Moving on, did you know that during Imperial Russian rule, 93% of all Ukrainians were peasants, among urban dwellers only 30% were Ukrainian. Kravchenko, a researcher of the 20th century Ukrainian society, pointed out that the word “Ukrainian” was synonymous to the word “peasant”. Don’t come for me, it’s not what I’m saying, it’s what he said.
In 1897, there were only 16% Ukrainian lawyers, less than one fourth teachers, 10% of writers and actors.
Enter the Bolsheviks.
While Ukraine has been very busy with their “decommunization” efforts, it was the silly Bolsheviks, specifically Lenin, who saw the connection between socialism and national struggle, concluding that the way to bring minorities along with the revolution was to grow their national identity.
Under the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party and its state apparatus, the country’s cities became majority Ukrainian, so ‘between 1923 and 1926 the proportion of Kyiv’s population which was Ukrainian increased from 27 per cent to 42 per cent’. There was also a flourishing of Ukrainian culture, and ‘the Ukrainian language, which the tsarist rulers had dismissed as a farmyard dialect, was now recognised as an essential tool for effective propaganda in the countryside and the recruitment of a native elite.’
The Soviet-backed education system dramatically raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone rural population. By 1929 over 97% of high school students in the republic were obtaining their education in Ukrainian and illiteracy dropped from 47% (1926) to 8% in 1934.
Nationalism is in part a product of urbanisation, and in particular the development of telegraph, railway and newspapers which enabled national identities to grow between connected towns united by language (and usually religion). But most Ukrainians were rural and the towns were then dominated by Russians, Jews and Poles. The Ukrainian word for citizen — hromadjanyn — comes from village whereas in most European languages it derives from city.
They were the country people. In the multiracial tsarist empire, different ethnic groups occupied different niches, and as the Bolsheviks saw, many class conflicts were also ethnic conflicts.
The newly literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianized — in both population and education. Between 1923 and 1933 the Ukrainian proportion of the population of Kharkiv, at the time the capital of Soviet Ukraine, increased from 38% to 50%. Similar increases occurred in other cities, from 27.1% to 42.1% in Kyiv, from 16% to 48% in Dnipropetrovsk, from 16% to 48% in Odesa, and from 7% to 31% in Luhansk.
