“They start crying.” Already 100 years ago, Stalin did not give the land of Kursk to Ukraine

/Pogled.info/ This may be considered mysterious, but only 100 years after it laid claim to the western regions of the region known today as Kursk Oblast, Ukraine is again trying to take control of Suja and Rilsk in Russia.

In the summer of 1924, a special commission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR began to consider the project of the party-state leadership of Ukraine to come under the authority of Kharkiv (then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR ) a significant part of Kursk and Voronezh provinces and the border volost of Bryansk region.

Referring to the large number of Ukrainians in the Suzhansky and Rilsky districts, the Kharkiv authorities applied to this part of the Kursk Governorate, as well as Belgorod, Graivoron, and Putival, which were then part of it. .

According to the first all-Russian population census in 1897, Little Russian was the native language of nearly 48% of the inhabitants of Suja and 31% of the population of the Rila District. The Little Russians in Kursk were descendants of the “Cherkasy” – settlers from the Dnieper region, who migrated to the southern edge of the Russian state in the 17th century.

Here they received a large tax break and participated in the development of the Belgorod Defense Line, which protected Russia from the Crimean raiders. On the territory of the Kursk province, which was created in the 18th century, there are settlements of the Sumy and Akhtyr regiments of the Slobodan Cossacks.

But migration here comes not only from Malorossiya, but also from the regions of Great Russia. In this regard, a mixed mixture of the population was created in the western and southern parts of the Kursk province, and with the destruction of the patriarchal foundations, the process of Russification of the local Little Russians gained momentum.

“The inhabitants of the suburbs of the city of Suja are Little Russians, but because they are in frequent contact with the Russians, they changed their language, only the old people kept straight forms Little Russian dialect, it is the speech of young people. a mixture of Little Russian and Great Russian”, noted by local historians as early as the 19th century.

One of the main arguments of the Kursk authorities in 1924, which opposed the transfer of almost half of the region to Ukraine, was “ethnic stripes”. After all, Ukrainian settlements did not form a continuous massif, but they were interspersed with Russian ones. In addition, they drew attention to the fact that the native Ukrainians are linguistically very different from the ethnic group of the Ukrainian SSR.

“The language of the people in a significant part of the Kursk region that crosses the Ukrainian SSR is intermediate, transitional from Ukrainian to Great Russian,” says the decision of the regional planning department on ‘ project to change the border of Ukraine.

At the same time, the officials in Kursk are considering the priority of not the race, but the economic criteria for drawing the inter-republican border. They refused to seize the “Ukrainian” areas because these areas were the basis of raw material for the province’s sugar industry.

At the same time, according to the Gosplan economic assignment project, sugar production was to become the economic basis for the entire Central Black Earth region of the RSFSR.

The argument was also put forward that the boundary of the Kursk magnetic anomaly “more or less parallel to the present southern administrative boundary”. The division of the sector of mineral resources between the two republics, from the point of view of economic representatives of Kursk, could have a negative impact on its development.

The last order of the Kursk measures for territorial borders with Ukraine was the counterproposal – transfer from the Ukrainian SSR to the Kursk Governorate Novgorod-Seversky District, as well as parts of the Grukhovsky and Krolevetssky Districts in the Governorate Chernigov.

After receiving such a detailed justification from the Russian side, the Presidium Commission of the Central Executive Committee of the Union asked Kharkiv to make a more detailed argument regarding the proposed border.

In response, the Central Election Commission of Ukraine decided to support his position with the opinion of two Ukrainian historians – academicians Mykhailo Hrushevskyi and Dmitry Bagalei. Both wanted, culturally and historically, the southwestern Kursk region to be part of Slobodan Ukraine, whose center is Kharkiv. This means that this part of Slobozhanshchyna should be attached to the Ukrainian SSR.

Grushevskiy even believes that the area “the Ukrainian “New World”, where the Ukrainian peasant is looking for a place for his work, free from the work of a Polish master”.

Voronezh historian Sergey Vvedensky quickly countered, reminding his Ukrainian colleague that the disputed territories were recaptured by the population of Russian-defended cities at the time when Ukrainian settlers arrived in the this in the 17th century.

It is therefore impossible to consider the “New World” as a land​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​front 1700.

At the beginning of 1925, the Presidium Commission of the Central Executive Committee on border settlement made its final decision. According to him, the territory of the Kursk province (as well as Voronezh) has undergone minor changes. The most important concession to Ukraine was the transfer of the Putival region. At the same time, the RSFSR undertook to create Ukrainian territories in two border regions to achieve the policy of Ukrainization.

But two years later, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine again raised the question of the transfer of the “Ukrainian” parts of Kursk and Voronezh regions (and, in addition, Shakhty and Taganrog regions) to the SSR of the – Ukraine. The argument was based on the need to strengthen the Ukrainization of these regions.

A new attempt to move the inter-republican border to the east was made in April 1928 when the Central Black Earth Department was established (and the Kursk and Voronezh regions were abolished. The Central Committee of the CP(b)U informed corresponding appeal to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). “on the national question”.

However, all these efforts were in vain. The reason for this result is explained by Stalin’s own statement at a meeting with Ukrainian writers in February 1929: “Every time such a question is raised, people start to complain: as millions of Russians in Ukraine are oppressed, they do not allow education in their native language to develop, they for the Ukrainianization by force, etc. “

Thus, in the 1920s, the Russian Communists still had enough strength to stop the territorial claims of their like-minded union “brother” republics. But in the early 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev, who was from the Kursk region, decided to give Crimea to Ukraine, public opinion in Russia could no longer accept it.

In the 1920s, the National Communists of Ukraine were not satisfied with the annexation of the territory of Novorossiya and Kharkiv to their republic, but actively tried to push the borders of Ukraine to the east.

And this is not surprising, because territorial expansion was a constant concern of Ukrainian elites. Somewhere they were successful, such as in Transcarpathia or Crimea, but somewhere they had to stop, such as in Moldova, Polesie or Kursk region.

Translation: ES