[lg policy] Map of Ukraine showing distribution of Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers

[Slavomír Čéplö]

Dear Harold,

the transfer you mentioned (which, incidently, went into effect 60 years
ago almost to the day, February 19th) only affected Crimea. The two blue
regions to the East and North-East bordering Russia - Luhansk and Donetsk -
are to some extent a part of what is historically referred to as Sloboda
Ukraine or Slobozhanshchina: until late 17th century, a territory nominally
under the control of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but controlled by
whoever could keep it. Usually these were Tatars launching raids into
Muscovy, and so the Tsars encouraged Cossacks escaping either the
Commonwealth (i.e. the Zaporozhian Host) or the Hetmanate to settle there
and protect the border of the Empire. These regions thus became a part of
Ukraine by virtue of being settled by, well, Ukrainians. Their
Russification began with the abolishment of Sloboda Ukraine by Catherine
the Great and a tighter integration of Cossack regiments within the
existing military structures and only intensified when Luhansk and Donetsk
became major industrial centers and targets of immigration.
As for Khrushchev's gift, there are several explanations going around, the
most cited one being that having spent a large part of his career in
Ukraine, Khrushchev wanted something big to commemorate the 300th
anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav which the official historiography
marked as the date Ukraine joined Russia. And so he gave the Ukrainians
Crimea which had been depopulated during WWII when Stalin deported all the
Crimean Tatars to Central Asia and then repopulated the peninsula with
(largely) ethnic Russians (70-80% of the population of Crime at the time).
And that, so another explanation goes, is why Khrushchev gave Crimea to the
Ukrainians: the Tatars began to demand return and this move would allow him
to wash his federal hands of the whole thing and let the Ukrainians deal
with the Tatars as well as the disastrous economic conditions there.
Whether that is true, none of my sources know.

Yours sincerely,

Slavomír



On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Harold Schiffman <haroldfs at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> This map accompanied an article in yesterday's NYTimes, and shows the
> distribution of speakers of Ukrainian and speakers of Russian in Ukraine,
> as well
> as support for different factions in the current dispute.  If I remember
> correctly,
> the predominantly Russian-speaking areas were ceded to Ukraine by Nikita
> Krushchev when he was Prime Minister.  I have never fully understood why he
> would do this, or whether he had sympathies for Ukraine that were expressed
> in this manner.  Does anyone on this list have any knowledge of how this
> happened?
>
> HS
>
> --
> =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
>
>  Harold F. Schiffman
>
> Professor Emeritus of
>  Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
> Dept. of South Asia Studies
> University of Pennsylvania
> Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
>
> Phone:  (215) 898-7475
> Fax:  (215) 573-2138
>
> Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
> http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>
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