The question of Ukraine's fate within the Country Email List USSR is complicated. is the ussrthe one that recognized Ukraine as a national entity in the early 1920s, in contrast to the Western Allies after World War I, who refused to do so. In the 1920s there Country Email List were conflicts over "bourgeois nationalism" in the Ukraine. In the famine of the early 1930s (called "Holodomor" by Ukrainians, and a key part of the national history of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state), Ukrainian peasants were the main victims (although peasants in other grain-producing Country Email List regions , like the south of Russia and Kazakhstan, also suffered a lot); and the Ukrainian Party leaders, along.
With those of other national republics Country Email List and regions, fell victim to the Great Purges at the end of the decade. This is relatively familiar ground, but there is also the question of Ukraine's role in Soviet politics and government in the post-Stalin period. During the Country Email List writing of my latest book, The Shortest History of the Soviet UnionI was quite interested in this topic. The post-Stalin period, especially from the 1960s, was much easier for Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev, a Russian born in the Ukraine, had been the head of the Party in that region at the Country Email List end of the Stalin period, and when he rose to higher echelons in Moscow he kept many Ukrainian friends, who of course did very well under his leadership.
At that time, the leaders of the Ukrainian Country Email List Party, although appointed by Moscow, were always ethnic Ukrainians; and Ukrainian representation in the Politburo increased and remained important during the Leonid Brezhnev period. During the Country Email List late Soviet period, Ukraine seemed to be one of the most successful republics, it was doing Country Email List quite well, and compared to other republics of the ussrShe felt quite pleased with herself.