The seven decades of Soviet rule had both a negative and positive impact but broadly
advanced the cause of Ukrainian statehood and nationhood. Tsarist Russia
administered Ukraine as provinces of Russia and regarded its inhabitants as 'Little
Russians', for whom a separate identity was not contemplated. The Soviet system
accorded Ukraine the trappings of statehood, including UN membership, and this
undoubtedly helped reinforce a distinctive identity; nevertheless, official attitudes
against bourgeois nationalism meant that the flowering of Ukrainian identity could not
take place in Soviet conditions; the indigenization policy of the 1920s was abandoned
and replaced by suspicion and hostility towards manifestations of a Ukrainian ethnos.
In the post-Soviet period, state-building is deemed to have been achieved, but the
distribution of ethnic and linguistic groups on the territory of modern Ukraine means
that nation-building is a continuing process.