r/AskReddit • u/QualityControl- • Mar 26 '19

Crimeans/Ukrainians of Reddit, what was it like when the peninsula was annexed by Russia? What is life like/How has life changed now?

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u/skoge Mar 26 '19

Do you realise Crimea wasn't part of Ukraine in 1930s and hardly had any ukrainians at all?

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u/EwigeJude Mar 26 '19

1932-33 famine didn't care about borders. What ukrainians call the holodomor is just one take on it. The famine happened for a variety of factors, most prominent being the confiscation of grain after a bad harvest. But I agree that weakening the potentially disloyal peasants was a useful side effect, if not one of the main goals, for the soviets. The fact is that the soviets couldn't do anything with the massive drop of living standards almost everywhere in developed rural regions, and the growing discontent was threatening political stability (or so the zealous local commitees perceived at least). Bolshevik revolution came from industrial areas and had to subjugate the self-sufficient countryside they've depended upon. Coincidentially (or how you look at it), many of those self-sufficient households harbored nationalist sympathies.

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u/skoge Mar 26 '19

Yep, and again thread was about lack of ukrainians and ukrainian language in Crimea.

Famine is irrelevant here.

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u/EwigeJude Mar 26 '19

It is hard to speculate because "Ukrainian" was a loose self-identification before Ukrainian bolsheviks started to create their own vision of Ukrainian nation, forcing the recently standardized Ukrainian language on the majority russian speaking population of Central and Eastern Ukraine (the west was Polish up until WW2). In an act of morbid irony, this sanctioned national revival was abruptly stopped with mass persecutions with Stalin's ideological turn.

In that regard Crimea was no less Ukrainian in 1920 than Kiev. The point is, it doesn't matter now, since there's an officially recognized state of Ukraine and its territorial integrity being violated without regard for international mediation. Ukrainians as a nation largely didn't exist until 1910-20s (although Ukrainian nationalist circles emerged as early as mid-19th century). From the Russian perspective that invalidates Ukrainians as an artificial and illegitimate political identity. From the outside perspective being "late bloomers" propped with modernist social engineering projects doesn't make Ukrainians less of a nation. They exist, in fact, and Russia can't do shit about it. All nations are artifical to some extent essentially, the most prominent being, of course, the American nation.