HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

482 I. S. KOROPECKYJprovinces were also among the poorest (Spechler, 1980, p. 314). Onlyone of them was inhabited by Ukrainians and one by Belorussians,while the others represented the heart of ethnic Russia. In comparison,the excess of per capital budget expenditures over receiptsamounted to 1 ruble in non-Russian Central Asia and 70 kopeks in theTranscaucasus for that year.The tsarist government considered the Ukraine and other non-Russian ethnic lands inseparable parts of a politically and economicallyintegrated state. Members of these nationalities could attain the highestgovernment positions as long as they faithfully served the empire'sinterests (cf. Nove, 1969, pp. 83-84). Finally, the bulk of landowners,businessmen, and investors in the Ukraine were non-Ukrainians. 17Since these feudal magnates and newly rich capitalists controlled asubstantial portion of the Ukraine's economy, any economic policy,including the budgetary policy, directed against the Ukraine in particularwould have been more harmful to them than to the impoverishedUkrainian peasants. No matter how autocratic it may have been, thetsarist regime could ill afford to base its policies simply on a biasagainst the Ukraine which, at the same time, would have been discriminatoryagainst the empire's most influential citizens and foreigners.An economic policy toward the Ukraine motivated simply by ananti-Ukrainian bias on the part of Soviet leaders seems even lessplausible. An explicit economic bias either against or for any ethnicgroup would be contradictory to the entire ideological climate in theUSSR. The division of the Soviet Union along ethnic borders intounion republics sharply unequal in economic potential makes economicplanning and management cumbersome and difficult. Still, inorder not to antagonize individual nationalities, the Moscow leadershiprefrains from abolishing these borders and from introducing aneconomically more efficient regionalization. The government saw to itthat national income, at least during the last two decades, grew at afaster rate in most non-Russian republics than in the RSFSR, whichranked tenth among the fifteen union republics. However, the Russianrepublic was fourth in the growth of income per capita, a fact explainablein part by the above average population growth in the Trans-17According to the 1897 census, ethnic Ukrainians accounted for the followingpercentages in the four "highest" classes in the Ukraine: hereditary nobility(landowners), 27.7; personal and official nobility (state officials), 23.7; hereditaryand personal honorary citizens (successful professionals and businessmen), 41.0;and merchants, 6.7 (Khomenko, 1931, p. 46).