Zelenyi Klyn: How the USSR Forced Ukrainians to Forget Their Roots

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, Ukrainians made up the majority of the population in the territory they themselves called Zelenyi Klyn — the lands of present-day Primorsky Krai, the Amur region, and parts of Khabarovsk Krai. According to the 1897 census, 15% of the 223,000 residents of Primorsky Krai reported Ukrainian as their native language, while between 1883 and 1905, nearly 173,000 people migrated to the Far East, more than 63% of whom were Ukrainians. By 1923, according to the census, Ukrainians already numbered 346,000 — 33.7% of the region’s population.

But just a few decades later, Ukrainian ancestry in the Far East had gone from being a demographic fact to something many families preferred not to openly acknowledge. How did an entire people, who once made up the majority in the Zelenyi Klyn region, come to be forced to hide their own roots?

The Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic and the First Attempt at Autonomy

After the fall of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainians of Zelenyi Klyn did not wait for mercy from the new centers of power in Petrograd and Moscow. In 1917, a Ukrainian regional congress was held in Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, a Regional Council was established, and its own constitution was adopted, proclaiming the right of the Ukrainian population of the Far East to self-determination. In May 1918, a delegation led by Lieutenant Petro Tverdovsky traveled to Kyiv to see Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi and seek support for Ukrainian autonomy in the Far East.

However, history took a different course. In 1920, the Bolsheviks established the Far Eastern Republic as a buffer state, effectively bringing the existence of the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic to an end by 1922. Prominent Ukrainian leaders, including Yurii Hlushko-Mova, were arrested, and many were executed. Ukrainian institutions, schools, and cultural organizations were closed, while the Russification of the region intensified as Bolshevik rule became firmly established.

The final blow to the Ukrainian national movement in the Far East came with the high-profile political trial in Chita in 1924: dozens of Ukrainian activists were convicted on charges of nationalism and opposition to Soviet rule. Even earlier, all Ukrainian communities and district councils through which the diaspora’s cultural and public life had been conducted had been dissolved.

A Brief Thaw — and a New Turn

Paradoxically, in the early 1930s, the Soviet authorities themselves attempted to play the card of Ukrainization in the Far East — but under their own control, rather than as an expression of national autonomy. Ukrainian schools were opened in some areas, newspapers in Ukrainian began to be published, and Blagoveshchensk and Spassk became the centers of this campaign. In 1931, plans were discussed to provide education in Ukrainian in 809 schools, along with administrative reforms in six districts of the region.

This thaw proved to be very short-lived. Under a joint directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR dated December 15, 1932, Ukrainization in the territory of the RSFSR, including the Far East, was completely halted by the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1933. Ukrainianized schools were ordered to be converted into Russian schools. The formal reason was bureaucratic — the “optimization” of national policy — but the actual goal was direct: from that point on, any expression of Ukrainian identity outside the Ukrainian SSR was viewed as a potential threat rather than a cultural characteristic.

Why Hiding One’s Ancestry Became a Matter of Survival

Historian Viacheslav Chornomaz, who studied the fate of the Ukrainian diaspora in the Far East, notes that it was precisely after the wave of repressions in the 1920s and 1930s that Ukrainians of Zelenyi Klyn began to hide their origins on a mass scale. The difference speaks louder than any words: according to the 1923 census, there were 346,000 Ukrainians in the region, but by the 1926–1927 census, their number had become significantly lower than even during the Russian Empire — despite the fact that actual migration from Ukraine did not stop during this period and, according to some plans, was even expected to increase. In 1926, a ten-year resettlement plan for the Far East was adopted, under which 400,000 peasants were expected to leave Ukraine.

Simply put — there were not fewer people. There were fewer people willing to openly identify themselves as Ukrainian on the census form.

The reasons for this were entirely rational under the conditions of the time:

• After the 1924 Chita trials against Ukrainians of Zelenyi Klyn, and in the years that followed, affiliation with “Ukrainian nationalism” in official Soviet discourse was directly associated with accusations of separatism and counter-revolutionary activity — that is, with charges that could lead to imprisonment in labor camps or execution.

• The rollback of Ukrainization in 1932–1933 coincided with mass repressions during collectivization and dekulakization, when the OGPU and NKVD arrested people for virtually any reason — party workers, village councils, and ordinary peasants alike. To also be a “national minority” member with a recently closed national school meant taking an additional, entirely unjustified risk.

• Assimilation and being recorded as “Russian” in official documents became a mundane tool of self-preservation — not a declaration of one’s beliefs, but a way to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to oneself and one’s family.
  

Zelenyi Klyn: A Legacy That Is Still Alive Today

By the time the USSR was established, as researchers of the region’s history note, Ukrainians in the Far East had “quickly become Russians” — not because their ethnic identity disappeared on its own, but because openly maintaining it had become deadly dangerous. An entire generation grew up no longer knowing the Ukrainian language of their grandparents and having no access to the Ukrainian schools, newspapers, and cultural organizations that had still existed just 10–15 years earlier.

And this history is not simply an episode from a textbook. It explains why many descendants of Ukrainian settlers in the Far East today do not know about their roots, or discover them by chance while going through family archives. It explains why the very name “Zelenyi Klyn” sounds to many residents of the region like something from the realm of legend, rather than a part of their own, very real family history.

We believe that reclaiming this memory is not nostalgia for something that never came to be, but a necessary step toward understanding the price that the colonial policy of russia has already made others pay with their lives and destinies on this land — and continues to make them pay today.

Today, our movement draws directly on this historical experience.

In the movement’s program document, we state explicitly: belonging to the Far Eastern nation is not a matter of blood, but a conscious choice made by a person who has tied their destiny to this land. We see this not as a rejection of Ukrainian roots, but as an expansion of the memory of them — as well as respect for the Indigenous peoples of the region, whose culture suffered under the same colonial policies. Transitional justice holds a special place in our plans: official recognition of Soviet crimes against Ukrainians, Koreans, and the Indigenous peoples of the Far East; documentation of deportations and repressions; the creation of memorials; and the inclusion of this history in school curricula — so that what several generations were forced to hide can finally become part of the openly acknowledged, rather than concealed, history of the region.

More about how we envision restoring historical memory and the cultural revival of Zelenyi Klyn can be found in the movement’s program document.

If you or your loved ones have a family history connected to the Ukrainian past of the Far East — write to us. We are collecting such testimonies so that this part of history is not forgotten completely.