Prof. Dr. Olena Palko

Research Project  | 3 Project Members

This project aims to examine a unique minorities experiment as implemented by the Soviet government during the 1920s. It was designed to propagate national differences and provide each ethnic group with equal access to state and party institutions, judicial defence, and education in native languages. By employing this strategy, Soviet leadership aimed to secure the loyalty of its ethnically diverse population, and engage them in its socialist project. But those policies had the opposite effect. In less than a decade Soviet authorities reversed their policies and respond with violence, subjecting its minority populations to Russification and assimilation, ethnic terror, and deportations. The proposed project builds upon the existing scholarship to provide a unique account of the Soviet minority experiment as designed and implemented during the 1920s-early 1930s within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet Ukraine served as a trendsetting laboratory for Soviet minorities policy Union-wide. While few existing studies look at certain minority groups, this research aims to provide a first-of-its-kind comprehensive study of the Soviet minority regime based on a variety of primary sources both from central and local archives. The Soviet minorities policies are set against the contemporary international attempts to provide protection and guarantee the legal and cultural status of national minorities under the Versailles system and the League of Nations. Unlike most studies on the Soviet nationality policy, this project makes Soviet ethnic minorities its primary focus, scrutinising the Soviet minority experiment at various levels of power, from top to bottom. At the top level, it looks at the state strategies to organise the society along ethnic lines; at the middle local level, it studies how local party officials and minority specialists translated the state-imposed vision of ethnic proliferation to the local conditions. Lastly, at the bottom level, it looks at the way education and cultural workers adapted and carried out those programmes on the ground and investigates how people digested the new ethnic regime and adapted (if at all) their everyday life to the new expectations. The study is centred around the examination of three main strategies of the Soviet government that concerned national minorities (the strategy of a Soviet 'civilising mission', the strategy of ethnic proliferation, and the strategy of ethnic equalisation). The primary material gathered by the project, combined with its theoretical framing and comprehensive perspective, will form a significant and original contribution to the historiography of the Soviet and Eastern European interwar-period studies.