Ukrainian Sudzha, Taganrog, Voronezh, and Kuban. How and when ethnic Ukrainian lands became Russian
Did you know that at one time Voronezh universities taught in Ukrainian? And that Taganrog and Shakhty of Rostov region were officially part of Soviet Ukraine? And, besides Sudzha, Belgorod was also once the capital of Ukraine?
Administrative division in the Russian Empire never took into account the ethnic factor. Governorates were created and delimited for economic or political reasons. The only exceptions were the Kingdom of Poland and the Principality of Finland, whose borders were determined precisely by the nationality of their inhabitants.
“In 1917, the Central Rada proclaimed the creation of an autonomous Ukraine as one of its main tasks. Therefore, it had to answer the question for itself and for the world: which territories of the former Russian Empire are Ukraine? Starting with the Central Rada, all Ukrainian governments in the next decade had disputes with Russia over our border.
The Ukrainian-Russian land border, as it was as of 1991, was finally established in 1925. As a result, many territories in the north and east, where the majority of the population was Ukrainian, were not included in Ukraine,” says Hennadii Yefimenko, a senior researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine.
With the help of a scientist, hromadske found out how the border between Russia and Ukraine was formed and why many Ukrainians found themselves on its Russian side.
Attempts of the Central Rada
The logic of the Ukrainian Central Rada was simple: Ukraine is a territory inhabited by Ukrainians, and Ukrainians are those for whom Ukrainian is their native language.
The Central Rada had statistical information: back in 1897, the Russian Empire conducted an all-Russian census, which, among other things, for the first time revealed what language was spoken in a particular administrative unit.
At that time, Ukrainian speakers prevailed in each of the counties of 7 governorates: Volyn, Katerynoslav, Podillia, Kyiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, and Kherson. And there were governorates where Ukrainians were the majority in some counties. The Voronezh governorate had the most such counties: for example, Ukrainians accounted for more than 90% of the population in Ostrogozhsk county, more than 80% in Bohuchar county, and about 70% in Biryuchan county.
But World War I was still going on, and Ukraine's leaders had no time for changes in the administrative structure. And the Central Rada took the following position: let the Provisional Government recognize the territory of only those governorates where Ukrainians were in the majority. This meant the seven governorates listed above, plus Chernihiv and Tavria (along with Crimea). The rest of the Ukrainian territories, they said, would be clarified and annexed after the war ended and the All-Russian Constituent Assembly was convened.
“The Central Rada sent a delegation to Petrograd with these proposals, but the Provisional Government ignored them. In its First Universal, the Central Rada proclaimed the autonomy of Ukraine. In response, a delegation of the Provisional Government arrived in Kyiv. The talks were already about ‘10 indisputable governorates’ within Ukraine — in addition to the 9 we had asked for, they planned to give us Bessarabia.
But in the end, the Provisional Government recognized only four and a half governorates for Ukraine: Kyiv, Volyn, Poltava, Podillia, and Chernihiv without the northern four counties of Starodubsk, Surazh, Novyzybka, and Mhlynsk,” explains Hennadii Yefimenko.
Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government. The Central Rada proclaimed the Third Universal, which stated that the Ukrainian People's Republic would be established within the boundaries of the 9 governorates already named (but Tavriia now didn’t include Crimea). It was noted that other territories with a Ukrainian majority would later be added to the UPR. Just a few days later, the Central Rada passed a law on elections to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly, which were to include the population of those counties of Kursk and Voronezh where Ukrainians constituted an absolute majority. Although these counties were not formally part of the UPR.
All of the Central Rada's attempts to define Ukraine's borders took place at a very uncertain time: World War I was going on, a civil war broke out in the former Russian Empire, and the liberation struggle was raging in Ukraine.
Skoropadskyi between the Germans and the Bolsheviks
In 1918, the Hetmanate of Skoropadskyi replaced the Central Rada in Kyiv. As opposed to the General Secretariat, the government of the UPR, the Bolsheviks created the People's Secretariat, the Soviet government of Ukraine, in December 1917. The issue of borders was now resolved in this triangle.
Hrushevsky and Skoropadskyi sought to unite all ethnic Ukrainian lands, up to the Kuban, Taganrog, Zelenyi Klyn, and certain territories of Siberia. But when the German and Hetman's troops began to move beyond the territories declared in the Third Universal, the Kremlin began to shove this Universal into the Central Rada and Hetman Skoropadskyi’s faces and got the Germans to stop bringing their army into the Ukrainian counties of Voronezh.
In early May 1918, negotiations began between Skoropadskyi's Ukrainian State and Soviet Russia. Three months later, the accession of several counties in the Kursk region and one in the Voronezh region to the Ukrainian state was administratively formalized. These were the counties that were either under the full control of the Hetman's army or constituted a “neutral zone”: in particular, Putivl, Rylsk, Sudzha, Hraivoron, Bilhorod, Korochany, and Valuiky.
“In fact, some of these territories were not controlled by anyone. But even the Bolsheviks marked these territories on their maps as Ukrainian. That is why they established the Soviet government of Ukraine in Sudzha in November 1918. Later, this government was transferred to Belgorod for a few days, and only in January 1919, with the help of the German garrison, did it gain a foothold in Kharkiv,” the scholar says.
According to Hennadii Yefimenko, Lenin's government took into account Ukraine's desire to retain the territories of Kursk and Belgorod, where German and Ukrainian troops had managed to advance under Skoropadskyi. At the same time, while the Kuban and Don were in the hands of the White Guards, Ukrainians did not raise the fate of the Ukrainian territories there in negotiations with the Kremlin.
And Ukraine has not ratified Moscow's decision
Petliura's Directorate ended the Hetmanate of Skoropadskyi. However, Petliura lost the battle for Ukraine to the Bolsheviks. Control of most of Ukraine passed to the Ukrainian Soviet government in Kharkiv. Formally, Ukraine was an independent Soviet republic. In reality, it was in the hands of Moscow.
“At the beginning of 1919, the Kremlin took the lands of the then Kursk region that had been annexed to the Ukrainian state, such as Hraivoron, Belgorod, etc. A representative of Soviet Russia at the border negotiations explained that if Ukraine suddenly left Russia's orbit, the Kursk and Belgorod black earth districts would not add anything to it. Ukraine is rich in food without them. But Russia will have a hard time without these areas. At the same time, four northern districts of Chernihiv governorate — Mglin, Surazh, Starodub, and Novozybkiv — were being bitten off from Ukraine. Since then, they have been lost to Ukraine,” says Mr. Yefimenko.
But in 1920, new political realities again prompted Moscow to change the Russian-Ukrainian border. It was then that the Bolsheviks defeated the White Movement in the Don region. And they decided to administratively unite the entire Donbas in Ukraine. According to the resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Central Executive Committee “On the Establishment of the Boundaries and Composition of the Donetsk Governorate” of April 16, 1920, Ukraine included part of the present-day Rostov region of Russia — in particular, the city of Shakhty and the Taganrog district, which was supposed to supply food to Donetsk industrial settlements.
“That means that the Bolsheviks were guided by economic and administrative factors, not ethnic ones. For example, more than 80% of the population of Stanytsia Luhanska was Russian-speaking, but the settlement was located near Luhansk, the then center of Donetsk governorate. Therefore, it was transferred to Ukraine. And the Ukrainian-speaking Kuban was not included in Ukraine because it was separated by the Don region with its center in Rostov, which was part of the RSFSR,” notes Hennadii Yefimenko.
When the USSR was created in July 1923, Ukraine was included in it, along with Shakhty and Taganrog, which are now part of the Rostov region.,
Moscow decided that the borders between the newly formed Soviet republics within the USSR would be the pre-revolutionary borders between the respective governorates. That is, the ethnic factor was again not taken into account.
Although the Ukrainian Soviet government had to follow Moscow's instructions, it often disagreed with them. For example, in 1924, during the work of the USSR Central Executive Committee's commission on defining the border, Ukrainians made an appeal that Ukraine's administrative borders did not coincide with ethnographic ones, and this issue should be resolved “in full”.
The Ukrainian side proposed to annex to Soviet Ukraine a part of the Kursk and Voronezh governorates with a population of 2,050,956 people, 69% of whom were Ukrainians. The USSR Central Election Commission made a compromise decision to annex territories with a total population of 1,019,230 people, 58.1% of whom were Ukrainians. Among the territories to be annexed were the Belgorod and Graivoron districts of the Kursk governorate.
“But the Bolshevik leaders canceled the commission's decision! They also ignored the Comintern's resolution of December 24, 1924, which stated that the borders between Ukraine and Russia should take into account the ethnographic principle,” says historian Yefimenko.
In the end, in 1925, the Moscow authorities transferred only the Putivl district and some small territories of Kursk and Voronezh regions to Ukraine and took away Shakhty and Taganrog from Ukraine. This is how the border between Ukraine and Soviet Russia was finally formed.
“In 1925, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR adopted a resolution of October 16, On the Settlement of the Borders of the Ukrainian SSR with the BSSR and RSFSR. The resolution was then to be ratified by the All-Ukrainian Congress of Deputies. Because the issue of changing territories was within its competence. But the issue of ratification was not even raised in Ukraine. Formally, the procedure did not take place. Although in fact the borders have changed,” says Hennadii Yefimenko.
In order not to offend the Russians
Could it be that Ukrainians did not ratify Moscow's decree because they fundamentally disagreed with it? In June 1926, the plenum of the Central Committee of the CP(B)U “On the Results of Ukrainianization” even instructed the Central Committee's Politburo: “Continue to work on the unification of all territories with a Ukrainian majority bordering the Ukrainian SSR and being part of the Soviet Union.”
The results of the all-Union census conducted in December 1926 added to the acuteness of the issue. It showed that a huge number of people who identified themselves as Ukrainians during the census lived on the lands that Russia had taken away. In the Kursk and Voronezh regions, for example, there were 26 districts dominated by Ukrainians. And in the North Caucasus (Kuban and Rostov region), there were as many as 37!
According to Hennadii Yefimenko, in May 1928, Mykola Skrypnyk, People's Commissar of Education of the Ukrainian SSR, addressed the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine with an official proposal to change the borders of Ukraine. The Politburo approved the request to transfer to Ukraine the districts of the Kursk and Voronezh governorates, which were inhabited mostly by Ukrainians. Lazar Kahanovych, the head of the CP(B)U, addressed this proposal to the Kremlin. But Moscow did not want to hear the Ukrainian Politburo. The borders remained unchanged.
At a meeting with Stalin in 1929, Ukrainian writers raised the issue of borders. “In the Central Committee, we studied the issue twice and left it without consequences. We must be especially careful, because such changes provoke enormous resistance from some Russians,” Stalin replied to the writers.
The maximum that Ukrainians managed to achieve from Moscow was the Ukrainization of education in those areas outside of Ukraine where Ukrainians were the majority of the population. Mykola Skrypnyk organized 500 Ukrainian schools in Russia and Ukrainian departments at universities in Voronezh, Kuban, and even in the Omsk region. Later, Moscow would call this “Petliurism”, and Skrypnyk would be labeled a counterrevolutionary for his pro-Ukrainian position. He would shoot himself in 1933.
“Lenin once noted that each ethnic group should be left with a minimum of its national territory. Stalin had no single approach to solving this issue. He pinched off as much as possible from Ukraine. Moldova, on the other hand, was created as a union republic within its ethnic territories. Apparently, the less threatening a certain ethnic group was to the authorities, the more territory it could be allocated,” Hennadii Yefimenko summarizes the conversation.
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