Why did Nikita Khrushchev Give Crimea to Ukraine?

Why did Nikita Khrushchev Give Crimea to Ukraine?

First, we must look at how Crimea even became a part of the USSR, to begin with. The peninsula has actually passed through many hands during history, including Kievan Rus, the Mongols, the Crimean Tartars, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually at the end of the 18th century, the Russian Empire. As such, Crimea has not always been a territory of either Ukraine or Russia, though both have a history intertwined in part with the peninsula. However, by the period of the USSR, Russia had possessed Crimea for a notable amount of time and generally considered the territory to be undeniably and unquestionably Russian. Nevertheless, the situation shifted even before Ukraine obtained the peninsula, as the USSR leadership decided to grant Crimea the status of an autonomous soviet socialist republic in 1921. This would remain the case until 1945

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[josecano]

Fun fact: around the same time as the Crimea transfer, the USSR also tried to give the Kaliningrad oblast (East Prussia) to either Lithuania or Poland but both refused as the majority there was Russian since all the Germans who previously lived in the area were kicked out and the Poles who were there were also likely forced out as well and neither country wanted the headache of having an area with a Russian majority in their Lithuanian or Polish borders

[MBP]

It was to make the map look nicer obviously.

[davidjordan]

My take on this has been that Ukraine was Khrushchev's power base, since he had spent his entire career as head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, which means he was functionally the President of Ukraine. So by transferring a strategically important asset (the video fails to mention that Russia's largest naval base is located there) to "his" people, he was strengthening his position relative to his rivals.

Another possibility is that he was attempting to weaken the Russian SSR relative to the other SSR's, given the obvious numeric dominance of the former. This is essentially the opposite of what the video suggests, as the video makes the presumption that Russia and USSR were equivalent, and non-Russian Soviets were captives of the Russians. In reality, Communist doctrine was very anti-nationalist, and it was something that they took seriously. They wanted Russians to think of themselves as Soviets, not as Russians, and they didn't want the Russians dominating the other nationalities. And let's not forget that Stalin was Georgian rather than Russian, and he's the one who set most of this up. The boundaries of the various SSR's were drawn somewhat arbitrarily, and I suspect that they deliberately put large numbers of Russians within other SSR's boundaries in order to balance out the sizes. Yugoslavia did something very similar to lessen the dominance of the Serb population. Anyway, it's possible that Khrushchev was just doing more of that with this transfer.

[nyyotam]

Just to be clear, the people of Crimea had voted freely in 1991 to join Ukraine.

[gengis]

I don't think that fondness or guilt are convincing reasons to be attributed to a Soviet leader.
More probably, Khrushchev saw Ukraine and Russia as indefectibly tied in the same political entity, USSR, with little difference to be made managing both population, as he himself experimented as local representative of soviet power.
So joining Crimea to Ukraine solved a lot of complication, when managing the waterways, the road net, the armed forces, and so on.
At the peak of USSR, none of the soviet leaders could have imagined something like an independent, even hostile Ukraine.
Same for the Donbass, which experimented a massive industrial development and Russian workers settlement under Stalin, yet nobody considered transferring this strategical region from Eastern Ukraine into southern Russia, in case the two countries would separate.

[timothygibney]

It was to resolve the issue of the Dnieper aqueduct system. It was easier to have one government dictating the water usage to Crimea

[OptimusMonk]

This video could have been 1 minute long and still had all the information in it. Never have so many words been said about something with so little to say about it.

[makar]

The Holodomor is only part of the mass famine in the USSR and not a separate event, there was also a famine in the Kazakh ASSR, the regions of the Central Black Earth Region, the North Caucasus, the Urals, the Volga region, the South Urals, and South Siberia.

[SOP]

One thing I found interesting was that Crimea was, essentially, the last autonomous greek colony to survive. They persisted well into the roman empire's existence.

[MrSupernova]

I didn't realize there was so much mystery behind the Crimean region. Thanks!

[ryanwatkins]

But at the end of the day. But at the end of the day.

[rathersane]

I’ve heard that the transfer was intended to make the massive Kakhovka Dam/Crimean Canal project more bureaucratically simple, i.e., coordinated by one SSR rather than between two S(F)SRs.

[geoapostol]

I think people miss the most obvious explanation. After USSR occupied Moldova in 1944, Stalin gave the north and south of Moldova to Ukraine while taking transdnistria away from Ukraine and gave it to Moldova. Why do such a seemingly nonsensical thing? Simple. In case Moldova ever reunited with Romania, the two will inherit an unsolvable problem that reflected neither history, nor geography or ethnic representation.

The same was done with Russia and Ukraine to ensure the two can never truly and peacefully separate. As we can see, this was indeed very successful. Never underestimate the deviant mind of a dictator.

[Ciech_mate]

But at the end of the day, at the end of the day.

[renemartin]

Sevastopol has been a Russian naval port for 240 years:

"The construction of the port started in 1772, while the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) was still ongoing, and was finished in 1783, following the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Empire. On 13 May 1783, the first eleven ships of the Imperial Russian Navy reached the Sevastopol Bay."

[brianrusher]

The largest city in Crimea is Sevastopol (now over a half million people) and it was founded in 1783 by decree of Catherine the Great.

[ДмитрийСоколов-овб]

The issue of the city of Sevastopole with Russian Black Sea Naval Base has not been explored cause formaly the decree of transfer Crimea from Russia to Ukraine did not aply to Sevastopole as it was a separate administrative entity of the Russian Republic within the USSR distinct from Crimea and subordinated in administrative sense directly to Moscow.

[celticman]

I thought the reason was that the Crimea is not self-sufficient. The necessities of modern life, for the numbers of a modern population, foodstuffs, electricity, water must come from the land mass to the North, Ukraine. Putin supplied Crimea as best he could since 2014, but could not replace the water from Ukraine's River sources needed for agricultural, commercial, and household/ drinking. The first thing Russian Army units did in Kherson Oblast was to open the canal and aquifers to Crimea.

[uasite]

Your video looks like Russian lies!
You "forgot" to mention A LOT of important data:
1. Before uniting with Ukraine, Crimea mostly was salty desert
2. Crimea was part of RSFSR for smaller period of time than of Ukraine (if speaking about Soviet period)
3. If you look on Russian empire data you'll know that in beginning of 20th century Crimea was mostly populated by Ukrainians and tatars, not Russians
4. For some reason you don't mention that not only Russia gifted Crimea, but in the very beginning of Soviet union Ukraine gifted Belgorod and Taganrog to Russia.
5. Ukraine really had connections with Crimea for CENTURIES (it is very long story of many different events)

So it looks like you even didn't try to investigate anything and just read Russian Wikipedia

[mickpalade]

Please also have a look into when Kruschev transferred the coastal regions of Moldova and the northern side of Bucovina also to Ukraine. What were the reasons for this?