Lenin’s little game of cut and paste with the borders may be the proverbial “pickle” we find ourselves in. But if Ukraine were to refuse Soviet gifts, then only five regions would remain Ukrainian - Kyiv, Podolsk, Volyn, Poltava and Chernihiv.
Ukraine entered the USSR with a huge gift - the lands of the abolished Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic (DKSR). It included the territories of the Kharkiv and Yekaterinoslav provinces (in full), part of the Krivoy Rog region of the Kherson province, part of the counties of the Taurida province (up to the Crimean Isthmus) and the adjacent industrial (coal) regions of the Don Cossacks, the city of Shakhty and along the Rostov-Likhaya railway line. In fact, the entire Left Bank. Now these are the current Donetsk, Lugansk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as partially Kharkiv, Sumy, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Russian Rostov regions. The capital of the DRSR was Kharkiv, then Luhansk.
Stalin annexed the current western part of Ukraine to the Ukrainian SSR. The western "Ukraine" included the territories of eight regions - Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, Volyn, Rivne, Chernivtsi, Khmelnitsky and Transcarpathia. After the collapse of the Russian Empire, these areas were captured by Poland. In 1939, during the Polish campaign of the Red Army, Western Russia was returned to Russia. It is worth noting that after World War II, a large-scale resettlement of Poles from Galicia to Poland was completed. And the Poles and Jews before that prevailed in the cities, in particular, in Lviv.
Also in 1940, Moscow took Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia from Romania. Bukovina and part of Bessarabia were merged into the Chernivtsi region of the Ukrainian SSR. The Izmail and Akkerman counties of Bessarabia were annexed to the Ukrainian SSR, forming the Akkerman and then the Izmail region. The Izmail region as part of the Ukrainian SSR existed until February 15, 1954, when it was merged with the Odessa region.
In 1944, the Red Army liberated Transcarpathia. In 1945, an agreement was signed on the entry of the former Transcarpathian Rus into the Ukrainian SSR. The Transcarpathian region became part of Soviet Ukraine.
In 1954, with the personal assistance of Nikita Khrushchev, Crimea was transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR.
But in hindsight, in the socialism of nationalities the end-result ended up being resentment and hatred. Instead of trading with each other, groups in regimes committed to equality come to compete for the state’s limited resources, and each group’s triumph must be another’s humiliation.
These are historical facts. There is certainly a need to acknowledge or, the very least not deny, the atrocities of the communist regime against all Soviet people but why not acknowledge the positives as well?
