Background

The Red Army’s success in driving the Germans out of eastern Galicia by the autumn of 1944 and the area’s reincorporation into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic did not mean the end of military hostilities.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), headed since 1943 by Roman Shukhevych (General Taras Chu- prynka), together with the political wing of the movement, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrains’ka Holovna Vyzvol’na Rada-UHVR, est. July 1944), continued to fight against what they considered the Soviet aggressor and its allies, the Communist-controlled governments of Poland and later Czechoslovakia. Against overwhelming odds, the UPA held out in the Carpathian Mountains and continued to make raids into the Galician lowlands until the early 1950s. By then, most of the UPA members had been killed or had escaped to Austria and West Germany via Czechoslovakia.

Despite such continued military resistance to Soviet rule, the new government proceeded with the transformation of Galician society. Ukrainian-inhabited Galicia was divided by the new Polish-Soviet border that ran northward from the Carpathians along the San River, then followed a northeast line, leaving Przemysl within Poland. This meant that the Lemkian region and other Ukrainian areas around Przemysl were returned to Polish rule. Under a Communist government, Polish authorities began to deport the Lemkian population from its homeland, at first eastward to the Soviet Ukraine, then in the spring and summer of 1947 westward and northward to lands (Wroclaw, Zielona Gora, Szczecin, Olsztyn) acquired by Poland from Germany after the war.

The larger part of Galicia came under Soviet rule. The old administrative divisions were abolished and four new Soviet Ukrainian oblasts were created- L’viv, Drohobych (made part of L’viv after 1959), Stanislav (renamed Ivano- Frankivs’k in 1962), and Ternopil’-which covered almost all of former eastern Galician territory. The new government proceeded to nationalize industries, banks, and the whole private business sector, as well as to collectivize the land and to reorganize educational and cultural facilities according to the Soviet model.

Ukrainianization, again according to the Soviet model, was the official policy in all levels of life, although in practice Russian soon came to be a parallel and in some areas dominant linguistic medium. The Greek Catholic church was abolished in March 1946, when a group of priests “voluntarily” annulled the 1596 union with Rome and joined the Orthodox church. Recalcitrant Greek Catholic priests and hierarchs were jailed, while the legal Orthodox church was restricted in its activity. Besides this, several hundred thousand persons, including most of the prewar Galician-Ukrainian intelligentsia, were uprooted. A large number had fled westward before the advancing Red Army in 1944. Of those remaining behind, many were suspected of being opposed to the government or of having familial ties to known resisters and were deported to other parts of the Soviet Union.

As a result of these administrative, socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and demographic changes, Ukrainian Galicia, which had functioned as a historico- cultural unit since the early medieval era, had in fact ceased to exist after 1945. As part of an unofficial region known as the western Ukraine (which included northern Bukovina and Transcarpathia as well), eastern Galicia was profoundly transformed and very soon it was not significantly different from any other part of the Soviet Ukraine. Considering these factors, the following discussion of the basic literature on post-1945 “Galicia” is but a brief postscript to the periods discussed in the rest of this book.

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Source: Magocsi P.R.. The roots of Ukrainian nationalism. Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont. University of Toronto Press,2002. — 214 p.. 2002

Background

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