukrainian capital.
And Crimea was transferred from Russia to Ukraine.
Between brothers
Amazingly, no one in 1954 held the view that the entire Russia nowadays seems to support: there was no Ukraine before Soviet rule.
In the USSR, we lived under the terrible, ignorant, Russophobic misconception that Ukraine was as old as Russia, both being descendants of the same millennium-old Rus civilization. We were taught in Soviet schools that somewhere in the process, we had been torn from each other, which was why our brothers in the west adopted the name of Ukraine for their lands along the Dniepr and Dniestr rivers—and when an occasion arose, we re-united!
Ukraine and Russia, two brother nations forever again!
Ukrainian Crimea, so what?
Neither was there anyone in the 1950s who found the idea of a territorial transfer of Crimea to Ukraine revolting (which is what we and all Russia’s true friends across the world feel now).
What few seem to know, this abomination was a collective decision of Nikita Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich and the rest of Stalin’s henchmen. The decision was officially signed off by Stalin’s right hand in military matters Kliment Voroshilov. At the time, he held the title of Soviet Unions “president”.
True reasons
Why all these fine Stalinists decided to give away Crimea to Ukrainians, who really didn’t have any more historical claim to the territory than us? Pure hard-nosed, clear-eyed pragmatical thinking:
- Crimea was totally devastated during WWII.
- Before the Nazis came, Stalin killed and sent to Gulag at least 50.000 ethnic Germans that had settled here on invitation from Ekaterina the Great in 1700s. These Germans managed the most productive parts of local farming.
- At the end of the war, Stalin forcibly deported some 300,000 Tatars, Greeks, Armenians and Bulgars whom he considered collaborators with the German occupants. Large parts of the countryside were virtually deserted
- Stalin tried to repopulate the peninsula by ethnic Russians from the Soviet heartland. But these people didn’t possess the farming skills needed for the local agriculture and Crimea’s climate. New settlers abandoned the plots of land given to them and moved to the cities at the coast. Neither was there anyone who could teach them what to do with this rocky, arid land. By the time of territorial transfer, the semi-abandoned Crimea remained a huge sinkhole for the cash-strapped federal budget.
In exact words of the official decision, Crimea was torn from Russia’s fold because (1) it had “common economy” with Ukraine, (2) was “close in terms of territorial proximity” to Ukraine and (3) had “tight managerial and cultural relations” with Ukraine. All in all, the official Soviet view until 1991 was that Crimea was closer to Ukraine than to Russia. No one tried to challenge that until the collapse of the USSR made it safe to be a Russian nationalist.
Management-wise, this was a pretty effectual move. Ukrainian shaped up the peninsula in a matter of few years. If they hadn’t decided to part ways with us when the USSR keeled over in 1991, they could have continued to enjoy having this marvel of arid rocks and sunny beaches for a few more years.
Below, the Manezhnaya Square in Moscow celebrating in the summer 1954 300 years of Russia and Ukraine being one state. Weirdly for the Russians of the 21st century, no one among the tens of thousands gathered here on the central square of Moscow had ever thought of Ukraine as a “fictional nation”, or found any reason to protest the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine a few months prior to the rally.
Comments
Post a Comment