of non-Russian national cultural activities and the active recruitment of non-
Russians into the Party and state apparatuses.

Since the non-Russians were overwhelmingly rural, the two policies, NEP
and indigenization, were but two sides of the same coin. As Stalin once wrote,
“The nationality problem is by the essence of the matter a problem of the
peasantry.” Official sponsorship of scholarship and the arts bore an extraor-
dinarily rich harvest. Schools that used Ukrainian as the primary language of
instruction, illegal before 1917 and begun under the UNR, were greatly
expanded. The language was standardized, and millions of people became
literate in it. There were even attempts to teach workers at the bench and
peasants at the plow to write poetry. Ukrainian, often dismissed only a few
years earlier as a “peasant tongue,” now became a vehicle in which one could
explain and discuss the latest cultural and scientific developments from
cinematic technique to Einstein’s theories. Ukraine’s cities, hitherto Russian-
speaking islands in the sea of Ukrainian speakers, were gradually Ukrainized.
By 1930 a majority of Ukraine’s industrial workers spoke Ukrainian, and the
main daily newspapers in all the country’s major cities were published in
Ukrainian. The regime in the UkSSR gradually became largely autonomous,
and even Communist spokespersons called for greater autonomy vis-a-vis the
central authorities in Moscow. Would such a rapidly developing nation remain
content with its dependent political status in the Soviet Union or would the old
goal of full political independence reassert itself with even greater force than
in the past? Those who ruled the Soviet Union might well have wondered.

The last Soviet census before the famine was that of 1926. At that time the
population of the USSR was 147 million of whom 77.8 million were Great
Russians, 31.2 million were Ukrainians, and the remaining 38 million were
spread among roughly one hundred smaller national groups, of which 4.7
million Byelorussians constituted the largest group. The population of the
RSFSR was then 92.7 million, the UkSSR’s 29.5 million, and the remaining
SSRs (as now constituted but within the pre-1939 USSR borders) together
possessed 24.8 million inhabitants. Since some of the SSRs which exist today
were then still part of the RSFSR, such a picture actually understates the
UkSSR’s predominance among the non-Russian SSRs. At the time of the
famine, despite the fact that the western fifth of Ukraine was not part of the
USSR, Ukrainians constituted almost half of the USSR’s non-Russians and the
population of the UkSSR greatly exceeded that of all other non-Russian SSRs
combined. Moreover, Ukraine then produced most of the Soviet Union’s
exportable wheat as well as most of its iron and steel. Despite decades of Soviet
economic policy favoring new investment in the Ural Mountains region and
Western Siberia over the construction of new facilities in Ukraine, even today
the UkSSR, if it were independent, would constitute one of the ten largest
economic powers in the world.

For this reason, nationality policy in early Soviet history largely revolved
around the issue of how to deal with the Ukrainians. If indigenization was
based on NEP, that base crumbled at the end of 1929 when Joseph Stalin
gained absolute power in the USSR and proclaimed a policy of the forced crash
collectivization of agriculture. Collectivization was bitterly opposed by the
peasantry, especially in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, where serfdom had
been brief and independent proprietorship was strongly ingrained in the rural
mind. It meant that those who tilled the soil no longer controlled what they

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