Turning the pages back... February 19, 1954 (02/14/99)

Turning the pages back...

February 19, 1954

Along with the demand that Ukraine be granted full status as a member of the United Nations, this week marks the 45th anniversary of another move in Soviet policy that holds considerable irony in the present day - the decision to tranfer control of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine.

Western Sovietologists saw the gesture as a perfect illustration of Nikita Khrushchev's quixotic policy. After all, Crimea had only recently been the theater for Stalin's ruthless reprisals against the Crimean Tatars, whom he had deported en masse following the second world war, accusing them of having collaborated with the Nazi invader.

In the Soviet press of the day, the handover was hailed as a euphoric commemoration of the Treaty of Pereiaslav of 1654, under which Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich "brought the brotherly peoples of Ukraine and Russia together."

The formal decree signalling the move is quite dry and bureaucratic, however. An ukase of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "on the transfer of the Crimean Oblast from the structure of the RSFSR to the structure of the Ukrainian SSR" was issued on February 19, 1954.

"Mindful of the commonality of the economy, the territorial proximity and the close economic and cultural ties between the Crimean Oblast and the Ukrainian SSR, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR resolves:

"To ratify a joint declaration of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR concerning the transfer of the Crimean Oblast from the structure of the RSFSR to the structure of the Ukrainian SSR."

It was signed by Kliment Voroshilov, chairman of the Presidium, and N. Pegov, secretary; and noted: Moscow, the Kremlin.

Sources: "Chernomorskii Flot, Gorod Sevastopol i Nekotorye Problemy Rossisko-Ukrainskikh Otnoshenii: Khronika, Dokumenty, Analiz, Mnenniia" (Moscow: Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1997); "Crimea," Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).

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