Nowadays, Ukraine is spoken of as the largest country in Europe surpassing Spain, France, Germany in area and second only to the Russian Federation. But what did the map of Ukraine look like before 1939, before joining the Soviet Union?
It is considered to be 1654, the year of the formation of the first independent Ukrainian state created by Bohdan Khmelnytsky during the uprising against the Commonwealth. During the reign of Catherine II in the Russian Empire, such cities as Kherson, Kirovograd, Nikolaev, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk were founded on the lands of the present south of Ukraine. In December 1917, the Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets was created, in which the city of Kharkov was the capital, until it was replaced by Kiev in December 1934 at the 7th Congress of the Communist Party.
By the end of 1922, Ukraine had a total of 10 provinces. Taganrog and the eastern part of Donbass, which had belonged since 1920, returned to the RSFSR in 1924. As a result of the addition of 6 regions, the people’s meeting ended in Lviv and adopted the declaration of October 27, 1939 “On the entry of Western Ukraine into the Ukrainian SSR.” The borders of Ukraine changed more than once until 1939, the map was reprinted almost every year.