Ukrainians in Kuban

Due to Russian and Soviet national policies—including the Holodomor—most of the population became Russified, and the percentage of those who identified themselves as Ukrainians dropped from an official 55% (1926) to 0.9% (2002).

In Kuban many Ukrainians were settled in areas which were inhabited by Russians when in 1792 the Empress Catherine II gave the Black Sea Cossack Host the rights to these lands.

[citation needed] The territory involved included the Phanagorian peninsula and the lands on the right bank of the Kuban River.

Between 1806 and 1809 about 562 Ukrainian Cossacks who had settled previously beyond the Danube were granted a pardon and arrived on the shores of the Taman Peninsula.

This was suddenly and brutally stopped in 1929, in an era known in Ukraine as the Executed Renaissance, and escalated in 1932, exacerbated by the events of Holodomor.

[2] Specifically, the December 14, 1932 decree "On Grain Collection in Ukraine, North Caucasus and the Western Oblasts" by the VKP(b) Central Committee and USSR Sovnarkom stated that Ukrainization in certain areas was carried out formally, in a "non-Bolshevik" way, which provided the "bourgeois-nationalist elements" with a legal cover for organizing their anti-Soviet resistance.

In addition the decree ordered a massive population swap: all "disloyal" population from a major Cossack settlement, stanitsa Poltavskaya was banished to Northern Russia, with their property given to loyal kolkhozniks moved from poorer areas of Russia.

Prior to the reversal of Ukrainianization, the policy was failing in the Kuban with most local districts not completing it partially due to opposition by local Cossack nationalists and Russian chauvinists in the Kuban including by sabotage despite punitive threats from the state to complete the process made in May 1932.

[5] Kaganovich relentlessly pursued the policy of requisition of grain in Poltavskaia and the rest of the Kuban and personally oversaw the purging of local leaders and Cossacks.

To justify this Kaganovich cited a letter allegedly written by a stanitsa ataman named Grigorii Omel'chenko advocating Cossack separatism and local reports of resistance to collectivization in association with this figure to substantiate this suspicion of the area.

[5] However Kaganocvich did not reveal in speeches throughout the region that many of those targeted by persecution in Poltavskaia had their family members and friends deported or shot including in years before the supposed Omel'chenko crisis even started.

Ultimately due to being perceived as the most rebellious area almost all (or 12,000) members of the Poltavskaia stantisa were deported to the north.

[8] Likely in connection to the affairs in Poltavskaia Ukrainization was officially reversed in a decree on 26 December 1932 in which there was a two week deadline to transfer all publishing and paperwork in the region to Russian, and the Ukrainian language was effectively banned in Kuban until 1991.

[9] The names of Stanytsias such as the rural town of Kyiv, in Krasnodar, was changed to "Krasnoartilyevskaya", and Uman to "Leningrad", and Poltavska to "Krasnoarmieiskaya".

Russification, the Holodomor of 1932–1933 and other tactics used by the Union government led to a catastrophic fall in the population that self-identified as being Ukrainian in the Kuban.

A characteristic of Ukrainian folk songs of Kuban is the replacement of particular words to better reflect the local history and conditions.

Close to 3,000 Ukrainian folk songs were recorded in Kuban by Oleksander Koshetz, who spent 3 years collecting materials.

In 1966 a collection of songs of the Kuban Cossacks published in Krasnodar included the text of "Shche ne vmerla Ukraina", the Ukrainian National Anthem, which at that time was banned in Ukraine.

[13] In the early 20th century a significant movement was organised for the support of people learning to play the Ukrainian folk instrument known as the bandura.

In recent times there has been a revival in the singing of Ukrainian folk songs led by the Kuban Cossack Choir and its director, Viktor Zakharchenko.

Ukrainian folk instruments are no longer officially banned and are returning to use, being taught at the Krasnodar Music college.