In April 1920, Polish and Ukrainian forces advanced toward Kyiv from the north, beginning what came to be known as the Polish–Soviet War. Their goal was to challenge Bolshevik ascendency in the region and reclaim the historic lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Petliura, who was then in exile in Warsaw, had agreed to an alliance with Piłsudski in which Poland would support Ukrainian independence in the provinces of the former Russian Empire in exchange for Petliura’s renunciation of Ukrainian claims to Eastern Galicia.¹ Polish forces had already made gains in Belarusian territory, conquering Mazyr and Kalinkavichy in March.
The Red Army was completely unprepared for the assault. Polish soldiers were amazed at the bedraggled appearance of the Bolsheviks. “Some were barefoot, some had shabby soft shoes, others had rubber galoshes,” wrote Franciszek Krzystyniak, “while on their heads they wore a variety of headgear—some even had women’s hats—and winter caps or kerchiefs, and some were even bareheaded, their hair flying in the wind. They looked like ghouls. Their rifles were either suspended on string, or without any straps—but they did have plenty of ammunition in their pockets and their aim was good.”²
The Bolsheviks’ tenuous hold over Ukraine seemed to be evaporating just as it had in the face of the Whites eight months earlier.
Maybe I should have known this far sooner than I did, but I was always under the impression that the Red Army had simply invaded Poland unprovoked!
While all this was happening in Polish occupied Western Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s, let's also take a look at what was going on in the Soviet Union's Ukrainian SSR:
Lenin gifted some of the most developed and economically valuable (but predominantly Russian) regions such as the Donbass, Odessa, Novorossiya and Kharkov to Ukraine
In the Ukrainian SSR, the use of Ukrainian language was promoted via the policy of "Korenizatsiya" (also implemented throughout the Caucasus and other national republics)
Ukrainian identity was promoted throughout the SSR, Ukrainian language was taught in schools and its use in art and printed media was encouraged by the Soviet state to create a national culture
The number of books and newspapers in Ukrainian increased exponentially
Universal literacy was achieved
The participation of ethnic Ukrainians in administration and governance greatly increased, with a large number of Ukrainians at top levels of the local Communist Party of Ukraine as well as the CPSU
Ukraine was heavily prioritized for industrial development and would later become one of the Soviet Union's most developed republics, building power plants, dams, canals, railways, mines, factories, universities, advanced technological research institutes, and more.
Meanwhile, under Poland, Western Ukraine remained a largely underdeveloped and backward producer of agricultural exports and raw materials.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: socialist construction 1921-1941
From Brezhnev to Khrushchev: Ukraine had a huge influence on the Soviet Union