Russian colonisation of Ukraine intensified throughout the 19th century with a ban on the use of the Ukrainian language in schools and publications. Yet, a cultural revival spread in the late 1800s from Galicia, with secret educational groups ( hromadas) infiltrating Russian Ukraine and increasing calls for Ukrainian independence.
Independence was finally achieved with the declaration of a republic after the forced abdication of the last Russian Czar in 1917, when a new state emerged led by a prominent nationalist, Mykhailo Hrushevsky. The Bolsheviks set up a rival Congress of Soviets in Kharkiv and civil war broke out. By 1919 Soviet troops occupied Kiev and eventually took formal control of the state. In 1922 Ukraine was one of the founding republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Collectivisation of agriculture and requisition of all grain was imposed by Stalin in 1932 – 1933: some five to seven million people are estimated to have died in the resulting famine (Holodomor). Leaders who opposed the policy were purged or executed and prosperous farmers were exiled to Central Asia. With the advent of the Second World War and the German attack on the USSR in in 1941, Ukraine fell under German control. Two military forces fought against Nazi occupation: one Soviet and the other nationalist (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, UPA) which battled both sides with the aim of recreating an independent Ukraine. In total approximately six million Ukrainians, including 1.5 million Jews, are estimated to have perished during the war.
In the aftermath of the war Stalin deported Crimean Tatars to Central Asia and Siberia in retribution for their alleged collaboration with the Nazis. The Ukrainian Uniate Church was banned because of similar accusations of sympathising with or aiding the enemy. Industrialisation and increased Russification were actively pursued during the Soviet period, with millions more Ukrainians and other groups being deported by Stalin to Siberia for disloyalty or their pursuit of a national idea.
Under Krushchev in the 1960s and later during the glasnost and perestroika years of the 1980s, nationalist objectives were increasingly pursued by Ukrainian communists. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the Ukrainian Parliament passed a declaration of state sovereignty in July 1990. A formal Declaration of Independence followed in 1991 after the failed Moscow putsch. Independence was confirmed by 92.3 % of voters in a national referendum that took place on 1st December 1991.