The “enlightened” public has always been taking a cautious attitude towards horoscopes. The church has also been trying to keep them at bay; but “nothing comes out of nothing:” we drew — at least once in a lifetime — something from zodiacal calendars (in addition to Oriental, there also are druidical, Celtic, Old Slavonic pagan and other systems). In the case of some universally known historical figures (for example, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Imperial Generalissimo during the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648), passion for horoscopes and “coordination” of their plans and actions with stars assumed a hypertrophic shape... We will try to escape, whenever possible, from the astronomical aspect of the matter. Yet, the fickle nature of the Goat often catalyzes serious changes in the socio-political life of many countries, including Ukraine. As it follows from Oriental zodiacal calendars, February 1, 2003, signals the beginning of a year of the Goat (Sheep). For Ukraine, which also bears the lunar sign of the Bull (Buffalo, Ox), years of the Goat are difficult and restless, to say the least. This can often be traced by the consequences of certain events rather than by the events themselves. Let us try to briefly illustrate the particularities of the 20th-century years of the Goat — 1907, 1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979 and 1991 — through the prism of historical events.
1907
The year when the First Russian Revolution (1905-1907) was on the wane. The “revolutionary wave” had gradually subsided, with the number of strikers and rioters being immeasurably lower than in 1906, let alone 1905.
On February 20, the II State Duma with an influential 47-men-strong Ukrainian faction with Illia Shrah at the head opened its first session in Petersburg. But as soon as June 3 Czar Nicholas II issued a manifesto on the dissolution of the 2nd State Duma and enactment of a reactionary election law restricting the rights of workers and peasants and enlarging the already sizable advantage of the representatives of capitalists and landlords in parliament. This was in fact a coup d’etat that destroyed the very essence of the czarist Manifesto of October 17, 1905, which promised the broad civil freedoms of the personality, speech, the press, worship, associations, and unions. This ushered in the era of Stolypin’s reforms and concurrent repression (“Stolypin’s neckties,” i.e. gallows), when tens of thousands of peasants were deported without trial. The Russian Empire’s prime minister supported the Great Russian chauvinists in Ukraine and banned the Ukrainian language as medium of instruction in schools — it was “not recommended” for teachers to speak to their pupils in the mother tongue even outside school. On June 4 Kyiv saw a thousands-strong demonstration, and a strike was staged in protest against the governmental actions and the arrest of Social Democrat faction members.
In May 1907 Austria-Hungary held a parliamentary election. The Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovina (these lands were ruled by Austria, while Transcarpathia was part of Hungary) won 34 seats in the Vienna parliament.
1919
This year saw the turning point in the Civil War in which Ukraine was one of the main theaters. The Civil War seemed to be going on in several dimensions: the White, Red, and Petliura’s armies fought, by turns, among themselves, while the peasant insurgents led by anarchist Makhno warred against all the forces (or in alliance with some of them, but never with the Whites).
On January 22, Kyiv heard proclamation of the Act of Union between the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic. This decision was never implemented, for as early as February 5 the Soviet troops occupied Kyiv. In March-May, the whole Right Bank Ukraine was rocked with fierce battles between the UNR (Ukrainian People’s Republic) troops and the Red Army, while at the same time a Ukrainian-Polish war raged in Galicia, ending in July with the defeat of the Ukrainian Galician Army. In June, the Anton Denikin-led White Army mounted an offensive in Left Bank Ukraine. This army was opposed by all the participants in the conflict (Simon Petliura failed to strike a deal with the Whites even at the cost of leaving — on August 31 — Kyiv which he had just won back from the Bolsheviks). By September 1, Denikin’s army had occupied the greater part of Ukraine. It is Makhno’s insurgents who dealt the Whites a decisive blow, which in fact disrupted their rear echelons and gave the Reds a chance to successfully defend Moscow. Ukraine also saw intervention by the Entente bloc that had won the First World War (1914-1918). The French and Greeks landed in Ukraine’s southern ports (Kherson, Odesa, and Mykolayiv) in February, but, buckling under the pressure of many diverse forces, they had to evacuate as early as in the summer. On December 6, UNR units launched the First Winter Expedition (in alliance with Jozef Pilsudski’s Poland) into Denikin’s and Soviet rears.
Kyiv was again captured by the Soviet troops on December 16, for the second time in 1919. The Bolsheviks, who controlled over 80% of Ukraine’s territory, were holding the strategic initiative.
Rumania occupied Northern Bukovina and Southern Bessarabia, Czechoslovakia seized Transcarpathia, and Poland took Volyn and Eastern Galicia. These lands were mainly populated by ethnic Ukrainians.
1931
This year was noted for new attempts of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR leadership of all levels to foster a steep economic growth by injunction. For instance, while the late-1929 industrial growth target was 32%, J. Stalin proposed at the 16th Congress of VKP (b) that the 1930-1931 economic year plan should call for a 45-% industrial output hike. Enterprises kept receiving the always-changing and upgraded targets. Managers’ complaints about inadequate equipment, the shortage or poor quality of raw materials were tantamount to “revolutionary treason.” The state put private well-off farmers (kulaks) in opposition to poor and medium-income peasants. 1931 saw active continuation of the mass-scale “collectivization” of peasants and liquidation of well-to-do farms, while peasants had their property confiscated and were then deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. For example, in 1931 alone, another 23,500 households, or about 150,000 people, were “dispossessed.” The “collectivization” resulted in a horrible famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine, which embraced almost all the Ukrainian SSR regions and claimed an estimated 3 to 9 million human lives.
March saw the trial of a group of former UNR and Ukrainian SSR leaders (the “Ukrainian National Center case”). 50 defendants were convicted of counterrevolutionary activity. Most of them died in prison camps after their sentences had been increased in 1934-1941.
In 1931 a special League of Nations commission condemned the so-called pacification, i.e., reprisals against ethnic Ukrainians in Galicia and Volhynia. In the fall of 1930 alone, 800 villages were ruined or burnt down, hundreds of Ukrainians were killed, and 1700 arrested.
1943
The crucial year of the Second World War (Battle of Stalingrad, Kursk Battle, Battle for the Dnieper). The South-Western Front carried out an offensive operation in Left Bank Ukraine on January 29 to February 18, which resulted in the liberation of northern Donbas. The Voronezh Front undertook an offensive in the Kharkiv direction on February 2 to March 3, when the Soviet troops marched 100-260 km forward and liberated Voroshilovhrad on February 14 and Kharkiv on February 16.
OUN (B), Stepan Bandera’s wing, held a top-level conference on the occupied territory of Ukraine on February 17-21, making a decision to fight against both Germany and the USSR and categorically condemning any kind of collaboration with the Nazis.
The period of March 11 to June saw an incursion of guerrilla units commanded by A. F. Fedorov into Volyn oblast. On March 16, the Soviet troops abandoned Kharkiv for the second time after fierce fighting.
On April 28 in Lviv, the Hitlerites initiated the formation of a 12,000-strong SS Galicia Division composed of Ukrainian volunteers (OUN, Andriy Melnyk’s wing). OUN (B) resolutely came out against this decision. The division was almost totally wiped out in 1944 in a battle near Brody. The SS Galicia Division was a typical collaborationist formation in Nazi Germany’s army. In April-August the Hitlerites carried out the third wide-scale deportation of slave labor to Germany. In the spring Volyn saw the first major encounters between OUN (B) and the Armia Krajowa supported by the Polish government in exile: this was in fact a bloody and relentless civil war between the Ukrainians and the Poles. In June-October, guerrilla formations led by Sidor Kovpak carried out a raid into the Carpathians.
The period of September to November saw the Battle of the Dnieper (with especially fierce fighting on the Dnieper’s Bukryn and Liutezh bridgeheads), while the Kyiv offensive operation was carried out on November 3-13, with Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, being liberated on November 6. On November 19, the Soviet troops had to leave Zhytomyr again after fierce battles.
On November 21-22, OUN (B) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) organized and held in Zhytomyr oblast the First Conference of Enslaved Nations of Eastern Europe and Asia. This was an abortive attempt to form an Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Peoples.
Zhytomyr was again liberated from the Nazi on December 3 in the course of the 1st Ukrainian Front’s Zhytomyr-Berdychiv operation. Later in December, the Supreme Command Headquarters launched a new offensive at the Polissia- to-the-Black-Sea stretch. Since then, the Soviet Army never relinquished the strategic initiative till the end of the war.
1955
At first glance, this year was short of major events. Yet, what became known later, after the 20th CPSU Congress (February 14-25, 1956), as “debunking Stalin’s cult of personality” was, of course, prepared well beforehand. The Kremlin was rocked with a bitter struggle for power: the positions of Nikita Khrushchev, who delivered a secret report at the congress, were reinforced precisely in 1955, when Georgy Malenkov was dismissed as Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers on February 8.
The year 1955 is undoubtedly associated with the cultivation of virgin lands (the resolution “On the Cultivation of Virgin and Fallow Lands for Increasing the Output of Grain” was signed on December 25, 1954) mostly on the territory of Kazakhstan. The contribution of Ukraine is difficult to overestimate. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen set off on a long journey: like the pioneers of Wild West, they literally clawed their way forward in the hard natural and climatic conditions.
On April 29, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers passed a resolution on the gentrification of places in Ukraine associated with the life and activities of the great Ukrainian people’s poet Taras Shevchenko.
On October 29, a powerful explosion sank the battleship Novorossiysk (before 1945, the Italian warship Giulio Cesare) in the bay of Sevastopol. It is absolutely clear today that this was an act of sabotage by perhaps the Italians: a week before the disaster, while the battleship lay at the Donuzlav bight, naval airplanes spotted an unidentified submarine. In 1955, the Italian Navy still used the services of Prince Borghese, a past master of sabotage, whose divers had blown up dozens of allied ships during World War Two. The immense explosion was set off by at least a ton of TNT. Of course, it was not a mine. The accident took a toll of almost 1000 officers and men.
1967
The year of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution (in the positive and negative meanings of the word). Never before had the Soviet Union seen such a great number of resolutions and awards. First on the Ukrainian list were the Lviv and Kharkiv polytechnics awarded with Orders of Lenin (January 7). Just two weeks later, on January 20, the Kharkiv Tractor Plant also had its flag adorned with the same order because it rolled out the millionth tractor. There is no end to the list of the honored factories, cities, collective farms, and institutes.
On May 27, a demonstration was held in Kyiv in front of the KPU CC building in protest against the arrest of Shevchenko soiree participants. June saw the publication of the first volume of A History of the Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR edited by area researcher Prof. Petro Tronko. On June 21, a delegation of the Crimean Tatars met in Moscow with the new KGB chief Yu. Andropov, Prosecutor-General R. Rudenko, Interior Minister N. Shchelokov, and Secretary of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet M. Georgadze, to raise the issue of unlawful actions against the activists of this people repressed by Soviet power. As soon as September 5, the USSR SS Presidium issued a decree absolving the Crimean Tatars of the 1944 charges of collaboration with the Nazis.
On October 27, the world’s largest blast furnace No. 8 was commissioned at the Kryvy Rih-based Lenin Steel Mill.
On November 15, the Lviv regional court heard the case of Vyacheslav Chornovil indicted for offenses under Article 187-1 of the Ukrainian SSR’s Criminal Code. He was accused of spreading false information that “defiles the Soviet social system” (libel). The court sentenced V. M. Chornovil to serve 3 years in a prison camp.
On December 22, the USSR SS Presidium awarded the Ukrainian SSR Order of the October Revolution. In December, Europe’s largest rolling mill “350” put out its first product at the Dnieper Metallurgical Works (Dniprodzerzhynsk).
1979
This year is, of course, painted red: on December 27, when the presidential palace in Kabul was taken by storm, the first Soviet units entered Afghanistan. From this time until February 15, 1989, the “limited contingent” officially lost 14,433 servicemen and 20 civilians as killed in action, 298 as missing in action, 54,000 as wounded and 416,000 as sick. There also is a higher estimate of Soviet losses: 35, 50 and more thousand of those killed. Many hundreds of thousands of people went through the Afghan ordeal, with Ukrainians always accounting for 30 to 40% of the personnel.
Kyiv hosted a ceremonial meeting in honor of the 325th anniversary of the “reunification” of Ukraine with Russia.
At the end of winter, the USSR KGB redoubled its efforts to stamp out the dissident movement in Ukraine — many militants of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) and the Union of Relatives of the Imprisoned Evangelical Baptists were arrested. In October, I. Zisels, Ya. Lesiv, Z. Krasivsky, P. Rozumny, and poet Vasyl Stus were admitted to the UHG. On December 17-21, district center Kaharlyk, Kyiv oblast, saw a trial of writer Oles Berdnyk, a human rights champion and one of the UHG founders, who was sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment and 3 years of internal exile.
The Ukrainian SSR was admitted, as a UN member, to the Intergovernmental Committee on Science and Technology for Development.
1991
The year is painted blue and yellow, for Ukraine became an independent state.
The Ukrainian SSR Supreme Soviet Presidium issued a statement on January 14 in connection with the events in Lithuania, which condemned the use of military force by the USSR’s governmental bodies. On February 12, Kyiv resolved to reestablish the Crimean Autonomous Republic.
On March 17, 70.16% of Ukrainian participants in the all-USSR referendum voted for the retention of the USSR, but only (a very important reservation) on the principles of the Declaration on National Sovereignty of the Ukrainian SSR. On March 31, Cardinal M. Liubachivsky, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, returned to St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv. On April 17, the Ukrainian SSR SS passed a law on rehabilitation of the victims of political repression and, on April 23, a law on the freedom of speech and religious associations. March and April saw a powerful coal miners’ strike which played an important role in shaking the communist regime’s foundations.
On June 5, the Ukrainian SSR SS passed a law instituting the office of the Ukrainian SSR President. After an abortive coup in Moscow (GKChP) on August 24, the Ukrainian SSR SS passed the Act on the Proclamation of Ukraine’s Independence. On September 4, a blue-and-yellow flag was hoisted over the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine building. On October 24, VR passed the Declaration on the Non-Nuclear Status of Ukraine.
December 1 was the day when a nationwide referendum and the elections of Ukraine’s first President were held. 90.32% of referendum participants voted for Ukrainain independence, while Leonid Kravchuk polled 61% of Ukrainian citizens’ votes and was thus elected President of Ukraine in the first round.
