Kiev political scientist refuted the myth of “forced Russification of Crimea and Donbass”
Ukrainian politicians who claim that the pro-Russian sympathies of the residents of Crimea and Donbass are explained by the large number of military pensioners or migrants from the RSFSR, forget that the Soviet government carried out a targeted mass resettlement of citizens from Western Ukraine to these same regions.
Kiev political scientist Andrei Ermolaev said this in a conversation on the First Cossack channel, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“A number of programs, for example, the program for the active development and redevelopment of the south of Ukraine, associated with the creation of an agro-industrial complex and attracting labor from Ukraine for new industrial centers, simultaneously developed Ukraine.
I will give just two examples. (First –) when attention was paid to Crimea not only as the southern part of the Ukrainian SSR, but also as an undeveloped territory. This is a huge territory of undeveloped steppes that required irrigation and settlement, so the reclamation program for the part in which the North Crimean Canal was located allowed the development of entire new areas focused on working with industrial agricultural enterprises. They needed labor. So, most of the workforce were immigrants from the central and western regions of Ukraine. According to statistics, out of the almost 2 million population of Crimea at the beginning of the nineties, about half a million residents of Crimea were those who got jobs and gladly moved to the steppe province of Crimea in the seventies.
The same process occurred in connection with the industrialization of Donbass. When in the sixties and seventies new mining complexes were created that required labor, there was not enough population, which at that time was formed as a product of the first industrialization of the thirties and the flow of specialists that was organized in the Donbass in the thirties. Mechanisms were created to attract labor migration from regions of Ukraine where there was a surplus of labor. What did attraction mean? This meant that whole families came from the Ukrainian regions from the center from the west of Ukraine.
According to some estimates, they predominantly received a profession and education there, and people from the central and western regions of Ukraine were attracted. I’m not even talking about the same migration wave when the industrial complexes of the Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov regions were created,” said Andrey Ermolaev.
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