a Part of Russian Federation Again .

CWIHP due east-Dossier No. 47

• Introduction by Mark Kramer

• List of Documents

 The Transfer of Crimea from Soviet Russian federation to Soviet Ukraine, 1954

Mark Kramer

Crimea was part of Russian federation from 1783, when the Tsarist Empire annexed it a decade after defeating Ottoman forces in the Boxing of Kozludzha, until 1954, when the Soviet authorities transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics (RSFSR) to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). The transfer was announced in the Soviet printing in late February 1954, eight days after the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet adopted a resolution authorizing the move on 19 Feb. The text of the resolution and some anodyne excerpts from the proceedings of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet coming together on nineteen February were published forth with the very brief announcement.[i] Nothing else near the transfer was disclosed at the time, and no further data was made available during the remainder of the Soviet era.

Not until 1992, merely after the Soviet Union was dissolved, did additional fabric about this episode emerge. A historical-archival journal, Istoricheskii arkhiv (Historical Annal), which had been published in the USSR from 1955 until 1962, began appearing again in 1992 with transcriptions of declassified documents from the quondam Soviet archives. The first upshot of the revived Istoricheskii arkhiv in 1992 contained a department about the transfer of Crimea that featured documents from the Russian Presidential Archive and from a few other archives whose collections are at present housed at the Land Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Unfortunately, these documents do not add together anything of substance to what was published in the Soviet press 38 years earlier; indeed, they are by and large identical to what was published in 1954. (Plainly, the editors of Istoricheskii arkhiv were unaware that the scripted proceedings of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium meeting had already been published in 1954.) The documents do confirm that the motion was originally approved by the Presidium of the Communist Political party of the Soviet Matrimony (CPSU) on 25 January 1954, paving the way for the authorizing resolution of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet three weeks later. But the declassified files reveal nothing more about the motives for the transfer, leaving us with but the two official rationales that were published in 1954:

(1) the cession of Crimea was a "noble deed on the function of the Russian people" to commemorate the 300^thursday ceremony of the "reunification of Ukraine with Russia" (a reference to the Treaty of Pereyaslav signed in 1654 past representatives of the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate and Tsar Aleksei I of Muscovy) and to "evince the boundless trust and honey the Russian people experience toward the Ukrainian people"; and

(2) the transfer was a natural outgrowth of the "territorial proximity of Crimea to Ukraine, the commonalities of their economies, and the close agricultural and cultural ties betwixt the Crimean oblast and the UkrSSS."

Neither of these ostensible justifications holds upwardly to scrutiny. Even though 1954 was the 300^th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav, at that place is no connection between that treaty and the Crimean peninsula. Pereyaslav, in fundamental Ukraine non far from Kyiv, is nowhere near Crimea, and the treaty had zip to practise with the peninsula, which did non come nether Russian command until 130 years later on. Moreover, the description of the treaty as having produced the "unification of Russia and Ukraine" is hyperbolic. The treaty did provide an of import step in that direction, but years of further struggling and warfare had to take place earlier full unification occurred. In retrospect the Treaty of Pereyaslav is often associated (inaccurately) with Russian-Ukrainian unity, but it is hard to come across why anyone in the USSR would have proposed jubilant the 300^th anniversary of the document past transferring Crimea from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR.

The notion that the transfer was justified solely by Crimea'due south cultural and economic affinities with Ukraine is also far-fetched. In the 1950s, the population of Crimea — approximately 1.1 meg — was roughly 75 pct ethnic Russian and 25 percent Ukrainian. A sizable population of Tatars had lived in Crimea for centuries until May 1944, when they were deported en masse past the Stalinist authorities to barren sites in Central Asia, where they were compelled to live for more than iv decades and were prohibited from returning to their homeland. Stalin also forcibly deported smaller populations of Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks from Crimea, completing the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula. Hence, in 1954, Crimea was more than "Russian" than it had been for centuries. Although Crimea is briefly contiguous with southern Ukraine via the Isthmus of Perekop, the large eastern Kerch region of Crimea is very close to Russia. The peninsula did have important economic and infrastructural ties with Ukraine, but cultural ties were much stronger overall with Russian federation than with Ukraine, and Crimea was the site of major military bases from Tsarist times on, having become a symbol of Imperial Russian military power against the Ottoman Turks.

Even though the publicly enunciated rationales for the transfer of Crimea to the UkrSSR were of trivial brownie, some of the comments published in 1954 and other information that has come to light since and then exercise allow united states to guess why the Soviet government decided on this action. Of item importance were the function of Nikita Khrushchev, the recent traumas inflicted on Ukraine, and the ongoing power struggle in the USSR.

Khrushchev had been elevated to the post of CPSU First Secretary in September 1953 but was still consolidating his leading position in early 1954. He had earlier served every bit the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine from the belatedly 1930s through the terminate of 1949 (apart from a yr-and-a-half during World War II when he was assigned as a political commissar to the front end). During the last several years of Khrushchev's tenure in the UkrSSR, he had overseen the Soviet authorities's side of a fierce civil war in the newly annexed western regions of Ukraine, especially Volynia and Galicia. The civil war was marked by high levels of casualties and gruesome atrocities on both sides. Despite Khrushchev's afterward part in denouncing Stalinism and implementing reforms in the USSR, he had relied on ruthless, unstinting violence to establish and enforce Soviet control over western Ukraine. Occasional armed clashes were nevertheless occurring in the mid-1950s, only the state of war was over by the time Crimea was transferred in February 1954. The repeated references at the meeting of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium on 19 February to the "unity of Russians and Ukrainians" and to the "peachy and indissoluble friendship" between the 2 peoples, and the affirmation that the transfer would demonstrate how wise information technology was to have Ukraine "under the leadership of the Communist Party and the Soviet authorities," indicate that Khrushchev saw the transfer as a manner of fortifying and perpetuating Soviet command over Ukraine at present that the ceremonious war had finally been won. Some 860,000 indigenous Russians would be joining the already large Russian minority in Ukraine.

A somewhat similar approach was used in the three newly annexed Baltic republics, especially Latvia and Estonia, both of which had had very few Russian inhabitants prior to the 1940s.  The Stalinist regime encouraged ethnic Russians to settle in those republics from the belatedly 1940s on, and this policy continued under Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Proportionally, the transfer of Russians to the Baltic republics was greater than in Ukraine, just in absolute numbers the transfer of Crimea brought into Ukraine much larger numbers of Russians and a region closely identified with Russia, bolstering Soviet control.

The transfer of Crimea to the UkrSSR also was politically useful for Khrushchev equally he sought to business firm upwardly the back up he needed in his ongoing power struggle with Soviet Prime Minister Georgii Malenkov, who had initially emerged as the preeminent leader in the USSR in 1953 after Joseph Stalin's death. Having been at a disadvantage right after Stalin'south death, Khrushchev had steadily whittled away at Malenkov'south position and had gained a major edge with his elevation to the post of CPSU Kickoff Secretary in September 1953. Nevertheless, the post-Stalin power struggle was by no means over in early 1954, and Khrushchev was trying to line up as much back up as he could on the CPSU Presidium for a bid to remove Malenkov from the prime government minister's spot (a feat he achieved in January 1955). Among those whose support Khrushchev was hoping to enlist was Oleksiy Kyrychenko, who had go first secretarial assistant of the Communist Party of Ukraine in early June 1953 (displacing Leonid Mel'nykov, who had succeeded Khrushchev in that postal service in December 1949) and soon thereafter had been appointed a full member of the CPSU Presidium. In 1944, when Khrushchev himself was even so the Communist Party leader in Ukraine, he reportedly had suggested to Stalin that transferring Crimea to the UkrSSR would be a useful style of winning back up from local Ukrainian elites.[2] Regardless of whether Khrushchev actually did bring up this matter with Stalin (the veracity of the secondhand retrospective account is uncertain), it most likely reflects Khrushchev's own sense as early every bit 1944 that expanding Ukraine's territory was a way of gaining elite support in the republic. In detail, Khrushchev most certainly regarded the transfer of Crimea as a means of securing Kyrychenko's backing. Khrushchev knew that he could not automatically count on Kyrychenko's support because the ii of them had been sharply at odds as recently every bit June 1953, when Kyrychenko endorsed Lavrentii Beria's strong criticism of the situation in western Ukraine — criticism that implicitly attacked a good bargain of what Khrushchev had done when he was the leader of the democracy in the 1940s. Khrushchev hoped that the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine would dispel the lingering tensions from this episode and thereby aid to solidify Kyrychenko'south support in the forthcoming showdown with Malenkov.

The earlier published documents, and materials that have emerged more recently, make clear that the transfer of Crimea from the RSFSR to the UkrSSR was carried out in accordance with the 1936 Soviet constitution, which in Article 18 stipulated that "the territory of a Union Democracy may non be altered without its consent." The proceedings of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium coming together point that both the RSFSR and the UkrSSR had given their consent via their republic parliaments. One of the officials nowadays at the xix Feb session, Otto Kuusinen, even boasted that "only in our state [the USSR] is it possible that issues of the utmost importance such equally the territorial transfer of individual oblasts to a detail republic can be decided without whatever difficulties." One might argue that the process in 1954 would take been a lot better if information technology had been complicated and difficult, merely no thing how one judges the expeditiousness of the territorial reconfiguration, the main point to stress here is that it is incorrect to say (as some Russian commentators and regime officials recently have) that Crimea was transferred unconstitutionally or illegally. The legal arrangement in the Soviet Union was mostly a fiction, but the transfer did occur in accord with the rules in consequence at the time. Moreover, regardless of how the transfer was carried out, the Russia expressly accepted Ukraine'due south 1991 borders both in the Dec 1991 Belovezhskaya Pushcha accords (the agreements that precipitated and codification the dissolution of the Soviet Union) and in the December 1994 Budapest Memorandum that finalized Ukraine's status as a non-nuclear weapons state.

Crimea had originally been an "autonomous commonwealth" (avtonomnaya respublika) in the RSFSR, but its status was changed to that of an "oblast'" (province) in the RSFSR in 1945, ostensibly because the forced removal of the Crimean Tatars had eliminated the need for autonomy. After the Crimean oblast was transferred to the UkSSR in 1954, it retained the status of an oblast' within Soviet Ukraine for 37 years. In early 1991, after a referendum was held in the UkrSSR and a resolution was adopted a month later on past the UkrSSR parliament, the status of Crimea was upgraded to that of an "autonomous republic." Crimea retained that designation within Ukraine after the Soviet Union broke apart. In the Russian federation, nevertheless, the category of "autonomous commonwealth" does non be. In the treaty of annexation signed by the Russian and Crimean governments on eighteen March 2014, the condition of the peninsula was changed to simply a "republic" (Respublika Krym), joining 21 other "republics" of the Russian Federation'south now-85 federal "subjects," with Crimea and the city of Sevastopol added as dissever entities.[[3]

Ane of the ironies of the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 is that when the chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, Kliment Voroshilov, offered his closing remarks at the session on 19 February 1954, he declared that "enemies of Russia" had "repeatedly tried to accept the Crimean peninsula from Russia and use information technology to steal and ravage Russian lands." He praised the "joint battles" waged by "the Russian and Ukrainian peoples" as they inflicted a "severe rebuff against the insolent usurpers." Voroshilov'south characterization of Russia's past "enemies" seems eerily appropriate today in describing Russia'southward own actions vis-à-vis Ukraine. A further tragic irony of the Crimean transfer is that an activeness of 60 years ago, taken by Moscow to strengthen its control over Ukraine, has come up back to haunt Ukraine today.

Marker Kramer is Manager of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Swain of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

  Documents

Document ane

5 February 1954

Prescript of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Council of Ministers, "Concerning the Transfer of the Crimean Oblast' from the RSFSR to the UkSSR"

TsGA RSFSR [GARF]. F.259. Op.1. D.645. L.159. Published in "Istoricheskii arkhiv" (1992). Translated for CWIHP by Gary Goldberg.

Document 2

v Feb 1954

Minutes Nº 41 of a Meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [RSFSR] Supreme Soviet

TsGA RSFSR [GARF]. F. 385, Op. 13. D. 492. L. 1-ii. Published in "Istoricheskii arkhiv" (1992). Translated for CWIHP by Gary Goldberg.

Document 3

13 February 1954

Decree of the Presidium of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, "Concerning the Submission of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet Presidium Apropos the Upshot of the Transfer of the Crimean Oblast to the Ukrainian SSR"

GARF. F. 7523. Op. 85. D. 94. 50. 8. Published in "Istoricheskii arkhiv" (1992). Translated for CWIHP past Gary Goldberg.

Document 4

15 February 1954

Letter from D. S. Korotchenko and V. Ye. Nizhnik to K. Ye. Voroshilov, with a Study about the Decree of the Presidium of the Ukrainian SSR Supreme Soviet

GARF. F. 7523. Op. 85. D. 94. L. 8. Published in "Istoricheskii arkhiv" (1992). Translated for CWIHP by Gary Goldberg.

Certificate five

nineteen February 1954

Meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

GARF. F.7523. Op.57. D.963, L1-10. Published in "Istoricheskii arkhiv," upshot i, vol. 1 (1992). Translated for CWIHP by Gary Goldberg.

Certificate 6

Sergey Khrushcehv, Excerpt fromNikita Khrushchev: Reformator (Moscow: Vremya, 2010)

Translated by Anna Melyakova for the National Security Archive.

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[1] "V Prezidiume Verkhovnogo soveta RSFSR i Sovete Ministrov RSFSR,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 Feb 1954, p. 1; "V Prezidiume Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 February 1954, p. 2; "Rech' tovarishcha Tarasova M. P.,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 February 1954, p. 2; "Rech' tovarishcha Korotchenko, D. S.,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 Feb 1954, p. 2; "Rech' tovarishcha Shvernika Due north. Chiliad."Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 February 1954, p. 2; "Rech' tovarishcha Rashidova Sh.,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 February 1954, p. ii; "Rech' tovarishcha Kuusinena O. V.,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 Feb 1954, p. 2; and "Rech' tovarishcha Voroshilova 1000. Eastward.,"Izvestiya (Moscow), 27 February 1954, p. 2.

[2] This matter is reported in P. Knyshevskii, "Shtrikhi g portretu kremlevskoi galerei,"Novoe vremya (Moscow), No. 9 (Apr 1994), p. 54.  Knyshevskii claims that Khrushchev told him in 1944 (50 years earlier) near having raised this matter with Stalin when Khrushchev was visiting Moscow.  William Taubman accepts Knyshevskii's account at face value inKhrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Due west. West. Norton, 2002), p. 163.  I am far more than skeptical (partly because Khrushchev was well aware of how savagely Stalin had attacked Ukrainian national elites throughout the 1930s, partly because Khrushchev's main priority in 1944 was to beat out the armed insurgency in western Ukraine, and partly because a secondhand account told so long after the fact is inherently difficult to appraise), only I practise regard information technology as a plausible reflection of Khrushchev'south own sentiment at the time.

[3] "Dogovor mezhdu Rossiiskoi Federatsiei i Respublikoi Krym o prinyatii v Rossiiskuyu Federatsiyu Respubliku Krym i obrazovanii v sostave Rossiiskoi Federatsii novykh sub"ektov," 18 March 2014, signed in Moscow.

pryorthenficed1940.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-sixty-years-ago