20th Century Russia Research Paper

Ukraine’s history in the 20th century has been dramatic. In two periods, particularly, there has been a great deal of suffering and death on its territory. During the Stalin era in the 1930s, forced collectivisation of agriculture is widely accepted to have led to the death of millions in the Soviet Union, mainly Ukrainian peasant farmers. The famine was largely man-made, although the episode remains controversial. In 2006 (under the West-leaning Viktor Yushchenko) the government of Ukraine passed a law recognizing the disaster as genocide against the Ukrainian people. Crimea was formally absorbed into the Russian empire by Catherine the Great in the 18th century , that’s when Russia’s strategically important Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol
The Crimean Peninsula was ruled by the Ottoman Empire until it was annexed by the Russian Empire in the 18th century. Then, under Stalin, enormous numbers of Tatars died at the same time as other Ukrainians. In the closing years of the Second World War, most of the remaining population was deported to Soviet Central Asia (those that survived the journey), accused of collaboration with the Nazis. In reality, other populations had been removed from Crimea too, including Greeks and Bulgarians, and many Russians had moved in during the Russian Empire. The deportation, along with such policies as imposing the Cyrillic alphabet, had the effect of ‘Russification’ of the peninsula The peninsula had been ruled by Russia for centuries when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev suddenly gifted it to to his native land Ukraine in 1954.
Many Russians think Khrushchev was drunk when he signed the Crimea away, while others believe he was trying make amends for the Ukrainian famine.
When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Crimea ended up inside an independent Ukraine, but as a formally autonomous region — specifically because its culture, history, and ethnic lines were far closer to Russia than