The 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 natural increase from the larger 1959 base); the 2010 Russian census recorded approximately 230,000 (about 3.5% of the regional population, with 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 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 reduced. The Soviet-period absence of Ukrainian-language institutional infrastructure left the community without a base for cultural revival; the 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, reduced from any historical peak.
The organisations, and their closing
The brief post-Soviet opening is worth setting out precisely, because it is the only period since 1922 in which Ukrainian organisations operated legally in Russia, and because its closing was gradual rather than sudden.
Ukrainian cultural societies formed across the Russian Federation in the early 1990s, including in Primorye, Khabarovsk and the Amur, running Sunday schools, folk ensembles, church parishes and small publishing efforts. Two federal umbrella bodies were registered: the Federal National-Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia, and the Association of Ukrainians of Russia. Scholarly work resumed, and it was in this window that Viktor Chornomaz, working in Vladivostok with access to the regional archives, assembled the reference works that remain the fullest account of the movement.
The closing began well before 2022. The Federal National-Cultural Autonomy was liquidated by court order in 2010 on procedural grounds; its successor organisation was liquidated in 2012. The Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow was raided in 2010 and again in 2015, its holdings seized and its director prosecuted and convicted. Regional societies were deregistered or wound themselves up. By 2021 the institutional Ukrainian presence in Russia had been reduced to a handful of local groups operating quietly.
After February 2022 it ended altogether. Wartime speech legislation made any public Ukrainian cultural activity legally hazardous, and the remaining organisations closed or went silent. The position now is that the Ukrainian Far East has no institutions of any kind — which returns the story to where it stood in 1939, with a population of Ukrainian descent, a set of village names on the map, and nothing through which any of it can be transmitted.
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 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 supportive but cautious. The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has, since the early 2000s, maintained 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 cultural inheritance of the Ukrainian state's broader historical territory. The Ukrainian state has not, however, made territorial claims to the Russian Far East.
The 2022 war and contemporary controversies
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has reshaped contemporary discussion of Green Ukraine. Several developments have followed:
The Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community has, in the contemporary period, been placed in a politically difficult position. The community's Ukrainian-language institutions have been further restricted by Russian state policy following the 2022 invasion; individual community members have faced harassment for public expressions of support for Ukraine; the Ukrainian-Russian diaspora migration that had been the principal post-1991 channel of cultural exchange has been disrupted by the war.
Ukrainian-nationalist commentary has, in some quarters, revived 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 more cautious. The contemporary Ukrainian government has refrained from any formal territorial claim on Russian territory.
Russian counter-claims have invoked the 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 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 regional political project of the 1917-1922 period, conducted by an Ukrainian-speaking community of the Russian Far East, with 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 an ethnic minority through the Soviet period and continues to exist, in reduced form, in the contemporary Russian Federation. The Ukrainian Far Eastern cultural inheritance is real, historically significant, and deserves 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 multi-ethnic Far Eastern territory; the project was never fully institutionally consolidated; the contemporary Russian Far Eastern Ukrainian community is small and Russified; the regional demographic position has been Russian-speaking for at least the past century. The historical Green Ukraine is a historical phenomenon that deserves to be remembered for what it was; it is not a basis for contemporary territorial politics.
Green Ukraine, in the historical-institutional sense, has been over since November 1922. Its 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 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 an example of how the chaos of major political crises can produce 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 X · End of Volume XI