Soviet Ukraine in the context of Holocaust in the Soviet Union

Indigenization is the act of making something more indigenous; transformation of some service, idea, etc. to suit a local culture, especially through the use of more indigenous people in public administration, employment and other fields.

The term is primarily used by anthropologists to describe what happens when locals take something from the outside and make it their own (such as: Africanization or Americanization).

The causes of the Holodomor, which was a famine in Soviet Ukraine during 1932 and 1933 that resulted in the death of around 3–5 million people, are the subject of scholarly and political debate, particularly surrounding the Holodomor genocide question. Soviet historians Stephen Wheatcroft and J. Arch Getty believe the famine was the unintended consequence of problems arising from Soviet agricultural collectivization which was designed to accelerate the program of industrialization in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. Other academics conclude policies were intentionally designed to cause the famine. Some scholars and political leaders claim that the famine may be classified as a genocide under the definition of genocide that entered international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Raphael Lemkin, the co-author of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948, considered Holodomor an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation, not just Ukrainian farmers. Such a conclusion was made by him based on four factors:

Various factions fought over Ukrainian territory after the collapse of the Russian Empire following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and after the First World War ended in 1918, resulting in the collapse of Austria-Hungary, which had ruled Ukrainian Galicia. The crumbling of the empires had a great effect on the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and in a short period of four years a number of Ukrainian governments sprang up. This period was characterized by optimism and by nation-building, as well as by chaos and civil war. Matters stabilized somewhat in 1921 with the territory of modern-day Ukraine divided between Soviet Ukraine (which would become a constituent republic of the Soviet Union in 1922) and Poland, and with small ethnic-Ukrainian regions belonging to Czechoslovakia and to Romania.

The Treaty of Riga was signed in Riga, Latvia, on 18 March 1921 between Poland on one side and Soviet Russia (acting also on behalf of Soviet Belarus) and Soviet Ukraine on the other, ending the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921). The chief negotiators of the peace were Jan Dąbski for the Polish side and Adolph Joffe for the Soviet side.

Under the treaty, Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, abrogating its 1920 Treaty of Warsaw with the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Treaty of Riga established a Polish–Soviet border about 250 kilometres (160 mi) east of the Curzon Line, incorporating large numbers of Ukrainians and Belarusians into the Second Polish Republic. Poland, which agreed to withdraw from areas further east (notably Minsk), renounced claims to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth's border prior to the 1772 First Partition of Poland, recovering only those eastern regions (Kresy) lost to Russia in the 1795 Third Partition. Russia and Ukraine agreed to withdraw their claims to lands west of the demarcated border line. Poland, by recognising the puppet states of the USSR and simultaneously withdrawing recognition of the UPR (its only ally in the Polish-Bolshevik war), was in fact giving up on the federation programme, while Russia approved of the fact that the whole of Galicia, as well as the territories of the former Russian Empire, inhabited largely by non-Polish people, were to be found within Poland's borders. The treaty also addressed matters of sovereignty, citizenship, national minorities, repatriation, and diplomatic and commercial relations. The Treaty lasted until the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union in 1939, and their borders were redefined by an agreement in 1945.

The District of Galicia (German: Distrikt Galizien, Polish: Dystrykt Galicja, Ukrainian: Дистрикт Галичина) was a World War II administrative unit of the General Government created by Nazi Germany on 1 August 1941 after the start of Operation Barbarossa, based loosely within the borders of the ancient Principality of Galicia and the more recent Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Initially, during the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, the territory temporarily fell under Soviet occupation in 1939 as part of Soviet Ukraine.

Adolf Hitler formed a capital in Lemberg (Lviv) (Document No. 1997-PS of 17 July 1941), and the district existed from 1941 until 1944. It ceased to exist after the Soviet counter-offensive.

Volodymyr Kyrylovych Vynnychenko (Ukrainian: Володимир Кирилович Винниченко; July 28 [O.S. July 16] 1880 – March 6, 1951) was a Ukrainian statesman, political activist, writer, playwright and artist who served as the first prime minister of the Ukrainian People's Republic. Prior to his entry onto the stage of Ukrainian politics, he was a long-time political activist, who lived abroad in Western Europe from 1906 to 1914 escaping persecutuion by Russian authorities.

Vynnychenko's works reflect his immersion in the Ukrainian revolutionary milieu, as well as his life both among impoverished working-class people, and among émigrés living in Western Europe. He is recognized as a leading Ukrainian modernist writer of the pre-revolutionary era, and an author of short stories, novels, and plays. In Soviet Ukraine between the 1930s and mid-1980s Vynnychenko's works, like those of many other Ukrainian writers, were forbidden.