Soviet Empire Research Articles

Genesis of social security regulation for police officers in Ukraine

The police reform launched in Ukraine in 2015 was a very important and long-overdue step towards the transformation of both the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and the law enforcement system of the country as a whole. However, today, more than seven years after the adoption of the Law of Ukraine “On the National Police”, the reform is still not fully completed, and sharp criticism of numerous problems and shortcomings in the reform process is often heard in the academic community and among representatives of the practical sphere of law. We do not deny the existence of certain gaps and other problematic issues in the current legal framework for the organisation and functioning of the police in Ukraine, but we do not agree with the current opinion that the police reform has failed. A number of aspects, including the state of legislative regulation of social security for police officers, demonstrate the necessary and important positive developments and changes in this area. In order to prove this position, an analysis of the genesis of legal regulation of social security for police officers is made in the article, which will allow tracing the changes in this area both during the period when our State was a part of the Soviet empire and after the declaration of independence and introduction of new ideas and principles of development of the Ukrainian statehood.
 The article examines the legal framework for regulating social security of police officers in Ukraine from the time of establishment of the Soviet police in 1917 to the launch of the police reform in 2015 and introduction of the relevant amendments to the current Ukrainian legislation in this regard. The author identifies the key features of the formation and development of legal regulation of social security of police officers in Ukraine at different historical stages of our country's development. Attention is focused on the dependence of the state of social security regulation of police officers on the ruling elite's vision of the role of police bodies and services in the system of state power.

Why Ukrainians Resist. Historical Memory, Civic Identity, Political Independence

What are the motivations that support Ukrainians’ strenuous and unexpected resistance to the invasion, which began in 2014, of their republic? For many political observers, journalists, researchers and scholars, the Ukrainians’ tenacity, courage, and determination remain little or not fully understandable to this day. In reality, the reasons for that tenacity are many. However, the main has been and continues to be the opportunity, in the thirty years of Independence, to discover one’s own history, both from the period of the Russian and the Soviet Empires. Ukraine’s history has been difficult, punctuated with long denied, counterfeited, and obscured tragedies. Its discovery is the most important reason that supports the will to resist today. What is taking place today thus is the intensification of a centuries-long process of de-colonization that not only affects the ethnic Ukrainian component, but also becomes an attempt to block the way for the return of autocratic and totalitarian rule that threatens to overwhelm a fragile civic nation in the making for the past 30 years.

Ucraina și praxisul Federației Ruse în materie de cuceriri teritoriale

The hypothesis of the article is that the Russian Federation has developed a praxis in terms of territorial conquests, based on historical reminiscences, and it will not be renounced, especially in the case of Ukraine. By immersing in history, without making it a determinant of the present and without showing psittacism, we believe that the assertiveness of the Russian Federation in its proximity can be justified only from its point of view. The brutal and completely illegal intervention in Ukraine is an example of reality violation. The end of communism and the dissolution of the USSR have generated resentment among the Russians, which denotes capitulation. The Russians have probably rejoiced for a while over the end of totalitarianism, but they have constantly regretted the loss of the empire. The “Russian world” is, in fact, nothing but a form of virtual restoration of the Soviet empire, a trap of the past, in the souls and minds of the Russians, a ferment whose purpose is the internal destruction of the states that emerged after the collapse of the USSR, preventing them, by injecting feelings of confusion and nostalgia, to overcome the post-Soviet stage.

Who Is to Blame and What Is to Be Done? The Rise and Fall of Russian Authority in the Olympics

Who Is to Blame and What Is to Be Done? The Rise and Fall of Russian Authority in the Olympics

Co‐temporality and Sovremennost': Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs

Co‐temporality and <i>Sovremennost'</i>: Late Imperial and Early Soviet Photographs

Unpunished Crimes of Russia: from Genocide by Hunger to Genocide by War

The relevance and scientific novelty of the article are determined by the fact that it substantiates the legality of condemning the wars, mass repressions and famines committed by Muscovy against the Ukrainian nation as unpunished crimes against humanity, that is, those of a genocidal nature. This approach makes it possible to realize the goal of the research in a new way, to further understand the current stage of the full-scale war against Ukraine as a continuation of the implementation of the centuries-old imperial strategy of genocide, aimed at the total exsanguination of the Ukrainian people, the destruction of their national statehood, cultural heritage, erasure of historical memory and capture of their territory. The task is to investigate the commonality of the goal, methods, means, the nature of the cause-and-effect relationships of wars, famines of the 1920s – 1940s and the military invasion of 2014-2022, as a typical series of numerous crimes “in-perpetuity” aimed at the destruction of Ukraine. The research is based on the fundamental principles of the methodology of the Ukrainian studies: on documentary evidence; scientific works of Ukrainian studies, those of historical, philosophical, legal and demographic nature; statistical material;, periodicals and Internet resources.Adhering to the chronological principle, this article studies the nature and genetic roots of the criminal policy of Muscovy against Ukraine, especially the peculiarities of its later essence, which was most fully manifested in the process of establishing the Russian-Bolshevik regime on Ukrainian territory, in the organization of mass repressions and famines of 1921-1923, 1932-1933 and 1946-1947 and how the new wave of that policy was repeated in the current bloody war. All these unpunished crimes are equally premeditated, pre-programmed, truly genocidal in nature and have the same misanthropic goal: the physical extermination of the Ukrainian people and the cultural neutering its primordial desire to liberate itself, assert itself or build its own state. The inspirers, organizers and executors of such policies are found to be the totalitarian-imperial regimes in the form of Communism- Bolshevism in the 1920s-1940s, Brezhnevism and modern "Putinism" as a variation on the ideology and practice of Hitler's Nazism and Stalin's Bolshevism. Attention is drawn to the similarity of the methods and means of implementing genocidal policy through starvation, repression and deportation in the 1920s - 1940s and the current war, the use in it not only of the latest weapons, cyber technologies, massive missile strikes, prohibited ammunition, phosphorous and cluster bombs, but also repression against the civilian population, mass maraudings, deportations, torture, the establishment of concentration camps and in general creation of intolerable conditions for human lives.The article justifies a conclusion that the unpunished past crimes of the Stalinist-Bolshevik regime, primarily the wars, mass repressions and famines of the 1920s-1940s, committed against the Ukrainian people are the direct historical antecedent of the current war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. A number of suggestions have been made regarding the further investigation of the problem of unpunished crimes of the Russian and Soviet Empires, the heir of which is the extant Russian Federation under the current Putin regime, and the development of safeguards to prevent their repetition in the future.

The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire, by William Partlett and Herbert Küpper, Edward Elgar, 2022, 281 pp., $135.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9781802209433, $40.00 (electronic), ISBN 9781802209440.

The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire, by William Partlett and Herbert Küpper, Edward Elgar, 2022, 281 pp., 40.00 (electronic), ISBN 9781802209440.

O esfriamento da amizade entre a Ásia Central e a Rússia após a guerra na Ucrânia

Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 faced Central Asian countries with a hard choice. They shared with Russia centuries of cooperation, and they have been keeping close economic and cultural ties since separation from the Soviet empire in 1990s. But the aggression against Ukraine which story reminds a lot their own stories, engendered doubts and even fears in the societies of the region. Our essay delves, firstly, in the political rational of the four Central Asian countries regarding the war in Ukraine. Secondly, the military dimension of their relationship is analyzed. Finally, it is proposed some prospective scenarios on the repositioning of the region.

The Cultural and Political Imaginary of Cybernetic Socialism

The Cultural and Political Imaginary of Cybernetic Socialism Clemens Günther (bio) In recent years, we have seen a surge in research on Soviet cybernetics. Drawing on some earlier studies and Slava Gerovitch's seminal From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, researchers have substantiated the role of cybernetics as a key element in late Soviet epistemology.1 During the Thaw, cybernetics became an "intellectual, technical, and institutional resource for innovation and change" and one of the cornerstones of socialist governance.2 Through the computerization of economic planning and the production process, the government hoped to enhance the quality of decision making in various fields. In architecture, cybernetic modeling became one means for planning and designing the new Soviet city.3 In the humanities, cybernetics was a vital component for establishing the "Soviet Empire of Signs" and for the introduction of statistical methods in linguistics, art, and historiography.4 In environmental studies, cybernetic methods were [End Page 321] for the development of Soviet-style "earth system governmentality."5 These examples demonstrate the encompassing character of cybernetics and the interdisciplinarity of the field in which it thrived. Although not all Soviet cybernetics endeavors were successfully implemented, as Benjamin Peters's book about the failure of a Soviet Internet shows, they constituted a paradigm shift for postwar epistemology with consequences for all fields of society.6 Prior to its rise in the second half of the 1950s, cybernetics was condemned as a "science of obscurantists" (nauka mrakobesov) and as a pseudoscience (lzheteoriia) in the Soviet press.7 Cybernetic studies from the West were relegated to libraries and supporters of cybernetics expelled from institutes. The early Stalinist campaign against cybernetics not only exemplified the then obsessive condemnation of international cooperation and exchange but was also triggered by the fuzzy nature of cybernetics itself. In its early stage, cybernetics appeared to herald scientific and social change and implicitly challenged Soviet Marxism and its universalist claims. After Stalin's death, cybernetics became, in Gerovitch's words, "a vehicle of reform" and was officially rehabilitated in the Soviet Union.8 In his portrait of the intelligentsia during the Thaw, Vladislav Zubok holds that "more than any other branch of scientific exploration, cybernetics seemed to offer Soviet optimists a fresh and truly universal intellectual framework."9 The newly emerging discipline with its universalist, rational language provided an alternative to Stalinist dogmatism and rekindled the utopian promises of the early Soviet years that had been discredited during Stalinism. I argue that cybernetics was both a tool for changing and enlarging existing social structures and a means of imagining different social orders.10 [End Page 322] Building on such key principles of cybernetics as information, feedback, and rationality, writers and theoreticians challenged Soviet socialism and proposed "cybernetic socialism" as an alternative.11 The concepts and terms of cybernetics were used as a basis to develop alternative models of socialism and Soviet society. To this end, I want to look first at a play by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Candle in the Wind, which deals with social cybernetics, bio-cybernetics, and the moral obligations imposed by both.12 Next, I shift attention to Valentin Turchin's treatise The Inertia of Fear, a contribution to the political theory of cybernetics, which was published in the West in the late 1970s.13 These examples reveal the conceptual change that occurred in the 1960s and the diversity of the imaginative potential of cybernetic socialism. They stand paradigmatically for the establishment of a political imaginary [End Page 323] that was less concerned with criticizing individual weaknesses of the Soviet system than with the necessity of thinking about political processes against the background of new technologies. Although Solzhenitsyn's piece is a work of fiction and Turchin's a theoretical treatise, both are united by the impulse to create a new idea of the political through the idea of "social cybernetics" (Solzhenitsyn) or "cybernetic socialism" (Turchin). The Political Imaginary of Cybernetics To understand the rise of cybernetics during the Thaw, it is important to note that more than the sober rationality of mathematics and computation made intellectuals embrace cybernetics. Perhaps even more importantly, cybernetics set free an imaginative surplus for utopian fantasies. This may seem paradoxical at first sight, considering...

Review: Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union

Review: <i>Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union</i>

Przywództwo polityczne I sekretarzy w okresie realnego socjalizmu

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP OF THE FIRST SECRETARIES IN THE PERIOD OF REAL SOCIALISM The subject of the analysis is the issue of the political leadership of the leaders of communist parties in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Formed and functioning political systems were characterized by an undemocratic and centralized internal character. Although the degree of repressiveness of the system evolved and changed (from the condemnation of crimes and the so-called distortion of Stalinism), the above features characterized the analyzed countries until the end of the 1980s, becoming an inherent element of the power system. In the discussed context, the states of the region in question (except for Yugoslavia after 1948 and Albania after 1961) remained in the so-called In the Soviet sphere of influence, external factors are an important element of leadership, i.e. the degree of dependence (or autonomy) of bloc politicians from the Kremlin and politicians from the leadership of the USSR.

Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy by Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard

Reviewed by: Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy by Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard Aryeh Neier (bio) Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2022), ISBN 9781108495639 (hard-back), 324 pages. Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, a Danish historian teaching at a Swedish university, has written an excellent account of the way that the United States Congress, through its struggles in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration, helped to make the promotion of international human rights an important ongoing component of American foreign policy. His book, Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy, is deeply researched. To one who was a close observer and participant in those struggles as they were taking place, Søndergaard’s highly detailed reporting seems flawless. Most of his judgments seem well-considered and fair. And yet, despite his book’s many virtues, it appears to me that Søndergaard has told only part of the story. It was not only struggles with Congress during the Reagan years that led to an ongoing American commitment to promote human rights. It was also the focus on human rights reporting in the mainstream American press during that period and the emergence of an array of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to the human rights cause. The press coverage and the lobbying by NGOs complemented and contributed to the efforts of those members of Congress who were at the forefront of disputes with the Reagan administration. In turn, of course, the battles waged by members of Congress provided material for press attention to human rights, and NGOs built their constituencies by mobilizing their supporters around struggles in Congress. Before the 1970s, the international human rights cause did not attract much attention. It was rarely an issue in the US Congress. Press coverage was scarce. And a civil society movement to promote human rights barely existed. Amnesty International had been founded in 1961, but while it caught on in a few European countries, it had only a small following in the United States. Also, in those days, it restricted its activities to very few issues. Its main activity was to identify “prisoners of conscience” in a number of countries and to organize letter-writing campaigns for them. All of this changed in the 1970s because human rights became a focal point in the Cold War struggle. The most important developments were the emergence of a small dissident movement, quickly subjected to harsh repression in Moscow, at the heart of the Soviet empire; a military coup that was accompanied by extensive torture and killings that overthrew a democratically elected leftist government in Chile; and large scale protests against the Apartheid government in South Africa that were violently suppressed. The geopolitical alignments of the governments engaged in repression became a central part of the story. Some reacted to abuses because of their political sympathies for certain victims of repression. Others were insistent that all such abuses should be condemned and that human rights should be upheld regardless of Cold War alignments. [End Page 157] A member of Congress who responded to the human rights developments in different parts of the world was Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota. He conducted hearings on those developments and was the principal author of legislation that would change the way the United States Department of State would deal with human rights. Fraser’s legislation mandated the creation of the post of Assistant Secretary for Human Rights, provided that the Department would issue annual “country reports” on the human rights practices of governments worldwide, and prohibited security aid to governments that had practiced gross abuses of rights. The latter provision was seen as a repudiation of the role of Henry Kissinger in facilitating the military coup in 1973 that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The legislation was vetoed by President Gerald Ford, for whom Kissinger served as Secretary of State. It was adopted by Congress over Ford’s veto. An essential part of the process that secured the votes needed to override Ford’s veto is that the legislation won the support of right-wing members of...

Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, eds. Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions.

What earlier generations perhaps knew as “proletarian internationalism” has during the past decade been rediscovered and reconceptualized within the framework of transnational history. The recent anthology Left Transnationalism: The Communist International and the National, Colonial, and Racial Questions, edited by Oleksa Drachewych and Ian McKay, is a vital addition to this emerging global field. The volume contains a substantial introduction and fifteen chapters written by leading international scholars. Rather than offering another general history of the Communist International (Comintern), the volume provides a distinct study of the Comintern’s relation to the national, colonial, and racial questions. The collection is based on the “Transnational Leftism” conference organized by the editors at MacMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, in September 2017. The Comintern (1919–1943) was during the entire Cold War period a source of major contention, and its history is still dichotomized between “traditionalist” and “revisionist” perspectives. The volume offers a welcome exit from the stalemate and locates the diverse histories of international communism as a part of a larger cultural turn that quickly has established itself as a cornerstone of new communist studies. The history of international communism naturally remains a highly contentious field, caught in the nexus between Soviet control “from above” and locally embedded grassroots activism; between communist anti-imperialism and Soviet imperialism; between idealism and Stalinist terror. In light of today’s profound transnational “historical consciousness,” a return to the simplistic Moscow-centered idea of a “transmission belt” model presents itself like a scholarly impossibility. Transnational and entangled history has revealed that transfers and circulations were a part of a complex transcultural, multidirectional, and multicentered process that crucially involved the translation of complex concepts and ideas that were received and interpreted in various national contexts. The present edited volume therefore needs to be lauded for its efforts to reframe such histories that examine how Marxists traversed through the world of the Comintern and engaged with nationalism, race, and the question of “national self-determination.” As the many contributions show, Comintern doctrine did not conclusively provide an answer to how communists should engage with bourgeois-nationalist groups in the colonial and semicolonial countries, how to best engage with the African Americans, or how to handle different European immigrant groups in the United States or Canada. They needed to integrate them in accordance to local circumstances.

Erotic images and motives as a broadcast of the dominant social status (Based on the “Kazakh Erotic Novel” by Berik Dzhilkibaev)

In the time leading up to and immediately following the collapse of the USSR, processes of national self-identification in the formerly Soviet republics were revived anew. Ideologues and culture workers mined the distant past for the raw materials with which to re-activate new forms of national identity, and also to distance themselves from the traumas of imperialism. Written and published in the midst of these processes, Berik Dzilkibayev’s 2001 work Kazakh Erotic Novel is something of a mythological text, with ritual elements symbolizing the constant evolution of the fate of nations. This article analyzes Kazakh Erotic Novel from the perspective of psychoanalytic and cognitive literary criticism, while also situating the work historically in post-independence Kazakhstan. The novel narrates the emergence of the newly-independent Kazakh state, with its heightened energy potential, onto the world stage, while simultaneously exploring the act of returning to one’s roots – to the origins of one’s ethnic group – by replicating the act of creation of a society and its accompanying sovereignty. To broadcast the competitiveness of a young Kazakh country on the world stage, the author uses erotic images and motives that have an increased aggressive potential. In Dzilkibayev’s novel the image of the enemy, the hated Soviet Empire, which served as a unifying force for the Kazakhs, takes on the form of another opponent – the West – which is presented as fundamentally opposed to an imagined Eastern mentality. This difference is attributed to structural differences between Western monotheism and Tengrism, the animist religion of the Kazakhs, which took on renewed significance in the post-Soviet era.

The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire by William Partlett and Herbert Küpper (review)

Reviewed by: The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire by William Partlett and Herbert Küpper W. E. Butler Partlett, William and Küpper, Herbert. The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire. Elgar Monographs in Constitutional and Administrative Law. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, 2022. xii + 269 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £95.00. Unlike the American experience where the Constitution has remained in force since 1789 with infrequent amendments, the first ten coming rather quickly, Russia in the twentieth century experienced several generations of constitutions between 1905 and 1993, all linked expressly or otherwise to fundamental changes in societal development and held out as a model for other state systems to emulate. Western political science and comparative constitutional law have found it instructive to view such constitution-making through the prism of 'authoritarian' models as juxtaposed with 'democratic', usually acknowledging that pure versions of either did not exist. The present volume offers an alternative reading to the authoritarian/post-authoritarian perspectives that have dominated comparative constitutional discourse by [End Page 187] suggesting a post-colonial lens be superimposed on constitutional-making processes. The category of 'post-colonial' is seen as an additional, not a replacement, perspective which the authors hope will improve our perceptions of 'constitutional dynamics'. The (former?) colonial power is Russia in their analysis, which acquired 'colonies' that fell into two groups: the former Soviet republics within the USSR, the 'inner Empire'; and the satellite States, formally independent but under Soviet domination (Central Europe, Mongolia and the Baltic States), here styled as the 'outer Empire'. Hungary is singled out as a case study of constitution-formation and given a separate chapter. Omitted from consideration are areas where the Soviet authorities exercised 'soft power' — Yugoslavia, Albania, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos, Cuba — and others once classified as countries 'of a socialist orientation'. From the outset the authors avoid the key issue of what differentiates a 'post-authoritarian' and a 'post-colonial' jurisdiction as being beyond their scope. They do suggest that 'post-authoritarian' implies a progressive transition towards liberal democratic constitutionalism, a limited State, a strong judiciary, and an emphasis on individual, rather than collective, rights. One immediate problem is that 'colonial' is a pejorative term that engages multiple (two or more) subjects of international law, whereas 'authoritarian' is a domestic law term confined to a single jurisdiction. There is no definition of 'colonial' in international law; usually it is explained by examples. On a broad reading, every historical situation in which a state exercises, or claims to exercise, influence or authority over a people, nation, or state outside its boundaries is eligible for possible classification as a 'colony'; often the term is associated with flows of migration and settlement. Self-awareness may also be a factor. Russia until 1917 declared itself to be an empire and from at least Petrine times forward was widely so regarded — a self-perception that some would regard as automatically making Russia a colonial power. The authors concentrate on the dissolution of the former Soviet Union but do not really address the Russian Federation as a colonial or post-colonial entity. Modern Russia is said to contain one hundred or so ethnic groups, some more or less concentrated geographically, others dispersed throughout the land. The Russian Constitution recognizes, as of October 2022, eighty-nine subjects of the Federation (or should some or all be designated as 'colonies'). All eighty-nine have a constitution or equivalent constitutive document and are bound together by international treaty. An authoritarian paradigm treats Russia as a single entity for these purposes; a colonial paradigm, if applicable, would take a different perspective. Within the limited scope of this study, the authors work with a very broad brush. They are no doubt correct that the colonial/post-colonial paradigm [End Page 188] offers insights into constitution-formation and collateral issues not readily observable through alternative paradigms. All of which enriches the discipline of comparative law. Omitted from their study and virtually all others in this field is a consideration of the twenty-one-volume verbatim...

William Partlett and Herbert Küpper. The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022

William Partlett and Herbert Küpper. The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022

Intimacy and Race in Late Soviet Central Asia

Intimacy and Race in Late Soviet Central Asia

William Partlett, Herbert Küpper, The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire, Edward Elgar Publ., Cheltenham-Northampton 2022

Poniższa recenzja dotyczy niedawno wydanej monografii The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire autorstwa W. Partletta i H. Küppera. W książce tej autorzy podjęli próbę analizy reform prawa ustrojowego dawnych państw postkomunistycznych w paradygmacie postkolonialnym. Recenzent wskazuje, że choć przyjęta perspektywa badawcza jest interesująca i w naukach prawnych mało popularna, rezultaty pracy nie są w pełni satysfakcjonujące. Wskazano, że błędne jest zbiorcze traktowanie wszystkich państw postkomunistycznych w kategoriach postradzieckości. Przyjęta przez autorów postkolonialna rama badawcza sprawdziła się w badaniu reform ustrojowych republik byłego Związku Radzieckiego, lecz nie jest dobrym narzędziem do badań innych państw Europy Środkowej.

The Pamiris in the Russian and Soviet Imperial Politics

The Pamiris in the Russian and Soviet Imperial Politics

CHANGES IN THE ADMINISTRATIVE-TERRITORIAL STRUCTURE AND POPULATION OF ZAKARPATTIA DURING THE SOVIET PERIOD (1946–1991)

It is noted that Zakarpattia, as a separate administrative-territorial unit consisting of Uzhan, Berez, Ugochan, and Maramoros counties, was created in 1919–1920 as part of Czechoslovakia. It was found that as a result of the administrative-territorial reform in 1926, the zhupas were united in the so-called a large zhupa, and 14 districts were created. In 1928, due to consolidation, the number of districts was reduced to 12. In 1938–1939, the territory returned to Hungary, which carried out several administrative-territorial reforms. It is claimed that in the autumn of 1944, it became obvious that the territory of Zakarpattia would fall under the influence of the Soviet Empire. In present study particular attention is paid to the fact that the Soviet military administration returned the administrative-territorial division of the Czechoslovak period. It is noted that in 1946, the region officially became part of the Soviet Union, so the formation of the administrative-territorial system continued in order for the region to organically fit in with other regions of the Ukrainian SSR. It was found that the most significant administrative transformations took place from 1946 to 1969. According to the administrative division in 1946, the region consisted of 15 administrative units: 2 cities of regional subordination and 13 districts. It was established that in 1962, 8 districts were liquidated in Zakarpattia, but later the disintegration of districts was carried out and as a result of this reorganization 11 districts were created in 1965, and 2 more in 1966. As a result of the administrative-territorial reform of the Ukrainian SSR in 1965–1966, Zakarpattia again consisted of 13 districts and 2 cities of the regional order. In 1967–1969 there was the formation of new village councils, their merger or liquidation, the transfer of village council centres to other settlements, a change in the administrative subordination of village councils, the inclusion of villages in the strip of urban-type cities and towns. It can be concluded that, after repeated administrative transformations, the number of settlements in Zakarpattia Oblast increased from 512 in 1946 to 603 in 1969. In the period from 1969 to 1991 significant changes did not occurred. Keywords: Ukraine, Zakarpattia, administrative-territorial units, Soviet Union.