Geographically, the Ukrainian SSR was situated in Eastern Europe, to the north of the Black Sea, and was bordered by the Soviet republics of Moldavia (since 1940), Byelorussia, and Russia, and the countries of Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

"[29] After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the February Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd, many people in Ukraine wished to establish an autonomous Ukrainian Republic.

During a period of the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1923, many factions claiming themselves governments of the newly born republic were formed, each with supporters and opponents.

Due to a lack of adequate support from the local population and governing anti-communist Central Rada, however, the Kiev Bolshevik group split.

The Bolsheviks convened a separate congress and declared the first Soviet Republic of Ukraine on 24 December 1917 claiming the Central Rada and its supporters outlaws that need to be eradicated.

A group of three thousand workers were dispatched from Russia to take grain from local farms to feed Russian cities and were met with resistance.

[citation needed] The material devastation was huge; Adolf Hitler's orders to create "a zone of annihilation" in 1943, coupled with the Soviet military's scorched-earth policy in 1941, meant Ukraine lay in ruins.

[42] After World War II, amendments to the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR were accepted, which allowed it to act as a separate subject of international law in some cases and to a certain extent, remaining a part of the Soviet Union at the same time.

This was part of a deal with the United States to ensure a degree of balance in the General Assembly, which, the USSR opined, was unbalanced in favor of the Western Bloc.

[citation needed] When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the collective leadership of Khrushchev, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrentiy Beria took power and a period of de-Stalinization began.

The event was celebrated to prove the old and brotherly love between Ukrainians and Russians, and proof of the Soviet Union as a "family of nations"; it was also another way of legitimising Marxism–Leninism.

[45] On 23 June 1954, the civilian oil tanker Tuapse of the Black Sea Shipping Company based in Odessa was hijacked by a fleet of Republic of China Navy in the high sea of 19°35′N, 120°39′E, west of Balintang Channel near Philippines, whereas the 49 Ukrainian, Russian and Moldovan crew were detained by the Kuomintang regime in various terms up to 34 years in captivity with three deaths.

[45] In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed by a joint Central Committee and Politburo plenum and succeeded by another collective leadership, this time led by Leonid Brezhnev, born in Ukraine, as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

[52] The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the russification policies, and the apparent social and economic stagnation led several Ukrainians to oppose Soviet rule.

[55] On 8 December 1991, Ukraine (at Kravchuk's direction), Russian and Belarus signed the Belovezh Accords which declared that the Soviet Union had effectively ceased to exist and founded the Commonwealth of Independent States as a quasi-replacement.

[56] Originally, the legislative authority was vested in the Congress of Soviets of Ukraine, whose Central Executive Committee was for many years headed by Grigory Petrovsky.

[57] In addition, parliament also had to authority to elect the republic's executive branch, the Council of Ministers as well as the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court.

In spite of this, the Supreme Soviet elected the Presidium, the Chairman, three deputy chairmen, a secretary, and couple of other government members to carry out the official functions and duties in between legislative sessions.

111 deputies from the Democratic Bloc, a loose association of small pro-Ukrainian and pro-sovereignty parties and the instrumental People's Movement of Ukraine (colloquially known as Rukh in Ukrainian) were elected to the parliament.

Throughout its 72-year existence, the administrative divisions of the Ukrainian SSR changed numerous times, often incorporating regional reorganisation and annexation on the part of Soviet authorities during World War II.

[66] In the 1920s the Ukrainian SSR was forced to cede several territories to Russia in Severia, Sloboda Ukraine and Azov littoral including such cities like Belgorod, Taganrog and Starodub.

At the onset of Soviet Ukraine, having largely inherited conditions from the Tsarist Empire, one of the biggest exporters of wheat in the world, the Ukrainian economy was still centered around agriculture, with over 90% of the workforce being peasants.

The initial agenda, War Communism, had prescribed total communisation and appropriation per quota of food from the people by force[68] - further economic damage and a famine claiming up to one million lives ensued.

Gradually escalating measures, from raised taxes, dispossession of property, and forced deportations into Siberia culminated in extremely high grain delivery quotas.

[70] In contrast to the remarkable growth in the industrial sector,[71] agriculture continued in Ukraine, as in the rest of the Soviet Union, to function as the economy's Achilles heel.

The slow changes in agriculture can be explained by the low productivity in collective farms, and by bad weather-conditions, which the Soviet planning system could not effectively respond to.

[72] The increase of Soviet agricultural production was tremendous, however, the Soviet-Ukrainians still experienced food shortages due to the inefficiencies of a highly centralised economy.

During the peak of Soviet-Ukrainian agriculture output in the 1950s and early-to-mid-1960s, human consumption in Ukraine, and in the rest of the Soviet Union, actually experienced short intervals of decrease.

[73][need quotation to verify] Khrushchev tried to improve the agricultural situation in the Soviet Union by expanding the total crop size – for instance, in the Ukrainian SSR alone "the amount of land planted with corn grew by 600 percent".

Aside from improving Soviet-Ukrainian water transport, the reservoirs became the sites for new power stations, and hydroelectric energy flourished in Ukraine in consequence.