Ukraine

Ukraine is a bourgeois state in Eastern Europe, formerly a part of the USSR. It broke away on 24 August 1991 and became a corrupt oligarchy with almost the lowest quality of life in Europe, featuring things like a high rate of poverty and violent crime along with the most virulent HIV epidemic in the continent; the most prevalent one outside Africa. Contemporary data indicates that 72% of Ukrainians believe that life was better in the USSR than it is now. In Soviet times, there was very little anti-Soviet sentiment in the Ukrainian SSR, with the exception of an unpopular minority of ultranationalists. From 1943 to 1957, such ultranationalists focused their efforts on destroying the Soviet republic, murdering 40,000 Soviet soldiers and 22,400 officials and civilians.

Today the bourgeois state and right-wingers promote Stephan Bandera as a national liberator and icon of the nation. He was in fact an antisemite and Nazi collaborator who took part in the Holocaust and conducted massacres of Polish civilians. The President of Ukraine nonetheless posthumously awarded him the title of "Hero of Ukraine" in 2010, which was criticized by the European Parliament and many Russians, Poles, and Jews. The award was annulled a year later but the Ukrainian parliament moved to reconfer it in 2018 with a large group of lawmakers continuing this effort in 2021.

History

The Ukrainians, like the Russians and Belarusians, are Eastern Slavs, all having a common ethnic origin which formed out of closely-related tribes in the tenth century that created their own state: Kievan Rus’. The three fraternal nations — Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians — gradually became differentiated between the 12th and 14th centuries as a result of socioeconomic and cultural development amid the political disunity in the ancient Russian lands caused by feudal disintegration. Sometime in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Ukrainians emerged as an independent ethnic community, with its own distinctive language, culture, and way of life. The formation of the Ukrainian nationality was centered in the Dnieper Region — the Kiev Region, Poltava Region, and Southern Chernigov Region, and this ethnic core attracted the people of other Ukrainian lands.

Despite the seizure in the 14th century of most of the Ukrainian lands by the Polish-Lithuanian feudal lords, the 16th and 17th centuries saw the consolidation and strengthening of the Ukrainian people. Among the factors that contributed to this were the further socioeconomic and cultural development of the Ukrainians, the struggle of the toiling masses, primarily the feudally dependent peasantry and the rank and file Cossacks, against the Lithuanian, Polish, and Hungarian Catholic feudal aggression, and the devastating raids of the Turkish and Tatar invaders.

The 17th century was marked by the strengthening of money-commodity relations and the emergence of bourgeois relations among the Ukrainians. The most important event in the ethnic history of the Ukrainians was the reunification of the Left-bank Ukraine with Russia in 1654. Of great historical significance, the reunification played an enormous role in the subsequent economic, political, and cultural development of the Ukrainians and protected the Ukrainian people from foreign enslavement. In the 1790’s the Right-bank Ukraine became part of Russia. The reunification of the Ukraine and Russia contributed to the growth of their productive forces and to the mutual cultural enrichment of the two fraternal peoples; it united and reinforced both nations in the struggle against foreign invaders and against enslavers at home.

The formation of the Ukrainians into a bourgeois nation, a process begun in the 17th century, was completed in the 19th century, after the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of capitalist relations. The rapid development of various industries in the principal Ukrainian lands, which had become part of Russia, led to the formation of the working class — the vanguard of the Ukrainian toiling masses. Together with the workers of other nations, primarily the Russian proletariat, the Ukrainian working class, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, waged a determined struggle against tsarism, the Ukrainian and Russian landowners, and capitalists for social and national liberation. The revolutionary movement in the Ukraine exerted a considerable influence on the liberation struggle of the workers in the parts of western Ukraine that were under Austro-Hungarian oppression — eastern Galicia, northern Bucovina, and Transcarpathia.

After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, which overthrew the power of the landowners and bourgeoisie, the working masses of the Ukraine, along with the workers of other Soviet peoples, defeated the counterrevolution, supported by the bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists, both at home and abroad. They created their own sovereign national state — the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR), which united the Ukrainian lands within the USSR. With the construction of socialism, the Ukrainians formed a socialist nation. The western part of Ukraine became part of the Ukrainian SSR in 1939, with northern Bucovina and the Khotin, Akkerman, and Izmail districts of Bessarabia joining in 1940, being follow by Transcarpathia in 1945. Thus, the age-old Ukrainian lands were reunited in the Ukrainian SSR.

The process of building a socialist society in the USSR has wrought great changes in the material and spiritual culture of the Ukrainians. Cities have been reconstructed, and new, modern major industrial centers have been built. Ukrainian villages have also experienced changes. They have undergone electrification and radiofication and have been provided with a variety of amenities. Most had several kinds of establishments set up: an administrative-economic center, modern dwellings, and various sovkhoz or kolkhoz farm structures, usually located on the outskirts. The tradition of planting numerous trees and gardens has been steadfastly preserved in the settlements. The old khaty dwellings have been replaced by more modern housing, whose design still retains the best elements of folk architecture. The interior has been radically altered and now resembles that of urban dwellings. Rooms are furnished with contemporary factory-made furniture, and numerous new household items and appliances, such as refrigerators and television sets, have become a part of everyday life.

Ethnography

Ukrainians have their own language, which most of them speak. In terms of religion, Ukrainians are for the most part members of the Orthodox Church. In the western regions some Ukrainians, under pressure from the Polish feudal lords, became members of the Uniate Church in the 16th and 17th centuries; thus having their own language and customs but being part of the Roman Catholic Church otherwise.

Ukrainians of the Soviet Union wore the common European-type clothing, although they still retained, especially in the rural areas, elements of Ukrainian national dress and the national dress of other peoples of the USSR.

The social and family life of the Ukrainians has been fundamentally reorganized in the process of socialist construction. The old way of life, based on class antagonism, has been replaced by a new socialist, collectivist way of life, typified by the unity of personal and social interests. New family relations, characterized by equal rights for all family members, have been formed.

Socialism and internationalism have provided the basis for the further development of traditional Ukrainian folk poetry, music, dance, and various decorative arts, such as painting, embroidery, ceramics, wood carving, and carpet weaving.

The socialist transformation in all the Ukrainian lands has contributed to the consolidation of the Ukrainian socialist nation; the distinctive ethnographic features of individual regions and groups are gradually disappearing. At the same time, the Ukrainians are developing closer ties with other Soviet peoples. The Ukrainian socialist nation, along with all the socialist nations and nationalities of the USSR together have constituted a new historical community — the Soviet people.