Minority Agents: State and Local Actors of Minority Policy in the Interwar Ukraine

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Olena Palko, Assistant Professor at the Chair for East European History at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Speaker: Olena Palko, Assistant Professor at the Chair for East European History at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Discussant: Per Bolin, Professor of History, Södertörn University.

Chair: Julia Malitska, Project Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies and Research Leader at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Abstract:

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet authorities devised and implemented a distinctive minority policy experiment intended to draw various non‑titular communities into the broader project of socialist construction. To pursue these aims, a new administrative reform was introduced that reorganized the territory of Soviet Ukraine along ethnic lines. Within these territorial units, the language of the dominant community was to be used in all communication with the state, while schooling and the press were likewise provided in the respective minority language.

Having outlined the broader context of this experiment, my presentation will focus on the main actors responsible for its implementation in Ukraine: the members of the Central Committee for National Minorities (TsK Natsmen), established in April 1924 within the All‑Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (VUTsVK). I examine representatives of several minority groups—specifically Polish, Bulgarian, German, and Greek—to assess their role in translating Soviet nationality policies into practice on the ground. At the same time, these very actors were among the first to be targeted during the national and mass operations of the 1930s. Analyzing their investigation files, compiled by the Soviet secret police, allows me to trace the connection between the minority policies of the 1920s and the mass terror of the following decade.

Olena Palko is Assistant Professor at the Chair for East European History at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Olena is an historian of Ukraine, the Soviet Union and modern Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on minorities history. She has held a number of research fellowships, including at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and the Slavic-Eurasian Research Centre, in Sapporo, Japan.