Human Losses of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

Historians of Ukraine have long been debating population losses in World War II. Some of them add the losses that occurred as a result of the accession of territories to the Ukrainian SSR in 1939–1940. Others add deaths from hunger in the postwar years. The authors of the publications, with rare exceptions, present an evaluative construction of reality. There are mainly versions in scientific circulation that propose authorial expert opinions based on fragmentary, mostly uncritically comprehended sources. The heated debate, excessive politicization of the topic of Ukraine’s demographic losses, and significant variation in their assessments indicate that this problem has not been solved. The main causes of this historiographical situation are incorrectly chosen methodological approaches to assessing population losses in 1939–1945 (expansion of historical geographical boundaries (at the expense of Crimean and Zakarpattia oblasts, which were not part of the republic in the period under study and were accessioned after the war) and chronological framework) and problems with research sources. Ukrainian historians and demographers largely ignore historical documents stored in Russian federal archives. The conducted “archival reconnaissance” indicates that the calculations of the demography department of the Central Directorate of the UkSSR State Planning Committee and the Statistical Directorate of the Ukrainian SSR, compiled from the end of 1944 through 1946, are of particular scientific interest. The identified historical sources will make it possible to reliably reconstruct the dynamics and composition of the population and contribute to solving the problem of demographic losses of the Ukrainian SSR in 1941–1945 in the context of the demographic development of the Soviet Union.