Anti-National Population Policy in the Ukrainian SSR during the 1960s–1970s: The Titular Nation of Ukraine as an Example

Abstract

The article studies the anti-national population policy of the USSR taking as the example the titular nation of Ukraine during the 1960s –1970s. The author investigates inner republican effects of migration (increasing the number of mixed marriages and the displacement of the Ukrainian language by Russian) and studies official statistics – Union censuses in 1959, 1970, and 1979 which allow a comparative analysis of the dynamics of the Ukrainians and territorial distribution in different regions of the republic.

The author has found that in the outlined period the USSR government always created anti-Ukrainian background at all levels, which formed a widespread anti-national population policy of Russification and assimilation of the Ukrainians; there was an artificial formation of national-ethnic structure of the Ukrainian SSR and forcing international convergence to create a “single Soviet people”. Any statement or reference to Ukrainian national problems was regarded as a ground for harassment and persecution by the Soviet authorities and accusation of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism”. It has been proved that Ukrainians were the dominant nation almost throughout the USSR in the outlined period. The number of Ukrainians increased exclusively trough natural population growth, while the number of representatives of the Russian nation increased as a result of internal migration. The article presents the idea that Ukraine was one of the centers of accumulation of immigration flows in the Soviet Union, and because of this fact the multicultural Ukrainian SSR society, which basically constituted of Ukrainians, gradually turned into a bi-national society, where the Ukrainian majority coexisted with the continuously growing Russian minority. Resettlements were carried out primarily for political reasons and their aim was to deprive the native people of their national characteristics – language, culture, and the like. Demographic, economic, and social processes that were spread under the slogan of “internationalist aid” substantially changed the proportion of native and settled populations in some regions.