After Russian Revolution of February 1917, Ukrainian and Bolshevik forces struggled for control of Ukraine until 1921, when Soviet government emerged victorious. In 1924 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became one of the constituent republics of Soviet Union. Northwestern Ukraine (including Galicia and part of Volhynia) remained in the hands of Poland, which had fought against Bolsheviks with some degree of success in 1919-1920.
Beginning in the 1930s, Soviet government under Joseph Stalin carried out a policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in Ukrainian S.S.R.
Collectivization met with peasant resistance, which in turn prompted confiscation of grain from Ukrainian farmers by Soviet authorities, with the result that a famine in the early 1930s took an estimated five million lives. In that same decade, Soviet regime tightened its control over Ukrainian cultural life, and any remaining manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism were suppressed.
German-Soviet Treaty of Nonaggression (1939) that extinguished independent Poland brought the territories of eastern Galicia and western Volhynia into Ukrainian S.S.R.
Nazi Germany’s attack on Soviet Union (1941) and its rapid conquest of Ukraine initially found some local support. But Germans’ ruthless exploitation of Ukrainian agriculture and labor to meet their own needs soon provoked guerrilla resistance.
Soviet Union period postcard
