Khrushchev as National Communist
The General Secretary and the Ukrainian question
Magdalena Semczyszyn, Łukasz Adamski
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Nikita Khrushchev had risen to prominence in the Stalin era and held high political office in the 1930s, before becoming general secretary of the CPSU himself after Stalin’s death. From 1938 to 1949, he stood at the helm of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Just as he had supported the show trials in Moscow, he led the fight against “Ukrainian nationalists” in Kyiv. But when it came to territorial issues, he used ethnic arguments to advocate the “unification of all Ukrainians” in the Ukrainian Soviet republic. In the 1930s, he promoted the Russification of Soviet Ukraine. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he organised the murder, deportation, expulsion, and expropriation of Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukrainian republic. His attempt to annex further Polish territories to Soviet Ukraine beyond those actually annexed to the Soviet Union was unsuccessful. But he did ensure the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet republic in 1954.
(Osteuropa 5-6/2023, pp. 205–220)