Chernivtsi Oblast (), also referred to as Chernivechchyna (), is an oblast (province) in western Ukraine, consisting of the northern parts of the historical regions of Bukovina and Bessarabia. It has an international border with Romania and Moldova. The region spans . The oblast is the smallest in Ukraine both by area and population. It has a population of and its administrative center is the city of Chernivtsi.
In 1408, Chernivtsi was a town in Moldavia and the chief centre of the area known as Bukovina. Chernivtsi later passed to the Turks and then in 1774 to the Habsburg monarchy. After World War I, it was ceded to Romania, and in 1940, the town was acquired by the Ukrainian SSR.
The oblast has a large variety of landforms: the Carpathian Mountains and picturesque hills at the foot of the mountains gradually change to a broad partly forested plain situated between the Dniester and Prut rivers.
Geography Chernivtsi Oblast covers an area of . It is the smallest oblast in Ukraine, representing 1.3% of Ukrainian territory, and is only larger than the city of Kyiv itself.
In the oblast there are 75 rivers longer than 10 kilometers. The largest rivers are the Dniester (290 km, in the oblast), Prut (128 km, in the oblast) and Siret (113 km, in the oblast).About Oblast Chernivtsi Oblast State Administration
The oblast covers three geographic zones: a forest steppe region between Prut and Dnister rivers, a foothill region between the Carpathian Mountains and Prut river, and a mountain region known as the Bukovinian part of the Carpathian Mountains.
Chernivtsi Oblast is bordered by Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ternopil Oblast, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Vinnytsia Oblast, Romania, and Moldova. Within the oblast the national border of Ukraine with Romania extends 226 km, and with Moldova .
History
Chernivtsi oblast was created on August 7, 1940, in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. The oblast was organized out of the northeast part of Ținutul Suceava of Kingdom of Romania, joining parts of three historical regions: northern half of Bukovina, northern half of the Hotin County county of Bessarabia, and Hertsa region, which was part of the Dorohoi county (presently Botoșani County) of proper Moldavia.
Archaeological sites in the region date back to 43,000–45,000 BC, with finds including a mammoth bone dwelling from the Middle Paleolithic. The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture flourished in the area. In the Middle Ages, the region was inhabited by East Slavic tribes White Croats and Tivertsi. From the end of the 10th century, it became a part of the Kievan Rus', then Principality of Halych, and in the mid-14th century of the Principality of Moldavia (which in the 16th century became a vassal of the Ottoman Empire). In 1775, two counties of Moldavia, since then known as Bukovina, were annexed by the Habsburg monarchy as part of the Austrian Empire and its final iteration Austria-Hungary. In 1812, one half of Moldavia, since then known as Bessarabia, was annexed by the Russian Empire. Hertsa region remained in Moldavia until its union with Wallachia in 1859, a union which in 1881 became the Kingdom of Romania. In 1918 both provinces of Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the Kingdom of Romania.
The Soviet occupation began on June 28, 1940. In addition to Bessarabia, the USSR demanded Northern Bukovina as compensation for the occupation of Bessarabia by Romania from 1918 to 1940. Hertsa region was not included in the demands that the Soviet Union addressed to Romania, but was occupied at the same time. Most of the occupied territories were organized on August 2, 1940, as the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, while the remainder, including the Chernivtsi Oblast, which was formed on August 7, 1940, were included in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Throughout 1940–1941 several tens of thousands of Bukovinians were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, some 13,000 of them on June 13, 1941, alone. The total number of deportees from Soviet Moldova to Siberia in June 1941 and of people eligible for deportation who were not deported was 31,699, while 8,374 were deported or eligible for deportation from the Chernivtsi oblast of Ukraine and 3,767 from the Izmail oblast of Ukraine (southern Bessarabia); the total was 43,840.Nikolai Bougai, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1996), p. 153. According to Bougai, 22,643 individuals from Soviet Moldova were deported in September 1941.Bougai, p. 153. The number of inhabitants deported during the night of June 12/13, 1941, from the Chernivtsi Oblast was 7,720.Ungureanu, Constantin (2021). "Represiunile din regiunea Cernăuți în perioada iunie 1940 – iunie 1941". Revista de Istorie a Moldovei (1–2): 60. Only 1,136 of those deported from the Izmail oblast were still alive in Western Siberia, in the Tomsk region, in 1951, but others were sent to other places.Bougai, p. 158. The number of deportees to the Soviet north and east from the Hertsa raion in its boundaries from early 2020 of the Chernivtsi oblast on June 13, 1941, was 1,373; 219 (15.95%) of them would later die in Siberia and Kazakhstan.Ungureanu, Constantin (2021). "Represiunile din regiunea Cernăuți în perioada iunie 1940 – iunie 1941". Revista de Istorie a Moldovei (1–2): 61. Among the 1,373 deportees from Hertsa Raion, 120 were of unknown nationality; among the 1,253 people whose nationality was known, 1090 (86.99%) were ethnic Romanians, 125 were ethnic Jews (9.98%), 31 were ethnic Ukrainians (2.474%), 4 were ethnic Russians (0.32%), 2 were ethnic Germans (0.02%) and 1 was ethnically Polish (0.08%). The number of inhabitants of the Chernivtsi Oblast who were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan was 7,720 (2,279 families). According to some sources, most of the deportees of June 1941 from the Chernivtsi oblast, who were of many ethnicities, did not return from the Soviet east.See, for example, Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina – intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 160. However, the fragmentary, locality-by-locality, evidence indicates that most of the deportees from 1941 survived.Ungureanu, Constantin (2021). "Represiunile din regiunea Cernăuți în perioada iunie 1940 – iunie 1941". Revista de Istorie a Moldovei (1–2): 63–65. According to Dr. Avigdor Schachan, who wrote a book about the Transnistrian ghettos, and was himself brought up in the Bessarabian part of the present-day Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine, about 2,000 northern Bukovinian and 4,000 Bessarabian Jews were deported to the Soviet east.Avigdor Shachan, Burning Ice: The Ghettos of Transnistria (Boulder, Colorado, Eastern European Monographs, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1996),:p. 28, 30. About half of the Jews deported from Bessarabia to the Soviet east survived and returned to Bessarabia, and the rest did not return, according to a source mentioned by Jean Ancel (Matathias Carp), the specialist on the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria; however, Carp's estimate is not confirmed by other sources.Jean Ancel, Transnistria (Bucuresti: Atlas, 1998), vol. 3 (in Romanian), p. 301.Ungureanu, Constantin (2021). "Represiunile din regiunea Cernăuți în perioada iunie 1940 – iunie 1941". Revista de Istorie a Moldovei (1–2): 61, 63–65. This and later deportations were primarily based on social class difference, it targeted intellectuals, people employed previously by the state, businessmen, clergymen, students, railworkers. In the winter and spring of 1941, the Soviet troops (NKVD) opened fire on many groups of locals trying to cross the border into Romania. Between September 17 and November 17, 1940, by a mutual agreement between USSR and Germany, 43,641 "ethnic Germans" from the Chernivtsi region were moved to Germany, although the total ethnic German population was only 34,500, and of these some 3,500 did not go to Germany.
Beginning with 1941, when the region returned under the control of the Romanian administration, the Jewish community of the area was largely destroyed by the deportations to Transnistria, where about 60% of the Jewish deportees from the area died. About 60% of the Jewish deportees to Transnistria from the city of Chernivtsi in 1941 and 1942 died there according to the Jewish Virtual Library.See "Chernovtsy, Ukraine" in Jewish Virtual Library According to Gali Mir-Tibon, most of the Jews deported from the city of Chernivtsi, and northern Bukovina in general, to Transnistria did not survive.Gali Mir-Tibon, "Am I My Brother's Keeper? Jewish Committees in the Ghettos of the Mogilev District and the Romanian Authorities in Transnistria, 1941–1944", in Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr., The Ghetto in Global History, 1500 to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 147. Despite the anti-Semitic policies of the Ion Antonescu's government of Romania, the mayor of Cernăuți, Traian Popovici, now honored by Israel's Yad Vashem memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, saved approximately 20,000 Jews.
In 1944, when the Soviet troops returned to Bukovina, many inhabitants fled to Romania, and Soviet persecutions resumed. In demographic terms, these war-time and post-war-time factors changed the region's ethnic composition. Today the number of Jews, Germans and Poles is negligible, while the number of Romanians has decreased substantially. In March 1945, 3,967 Romanian citizens from Ukraine (excluding Jews), mostly from the Chernivtsi Oblast, were sent to the Soviet east.Nikolai Bougai, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1996), p. 156. According to Nikolai Bougai, in March 1945, 12,852 Jews from 5,420 families with both Romanian and Soviet passports living in Ukraine, mostly originating from the Chernivtsi oblast, were relocated (as Jews) by the NKVD to the Soviet north and east.
On October 11, 1942, the (Soviet) State Committee on Defense decided to extend the decrees on "the mobilization of the NKVD labour columns, German men, able to work, 17–50 years old – to the persons of other nations, being in war with USSR-Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Finns."; the order was signed by Stalin.Nikolai Bougai, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1996), p. 116. As a result, in May 1944, in the village of Molodiia and some other northern Bukovinian localities, those men who declared a "Moldovan" nationality were incorporated into the Soviet army, while those who declared a "Romanian" nationality were sent to the work camps in the area of Lake Onega, where most of them died.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina – intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 168. The Soviet era dominance of the "Moldovan" identity in parts of northern Bukovina was due to the fact that the inhabitants of the Chernivtsi and Sadagura rural raions, and of the Bukovinian part of the Novoselytsia raion, were pressured in 1944 to adopt a "Moldovan" national/ethnic identity.Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina – intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 172. In March 1945, 3,967 ethnic Romanians from Ukraine, mostly from the Chernivtsi Oblast, were sent to the Soviet east.