From the Transfer of Crimea to Giving Up Nuclear Weapons: Half a Century of Postwar Ukraine

This is the fourth in a four-part series tracing the history of the land of Ukraine. It covers the period from the end of the Second World War, which Ukraine met as a Soviet republic, through independence in 1991, to the 1990s, when a new constitution and currency were created.

The Famine of 1946–47

After the war, many residents of central and eastern Ukraine experienced hunger. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, CIUS) writes that although drought worsened the wartime collapse of agriculture, the Soviet government refused to lower the procurement quotas it imposed on peasants. The same encyclopedia also states that “the Soviet regime did not acknowledge that a famine had occurred in Ukraine in 1946–47.”

A death toll cannot be stated. The same encyclopedia says “estimates of the death toll vary greatly, ranging from 100,000 to over one million.” The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, published by the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, gives a figure of over one million, while qualifying that figure itself as being “according to extremely incomplete data.”

When Did the UPA’s Resistance End?

The UPA’s anti-Soviet resistance in western Ukraine ended in stages. On September 3, 1949, Roman Shukhevych ordered the dissolution of the command structure and the remaining combat units, moving members into an underground network. After Shukhevych’s death (March 5, 1950), the underground continued the armed struggle under Vasyl Kuk’s leadership, and organized resistance ended when he was captured in a special operation by the security services in 1954.

The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine gives the number of people specially resettled from the western oblasts to remote areas of the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1952 as 203,662, of whom 182,543 were family members of OUN and UPA members and their sympathizers.

The 1954 Transfer of Crimea: Tracing the Procedure by Date

The decision to transfer Crimea was made by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on February 19, 1954. However, the decision passed through several bodies before reaching that point. The collection of documents Mark Kramer, of Harvard University’s Cold War Studies Program, published at the Wilson Center lists the following dates among the documents it contains: on January 25, 1954, the Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party approved the transfer; on February 5, a decision of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Republic and the minutes of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic; on February 13, a decision of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine; and on February 19, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Each document carries a fond (collection) number from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF).

Two official reasons were given. As Kramer quotes them, the first was that the transfer was a “noble act on the part of the Russian people” marking the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav, demonstrating “the boundless trust and love that the Russian people feel for the Ukrainian people.” The second reason was “the geographic proximity of Crimea to Ukraine, the commonality of their economies, and the close agricultural and cultural ties between Crimea Oblast and the Ukrainian republic.” Omitting the first reason would fail to convey the official explanation of the time accurately.

Kramer himself, however, writes that “neither of these ostensible justifications withstands scrutiny,” and cites as the real motives the tightening of control after the end of armed resistance in western Ukraine, the power struggle with Malenkov, and the securing of Kirichenko’s support. The officially stated reasons and the motives researchers infer need to be read separately.

No procedure was carried out to ask the residents’ will. On this point, Professor J. Gordon Hylton of Marquette University Law School states that the approval of the residents concerned was required under the Soviet constitution but was never obtained (this is from the professor’s blog post, not a peer-reviewed paper). At the time, in 1954, Crimean Tatars were in forced-resettlement locations in Central Asia and were barred from returning. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that a decision of April 28, 1956 banned their return, that this ban remained in effect until 1988, and that this was still the case even after a decision of September 5, 1960 cleared them of the suspicion of collaboration with Germany.

Around the time of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Russia and Ukraine signed documents containing provisions on their border. Article 6 of the treaty of November 19, 1990 provided that “the two contracting parties recognize and respect the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic within the borders currently existing within the framework of the USSR.” The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership of May 31, 1997, in its Article 2, has the two countries respect each other’s territorial integrity and confirm the inviolability of existing borders. However, the 1990 treaty was terminated by the 1997 treaty, and the 1997 treaty was in turn terminated by a law of December 6, 2018. It cannot be written that “a treaty still in force guarantees the border.”

After the Thaw: The Dissident Movement, and Its Cost

The generation that began writing in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the early 1960s is called the “Shistdesiatnyky” (people of the sixties). Lina Kostenko and Vasyl Symonenko are considered its first representatives. The movement lasted only about a decade before being silenced by arrests from 1965 to 1972.

There were two waves of arrests: 1965–66, and January to April 1972. In the latter, Viacheslav Chornovil, Ivan Dziuba, Vasyl Stus, and others were arrested, on the charge of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” The repression was not limited to imprisonment. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that “at the same time, repression also took the form of dismissals, expulsions, and evictions from housing; at Lviv University, 23 students were expelled and 27 lecturers dismissed.”

Committal to psychiatric hospitals was also a real practice. The same encyclopedia writes that in the “special psychiatric hospitals” placed directly under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, security took priority over medical judgment, and the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was common; it notes that Ukraine had one such hospital, in Dnipro (then Dnipropetrovsk).

Dziuba finished writing “Internationalism or Russification?” at the end of 1965 and submitted it to the party’s First Secretary; it was published in the West in 1968 (do not confuse the writing with the publication). He was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in April 1973, and released in November of the same year in exchange for a public recantation. Stus died on the night of September 3–4, 1985 in a punishment cell of a special-regime camp in Kuchino, Perm Oblast, and was reburied at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv on November 19, 1989.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Group was formed in Kyiv on November 9, 1976. The names of its 10 founders match between the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine and the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine from the Institute of History of Ukraine at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine: Mykola Rudenko as chair, Oles Berdnyk, Petro Hryhorenko, Ivan Kandyba, Levko Lukianenko, Myroslav Marynovych, Mykola Matusevych, Oksana Meshko, Nina Strokata, and Oleksa Tykhy. Arrests began in February 1977, and within two years all the founding members had been sentenced to 7 to 10 years’ imprisonment and exile.

Russification: Whose Figures Are These?

All the figures in this section come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), not from Soviet official statistics themselves. According to the encyclopedia, the share of schools teaching in Ukrainian fell from 85.3% in 1955–56 to 81.1% in 1967–68. In 1987, only 16% of schools in the capital and oblast centers were Ukrainian-language schools, and Chernihiv, Donetsk, Simferopol, and Luhansk had no Ukrainian-language schools at all (this figure is limited to the capital and oblast centers, not a nationwide value).

In publishing too, the number of Ukrainian-language higher-education textbook titles fell from 168 in 1970 to 38 in 1980, while the number of Russian-language titles rose from 263 to 422 over the same period. The assessment that “Russian was advantageous for upward mobility” can be attributed as the view of this encyclopedia’s authors (Bohdan Kravtsiv, Volodymyr Kubijovyc), and is not a fact that follows directly from the statistics.

April 26, 1986: Chornobyl

The report of the Chernobyl Forum (which included the IAEA, WHO, UNSCEAR, the World Bank, and the governments of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine) states, “On 26 April 1986, the most serious accident in the history of the nuclear power industry occurred at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the then Ukrainian S.S.R.”

The delay in disclosing information is stated by the official bodies themselves. The same report writes: “Third, the Soviet government delayed disclosure of the fact that the accident had happened. The provision of information was selective and restrictive, especially in the period immediately following the accident,” and “reliable information did not initially reach the affected population in the Soviet Union at the time and remained inadequate for years after the accident.”

On the evacuation, the same report states that approximately 50,000 residents of Pripyat were evacuated within 40 hours of the accident.

Two international frameworks were created after the accident: the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident, and the Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency. Both were adopted in Vienna on September 26, 1986, entering into force on October 27, 1986 and February 26, 1987 respectively. According to a note in the UN Treaty Series, one of the three states whose ratification brought the Assistance Convention into force was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (January 26, 1987).

Rukh, the Human Chain, and the Declaration of Sovereignty

The founding congress of the People’s Movement of Ukraine, Rukh, was held September 8–10, 1989 at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. The number of delegates who attended is given variously as just over 1,100, 1,109, or 1,200 depending on the source, so this article does not state a figure.

The “human chain” took place on January 21, 1990. According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, although it was officially called “Between Lviv and Kyiv,” the main chain actually began in the city of Stryi, Lviv Oblast, with two additional chains extending from there toward Ivano-Frankivsk and toward Zakarpattia. Its total length is given as 500 kilometers (Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine) and about 700 kilometers (the Institute), which disagree. The number of participants is also estimated at anywhere from 400,000 to 3 million, so no single figure can be given. It commemorated the Act of Unification of East and West Ukraine of January 22, 1919.

On July 16, 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty. Section 9 of the declaration includes the provision: “The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention of becoming in the future a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three nuclear-free principles: not to accept, not to produce, and not to acquire nuclear weapons.” This provision would later be connected to the handling of nuclear weapons.

1991: The Declaration of Independence and the December 1 Referendum

On August 24, 1991, the Verkhovna Rada adopted the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine (document No. 1427-XII). The resolution adopted the same day also set December 1 for a republic-wide referendum to confirm the declaration of independence. In other words, the referendum had been scheduled from the outset, within the same decision as the declaration itself.

The result on December 1 was 90.32% in favor, with 84.16% turnout (the official results of the central election body of the time, as received and reported on December 3 by the contemporary newspaper The Ukrainian Weekly). In the figures the paper published for the 27 administrative units, a majority of those who voted favored independence in all 27. The city of Kyiv recorded 92.87%, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea 54.19%, and the city of Sevastopol 57.07%.

These are the shares of those who voted. Taking the total number of eligible voters as the denominator instead, Professor Hylton’s calculation, cited above, puts the figure at about 37% for Crimea and about 40% for Sevastopol.

Leonid Kravchuk was elected in the presidential election held the same day. On December 8, an agreement signed by the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine stated that “the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, ceases to exist,” and, in Article 1, established the Commonwealth of Independent States. Only these three countries signed it, and the document itself records the place of signing as “the city of Minsk.”

In Crimea, a “referendum” was later held on March 16, 2014 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. The UN General Assembly, in Resolution 68/262, states that it was not authorized by Ukraine, and in operative paragraph 5 declares it “having no validity” and incapable of serving as a basis for changing the status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea or the city of Sevastopol (see A Timeline of Independence and Aggression).

Giving Up Nuclear Weapons and the Budapest Memorandum

What remained on Ukrainian territory at independence, by the Arms Control Association’s estimate, was about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 44 strategic bombers. A figure of about 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons is also cited, but it is backed by only a single source. All of these are estimates.

The same association writes that “Kyiv never had operational control of these weapons.” At the same time, the Ukrainian government declared “administrative control” in June 1992, and asserted ownership of the warheads in 1993. Not having operational control is not the same as having no authority at all.

On December 5, 1994, Ukraine acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state. The Budapest Memorandum was signed the same day. It was signed by four countries—Ukraine, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; France was not a signatory to the memorandum (it issued a separate unilateral declaration). The memorandum has six provisions: paragraph 1 confirms the obligation to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act; paragraph 2, to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine’s territorial integrity or political independence; paragraph 3, to refrain from economic coercion; paragraph 4, to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action if Ukraine becomes a victim of aggression involving nuclear weapons; and paragraph 6, to hold consultations if doubt arises regarding these commitments.

How much weight this memorandum carries is a matter of assessment. Steven Pifer, a former U.S. diplomat involved in the negotiations (Brookings Institution), writes: “What the Budapest Memorandum contains are security assurances, not security guarantees. Guarantees would imply the commitment of American military force, which is what NATO members have. U.S. officials made clear that this was not being offered.” This article does not assert in its own voice that it “is not a defense guarantee,” but presents this as Pifer’s assessment.

The 1990s: Prices, the Constitution, and the Currency

How prices rose can be stated two different ways, depending on the indicator. The State Statistics Service of Ukraine’s consumer price index, measured against the previous December, was 2,100.0 for 1992 and 10,256.0 for 1993 (about 102 times the previous December). The same agency’s annual average (year-on-year) figure for 1993 is 4,834.9. The World Bank’s published figure (4,734.9% for 1993) matches this annual-average series. Giving only one of these would be misleading, so both are shown here.

Production also fell. Calculated from the World Bank’s real GDP level figures, Ukraine’s real GDP in 1999 was 40.8% of its 1990 level (this is a calculation from the published figures, not a ratio the World Bank itself states). Ukraine returned to positive growth in 2000. On the connection between privatization and economic power, Freedom House’s annual report writes that national television was either state-owned or controlled by “economic oligarchs” close to the president and government. This is that organization’s assessment, not a statistical category.

On June 28, 1996, the Verkhovna Rada adopted the Constitution (No. 254к/96-ВР). Article 10 provides that “the state language of Ukraine is Ukrainian,” but the same article goes on to provide that “the free development, use, and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine shall be guaranteed.” Giving only the first half would distort the article, so both are given here. Note that the term “semi-presidential system” does not appear in the text of the Constitution.

The currency reform began on September 2, based on Presidential Decree No. 762/96 of August 25, 1996. Cash circulation of the Ukrainian karbovanets ended at midnight on September 16, after which the hryvnia became the sole legal currency. The exchange rate was 1 hryvnia to 100,000 karbovantsi.

Elections, the Press, and the Gongadze Case

How to assess governance in the 1990s is given together with the name of the assessing body. The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) issued a final report on Ukraine’s presidential elections of October 31 and November 14, 1999, stating that they “failed to meet a significant number of OSCE election-related commitments.” The same report writes that “state administrative bodies and civil servants were observed campaigning for the incumbent president, and against his rival,” and that “the election observation mission uncovered clear evidence that this campaigning by state bodies was extensive, systematic, and coordinated nationwide.”

The journalist Heorhiy Gongadze disappeared on September 16, 2000, and a headless body was found near Tarashcha, Kyiv Oblast, on November 2. Confirming the identity took a long time: the Prosecutor General announced in December 2000 that it was someone else, then reversed course in February 2001 and confirmed it was Gongadze, with final DNA confirmation coming in March 2003. The European Court of Human Rights, in its judgment of November 8, 2005 (Application No. 34056/02), found that Ukraine had violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life, in both its substantive and procedural aspects), Article 3, and Article 13, and ordered a payment of 100,000 euros. Three former police officers were found guilty of murder on March 15, 2008. Note that President Kuchma’s own involvement is not a finding of the Court; the judgment cites it only as a conclusion reached in a September 20, 2005 report by a special committee of the Ukrainian parliament.

This four-part series ends with the 1990s. The events from 2013 onward are covered separately in a sourced timeline.