Moscow controlled all decision-making in the USSR.
The majority of top Soviet leaders, including Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev, were from Russia (although Brezhnev was born in Ukraine, he identified as Russian).
The Russian Communist Party was the largest and most powerful within the Soviet system.
Ukraine also had strong nationalist movements that resisted Soviet rule.
Sure there could have been many communist party members in Ukraine, but back then ONE HAD to join a party to get promoted, to be an important person in the country. and people obviously wanted to be promoted and important so they signed the papers.
Moscow? The city itself controlled something

? That very city where the Kievan (and thus Russian) princes and the entire population fled after the destruction of Kyiv by the Mongols? Stalin was a Georgian. Brezhnev was Ukrainian as well as Khruschev and Chernenko. And no, Ukrainian Communist party was the biggest, numerically, even given a threefold larger Russian population.
But in some ways, you're right. The same Ukrainian communists (and there could be no others there due to the sheer proximity of the borders) who occupied Poland were eager to curry favor, and it was they who denounced their own neighbors during the Holodomor, just as they now denounce those hiding from mass mobilization.
This post was edited by Norlander on Mar 29 2025 09:22am