Language, Literacy, and Book Publishing in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923–1928

Abstract

After the creation of the USSR in December 1922, the Soviet government initiated a program of korenizatsiia, the indigenization of the party and governmental institutions in the non-Russian republics and regions. By encouraging wide-ranging cultural and linguistic development, the government hoped to win the support of wary non-Russians who had been subjected to Russification under tsarist rule and who had violently opposed the establishment of Bolshevik power in the borderlands. The indigenization program attempted to recruit enough non-Russians into responsible positions to eliminate the image of the party and the government as outposts of the foreign ruling class, where native cadres were underrepresented. 1 The program was intended to legitimize Soviet rule and to demonstrate to Eastern Europe and to Western colonies in Asia the Soviet solution to the national and colonial problem. The Ukrainianization of the Communist Party of the Ukraine and the government of the Ukrainian republic was supposed to reconcile the predominantly Ukrainian peasantry with the Russian and Russified urban working class.2 The expansion of Ukrainian cadres as well as the increased use of the Ukrainian language in the party and the state apparatus were some of the means of legitimizing Soviet rule in the Ukraine. Thus, the linguistic transformation of book publishing in the Ukraine during the 1920s is one important indicator of the evolution and implementation of the Ukrainianization program and the application of the Soviet nationalities policy during the period of the New: Economic Policy.