The substantial Ukrainian-language community of the Russian Far East has continued to exist as a recognisable ethnic-cultural minority through the post-1939 Soviet period and into the post-1991 Russian Federation period. The substantive demographic figures: the 1959 Soviet census recorded approximately 380,000 ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Far Eastern provinces (about 7% of the regional population); the 1989 Soviet census recorded approximately 620,000 (about 7.5% of the regional population, with substantial natural increase from the larger 1959 base); the 2010 Russian census recorded approximately 230,000 (about 3.5% of the regional population, with substantial decline from the 1989 peak through emigration to independent Ukraine after 1991, assimilation to ethnic Russian identity, and natural demographic processes); the 2020 Russian census recorded approximately 150,000 (continued decline). The Ukrainian-speaking population, however, is substantially smaller than the ethnic-Ukrainian population: the 2010 census recorded only about 30,000 Ukrainian-language native-speakers in the Russian Far Eastern provinces, and the 2020 figure is probably about 20,000.
The post-Soviet community
The post-1991 Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community has, in institutional terms, been substantially reduced. The Soviet-period absence of Ukrainian-language institutional infrastructure left the community without a substantial base for cultural revival; the substantial post-1991 emigration to independent Ukraine took, principally, the more nationally-conscious community members; the demographic decline of the broader Russian Far Eastern population (which has lost about a quarter of its peak Soviet-era population to emigration since 1991) has reduced the community's substantive numerical position.
The principal contemporary Ukrainian institutional presences in the Russian Far East are several Ukrainian cultural societies operating in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk; the Ukrainian-language sections of various Far Eastern universities (Far Eastern Federal University at Vladivostok, Pacific National University at Khabarovsk); occasional Ukrainian-language church services in the Russian Orthodox parishes of the Ukrainian-settlement districts; and a small but persistent Ukrainian-language internet community. The substantive scale of the community is, however, substantially reduced from any historical peak.
The diaspora memory
The substantive memory of Green Ukraine as a historical phenomenon has been principally preserved in the Ukrainian diaspora outside the post-Soviet space — particularly in the Ukrainian-Canadian, Ukrainian-American, and Ukrainian-Australian communities, which have maintained substantial historical-academic interest in the Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian inheritance. The principal English-language scholarly work on Green Ukraine is Ivan Svit's Ukrainian-Japanese Relations, 1903-1945 (published in Ukrainian in New York in 1972 and substantively the first major monographic treatment of the topic) and the more recent academic literature by various Ukrainian-Canadian and Ukrainian-American historians (Boris Kushnir, Marko Stech, Natalia Yakovenko, and others). The principal Ukrainian-language scholarly work has been produced in independent Ukraine since 1991, particularly through the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at Lviv and various Kyiv academic institutions.
The Ukrainian state's official attitude to Green Ukraine has been substantially supportive but cautious. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has, since the early 2000s, maintained substantial contact with the Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community and has supported cultural-exchange programmes. The official Ukrainian historical position is that Green Ukraine was a substantive Ukrainian political project that was forcibly suppressed by the Russian and Soviet imperial state, and that the contemporary Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community is a substantial cultural inheritance of the Ukrainian state's broader historical territory. The Ukrainian state has not, however, made substantial territorial claims to the Russian Far East.
The 2022 war and contemporary controversies
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has substantially reshaped contemporary discussion of Green Ukraine. Several developments have followed:
The Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community has, in the contemporary period, been substantially placed in a politically difficult position. The community's Ukrainian-language institutions have been further restricted by Russian state policy following the 2022 invasion; substantial individual community members have faced harassment for public expressions of support for Ukraine; the substantial Ukrainian-Russian diaspora migration that had been the principal post-1991 channel of cultural exchange has been substantially disrupted by the war.
Ukrainian-nationalist commentary has, in some quarters, revived substantial historical claims about the political significance of Green Ukraine, including (in some particularly maximalist commentaries) claims that the Russian Far East should be considered historically Ukrainian territory and that the Ukrainian state has substantive historical claims to portions of the contemporary Russian Federation. The substantive scholarly and political establishment in independent Ukraine has not endorsed these claims; the official Ukrainian state position remains substantially more cautious. The contemporary Ukrainian government has refrained from any formal territorial claim on Russian territory.
Russian counter-claims have invoked the substantial Russian-speaking population of the Russian Far East (about 80% of the regional population, against the Ukrainian-speaking 0.3%) as evidence that the region has been substantively Russian in cultural-political terms for over a century, and that any contemporary Ukrainian claims are substantively unfounded. The Russian-language official discussion has, since 2022, paid substantially more attention to the historical Green Ukraine than at any previous period — primarily as a target of refutation rather than as an object of substantive historical inquiry.
The Lost Lands position
The Lost Lands volume's editorial position on these contemporary controversies is as follows. The historical Green Ukraine was a substantial regional political project of the 1917-1922 period, conducted by a substantial Ukrainian-speaking community of the Russian Far East, with substantial institutional ambitions that were never fully consolidated and were ultimately suppressed by the Soviet state. The Ukrainian-speaking community of the Russian Far East continued to exist as a substantial ethnic minority through the Soviet period and continues to exist, in substantially reduced form, in the contemporary Russian Federation. The substantial Ukrainian Far Eastern cultural inheritance is real, historically significant, and deserves substantial scholarly attention.
The contemporary territorial-political claims that some Ukrainian-nationalist commentators have built on this historical record are, on the substantive evidence, weak: the historical Green Ukraine was, at peak, a regional minority within a substantially multi-ethnic Far Eastern territory; the project was never fully institutionally consolidated; the contemporary Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community is small and substantially Russified; the substantial regional demographic position has been Russian-speaking for at least the past century. The historical Green Ukraine is a substantial historical phenomenon that deserves to be remembered for what it was; it is not a substantial basis for contemporary territorial politics.
Green Ukraine, in the historical-institutional sense, has been over since November 1922. Its substantial cultural and demographic inheritance continues, in the form of the residual Ukrainian-speaking minority of the Russian Far East and in the broader Ukrainian-diaspora historical memory of the project. The country itself — the substantive autonomous or independent Ukrainian Far Eastern state that the 1917-1922 Congresses had declared — never substantially existed and is, in the institutional sense, the least consolidated of all the lost states in this library. The substantive value of remembering it is not as a basis for contemporary political claims but as a substantial example of how the chaos of major political crises can produce substantial regional autonomy movements whose institutional substance is, in the longer historical view, contested.
"We were Ukrainians, on the Pacific. The Pacific did not care; the Russians did; we did our best." — Yuri Hlushko-Mova, former member of the Far Eastern Ukrainian Krayova Rada, memoir written in Harbin in the 1920s
End of Chapter VI · End of Volume XI