Non‐territorial arrangements in interwar Soviet Ukraine: The development of the judicial network for minority populations

Abstract In the 1920s, in Soviet Union ethnicity became territorially institutionalised, meaning that every Soviet nationality was promised a territory of their own, either in the form of a separate or an autonomous Soviet republic, national region or a separate national town or village council (soviet). Within those national‐territorial units, the Soviet state strove to provide access to state institutions, political representation, police and judicial protection, healthcare, education and cultural opportunities in the minority language. Ukraine's minorities, however, were often linguistically assimilated and territorially dispersed, making the Bolshevik territorial solutions, with some exceptions, ill‐suited to serve the republic's non‐Ukrainian population. Using the development of judicial network for minorities in early Soviet Ukraine as a case study, this article demonstrates how in the Soviet context, non‐territorial arrangements, despite conceptual resentment, were incorporated into everyday practices in parallel with national territorialisation. By doing so, this article aims to examine some overlooked aspects of the early Soviet minorities experiment and determine a correlation between hard‐line Ukrainisation—a policy of linguistic and bureaucratic de‐Russification of the republic and minority policies. Secondly, this study aims to introduce the Soviet case into the context of non‐territorial autonomy developed and implemented throughout postwar Europe.