Lecture 38: Soviet Ukraine's Other Peoples

Professor Paul Robert Magocsi — Ukraine: A History Course.

The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter is pleased to present a lecture series by Paul Robert Magocsi titled Ukraine: A History Course. Magocsi recorded 45 lectures in 2023 at the University of Toronto, where he holds the professorial Chair of Ukrainian Studies and is a history and political science professor. He is also a Board Member of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

Magocsi, one of the world’s leading experts on Ukraine, explores this fascinating country in all its complexity, from its history, culture, geography, politics, and multi-ethnic composition. The lectures are an important counterweight to Russian propaganda and explain Ukraine’s importance to global security today.

Time stamps are available for each lecture. Auto-translate is available in Ukrainian, major European, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern languages, including Hebrew and Yiddish.

Recordings of the lecture series were made possible with the support of the Temerty Foundation.

All the lectures are available on YouTube here.

4:22 Nationality composition of Soviet Ukraine, 1926
6:05 Nationality districts in Soviet Ukraine, 1931
4:40 Nationality subdivisions in Soviet Ukraine, circa 1931
15:59 Mikhail / Mykhailo Volobuiev, Nikolai Fitilev / Mykola Khvylovyi
21:51 Jewish agricultural settlements in the steppe of southern Ukraine and Crimea 22:35 Learning how to drive agricultural tractors: Jewish students and their course instructors near Kherson, March 1926
23:23 Shtetl market square, Rzhyshchiv, central Soviet Ukraine, 1920s
24:05 Kultur-Lige publication: Yiddish-language translation of Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Kyiv, 1925)
28:24 Three Jewish nationality districts in southern Ukraine
28:47 Ukrainian and Yiddish languages, dialects
30:11 Jewish students at the Ratmansky school in Kyiv under a portrait of Lenin and a banner in Yiddish which reads: "Long live the Komsomol tribe, the powerful reserve force and reliable helper of the Communist party"
36:03 Polish district in Ukraine
37:15 Polish-language daily newspaper in Soviet Ukraine, Sierp / The Sickle (Kyiv, 1922–1941)
42:43 Gathering the harvest on a German village soviet collective farm in the steppe Ukraine
45:55 Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
46:37 Nationality composition of Crimean ASSR, 1926
49:48 Veli Ibrahimov (1888–1928), seated in the center among the members of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Crimean ASSR
55:49 Mongol invasions, The Golden Horde, ca. 1300
1:00:02 Children’s books from 1920s and 1930s depicting the change of alphabets imposed on the Crimean Tatar language: Arabic, Roman/Latin, and Cyrillic

For further information, you may wish to consult: A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples (University of Toronto Press, 2010)

Robert Paul Magocsi
Chair of Ukrainian Studies University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada, September 2023.