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).

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. 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). According to Bougai, 22,643 individuals from Soviet Moldova were deported in September 1941. The number of inhabitants deported during the night of June 12/13, 1941, from the Chernivtsi Oblast was 7,720. 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. 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. 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%). However, the fragmentary, locality-by-locality, evidence indicates that most of the deportees from 1941 survived. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. As a reult, 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. 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. In March 1945, 3,967 ethnic Romanians from Ukraine, mostly from the Chernivtsi Oblast, were sent to the Soviet east. Ukrainians represent 74.98% (689,056) of the population of Chernivtsi Oblast out of 919,028 inhabitants. Moreover, 12.46% (114,555) reported themselves as Romanians, 7.31% (67,225) as Moldovans, and 4.12% (37,881) as Russians. The other nationalities, such as Poles, Belarusians, and Jews sum up to 1.2%. According to the 2001 census, the majority of the population of the Chernivtsi region was Ukrainian-speaking (75.57%), and there were also Romanian (18.64%) and Russian (5.27%) speakers. In the last Soviet census of 1989, out of 940,801 inhabitants, 666,095 declared themselves Ukrainians (70.8%), 100,317 Romanians (10.66%), 84,519 Moldovans (8.98%), and 63,066 Russians (6.7%). The decline in the number (from 84,519 to 67,225) and proportion of Moldovans (from 8.98% to 7.31%) was explained by a switch from a census Moldovan to a census Romanian ethnic identity, and has continued after the 2001 census. By contrast, the number of self-identified ethnic Romanians has increased and so has their proportion of the population of the oblast (from 10.66% to 12.46%), and the process has continued after the 2001 census.

The use of separate categories for the Moldovans and Romanians, as well as for the Moldovan and Romanian languages in the Ukrainian census has been criticized by various Romanian organizations in Ukraine, including the Romanian Community of Ukraine Interregional Union. Furthermore, it was alleged that individuals, especially, but not exclusively, in the Odessa region were threatened with dismissal from their jobs if they declared that they were "Romanians" rather than "Moldovans", and it was also claimed that the ethnicity of some individuals was listed arbitrarily by census-takers who did not even ask those individuals what their ethnicity was. Nevertheless, all census respondents had to write in their ethnicity (no predetermined set of choices existed), and could respond or not to any particular census question, or not answer any questions at all.

According to Kateryna Sheshtakova, a professor at the Pomeranian University of Slutsk in Poland who did field research among 15 self-identified Romanians and self-identified Moldovans in the Chernivtsi region of Ukraine, 'Some Moldovans use both names of the mother tongue (Moldovan or Romanian) and accordingly declare two ethnic affiliations.' Opinion polling from the Chernivtsi oblast, as well as the discussions of the delegates of the Meeting of the Leaders of the Romanophone Organizations from Ukraine of December 6, 1996, indicated that many of the self-identified Moldovans believed that the Moldovan and Romanian languages were identical. Shestakova suggests that those self-identified Moldovans who see differences between Moldovan and Romanian tend to be from "the older generation". More information on the Romanian identity population and Moldovan identity population in Ukraine, including in the Chernivtsi oblast, and including detailed statistical data, may be found in the articles Romanians in Ukraine, Moldovans in Ukraine and Moldovenism.

According to the Romanian census of 1930, the territory of the future Chernivtsi Oblast had 805,642 inhabitants in that year, out of which 47.6% were Ukrainians, and 28.2% were Romanians. The rest of the population was 88,772 Jews, 46,946 Russians (among them an important community of Lipovans), around 35,000 Germans, 10,000 Poles, and 10,000 Hungarians.

  • Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans, UNESCO World Heritage Site
  • Khotyn Fortress State Historic and Architectural Reserve
  • Chernivtsi architectural complex of Olha Kobylianska Street
  • Several archaeological sites of Trajan's Wall

<gallery>

File:Universitat Czernowitz.jpg|Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans in Chernivtsi

File:Chernivtsi Teatr DSC 0903 73-101-0016.JPG|Chernivtsi Drama Theatre

File:73-250-0001 Khotyn Fortress RB 24.jpg|Khotyn Fortress complex

File:Водоспад на річці Виженка в урочищі Лужки.JPG|Luzhka Waterfall

File:Водоспад Бісків.jpg|Biskiv Waterfall

File:Чемернарський Нижній Гук.JPG|Chemernarskyi Nyzhnii Huk

</gallery>

References

  • Chernivtsi Oblast Administration (official website)
  • Chernivtsi Oblast Council (official website)
  • Statistics Committee of Chernivtsi Oblast

See also

  • List of Canadian place names of Ukrainian origin