Ukraine: Coming to terms with the soviet legacy

The seven decades of Soviet rule had both a negative and positive impact but broadly advanced the cause of Ukrainian statehood and nationhood. Tsarist Russia administered Ukraine as provinces of Russia and regarded its inhabitants as ‘Little Russians’, for whom a separate identity was not contemplated. The Soviet system accorded Ukraine the trappings of statehood, including UN membership, and this undoubtedly helped reinforce a distinctive identity; nevertheless, official attitudes against bourgeois nationalism meant that the flowering of Ukrainian identity could not take place in Soviet conditions; the indigenization policy of the 1920s was abandoned and replaced by suspicion and hostility towards manifestations of a Ukrainian ethnos. In the post‐Soviet period, state‐building is deemed to have been achieved, but the distribution of ethnic and linguistic groups on the territory of modern Ukraine means that nation‐building is a continuing process.