Borders and Population Changes
With the victory over Germany in 1945, the Allied leadership reconstructed the borders of Germany and the countries of East Central Europe, boundaries which their predecessors had established between 1919 and 1921 at the Treaty of Versailles and at the Treaty of Riga.
By redefining the new frontiers, the Allied leaders sparked large-scale and coercive migrations between contiguous countries, solidified the post-war contours of Central and Eastern Europe, and reconfigured the national compositions of these countries. Between 1943 and 1948, nearly thirty million Europeans were forced the leave their homes permanently.21In negotiating the occupation and reconstruction of post-war Germany at Potsdam in the summer of 1945, Joseph Stalin, Harry S. Truman, and Winston Churchill (replaced by Clement Attlee after Churchill lost the 2 July election) formally endorsed the expulsion of the Germans from East Central Europe, where they had lived for the past millennium. Within a short period, the newly established communist and coalition governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, with the help of the USSR, forcibly deported at least twelve million and as many as fourteen million Germans to occupied Germany.22 Despite Potsdam’s official promise that the transfer of populations would take place in an “orderly and humane manner,” between 500,000 and 1.5 million Germans died during these merciless treks.23 Even the victorious Allies embraced the idea of collective guilt.
As the predominant military and political force in East Central Europe after the war, the USSR transformed its map. Poland, which sided with the Allies and emerged as one of the war’s winners, came out “22 percent smaller than it had been before the war, while Germany, which lost the war, was 18 percent smaller.”24 The Soviets moved the borders of Poland 200 to 300 hundred kilometres west to the Oder-Niesse Rivers.
Poland incorporated the eastern areas of Germany and permanently lost its own eastern territories to Soviet Belarus, Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Lithuania, almost half (47 per cent) of its pre-war territory.25 Soviet authorities then forced approximately 2.15 million Poles and 150,000 Jews to leave the territories annexed by the Soviet Union and relocate to Poland.26 The new Polish government moved the displaced Poles and Jews to the western areas the Germans evacuated. At the same time, approximately two million Poles - forced labourers, POWs, and previous emigrants - returned from the West. Most migrated to Poland’s newly acquired western lands.27 Because Poland had lost its eastern borderlands, “the west was all the most precious.”28At the same time that Poland acquired a new Polish population, those who did not identify themselves as Poles were expelled. By 1946, Polish authorities forced approximately 482,000 Ukrainians to leave Poland for Soviet Ukraine.29 Two-thirds settled in the newly annexed Ukrainian territories and one-third in southern and eastern Ukraine.30
The majority of Ukrainians who lived in Poland lived on the frontier areas between Poland and the Soviet Union. These territories included Podlachia, the Lemko Region, and the Sian Region, collectively known as Zakerzonnia, the Transcurzon Lands (the area behind the Curzon Line, a proposed armistice line between Poland and Soviet Russia during their 1919-20 war); it became - with some slight modifications - the SovietPolish border after the Second World War.
On the eve of the Second World War, these areas contained a large Ukrainian population (500,000 identified themselves as Ukrainians, with 200,000 who belonged to the Roman Catholic faith, but spoke Ukrainian). The USSR did not annex this territory after the war, but facilitated a largescale population exchange of Zakerzonnia’s Ukrainian population. Despite the Soviet-Polish (TWJK) “voluntary” population transfer agreement of September 1944, most of the Ukrainians in Zakerzonnia did not want to move to the Ukrainian SSR.31 But the Polish and Soviet governments wanted to uproot them en masse.
A weak OUN-B/UPA force in the area decided to stay and to help defend the Ukrainian population. For the OUN-B and UPA, they understood that if their compatriots left, it would be difficult to claim or defend this territory. If the Ukrainians disappeared, OUN and UPA would not be able, as Mao Ze Dong eloquently put it, to “move amongst the people as fish swim in the sea.” In the long run, the armed resistance would not survive. Not surprisingly, the OUN/UPA viewed all Ukrainians who voluntarily registered with the Poles to transfer to Ukraine as traitors and dealt with them by means of violence or threats of violence.32
Once the Soviet and Polish security forces forcibly evacuated the local population, OUN/UPA units burned down abandoned Ukrainian villages (so that Poles transferring from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia could not get access to them) and came into conflict with the communist military units. In early 1947, they killed the Polish deputy defence minister, Karol Swierczewski.
Beyond defending the Ukrainian population in Zakerzonnia, OUN-B and UPA did not make any claims to Polish-majority areas in the newly reconstructed Poland. They recognized that these territories belonged to Poland and that the majority Ukrainian-speaking territories, such as Zakerzonnia, should belong to Ukraine. Unfortunately for the Ukrainians and the Poles, nationally mixed areas (such as Chelm/Kholm, Zakerzonnia, Wofyn/Volhynia, and East Galicia) always provoked irreconcilable conflicts over which group should rule the region in question. The new postwar Polish-Soviet border split the first two areas from the second two and both governments sought to homogenize the remaining populations.
The process of creating a nationally pure Poland culminated in the spring and summer of 1947 with the Soviet-sponsored military operation, Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisla) against the Ukrainian population of southeast Poland, an area which harboured extensive UPA resistance.33 During the largest post-Second World War military operation in Poland, the Soviet Union supervised the brutal transfer of the remaining 140,600 Ukrainians in Poland’s southeast to the newly acquired Polish western territories34 (see map 9).
Poland’s new elite justified its internal war against the Ukrainians by assuming the latter group’s “collective guilt.”As a consequence of these border changes, population transfers, and the Nazi extermination of the Jews, Poland became a nationally homogeneous state. According to demographic analyses of Poland’s first post-war census in December 1950, Poles and Roman Catholics constituted 97 per cent of the population, a far higher percentage than in 1931.35 Although most Poles distrusted their new pro-Soviet government, they approved of these population transfers and the addition of the “recovered territories” in the west, helping entrench communist rule in East Central Europe.36
Ukraine also experienced extensive border changes. Soviet authorities had already incorporated Eastern Galicia and Volhynia from Poland and Bukovina and Bessarabia from Romania into the Ukrainian SSR before the end of the war and Transcarpathia from Czechoslovakia in 1945. (Only small numbers of Ukrainians remained in these countries after these boundary rectifications.) With the conclusion of the Second World War, Stalin and his colleagues united the majority of Ukrainians living in East Central Europe into a single Soviet republic, a highly popular move among those Ukrainians living in territories under Soviet control since 1920, but not necessarily among those annexed after 1939.37
These border changes, however, did not transform the Ukrainian SSR into a nationally homogeneous entity.38 After 1945 Ukraine remained nationally diverse, but regionally homogeneous. In the post-war period, it contained four different sets of territories. The western Ukrainian territories, those areas the Soviet Union acquired from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in 1939-45, became more Ukrainian demographically.39 In the central, agricultural regions under Soviet control since 1920, the percentage of those who identified themselves as Ukrainians also increased in the 1939-59 period.40 Yet, the industrial eastern and southern regions under Soviet control since 1920 became more Russian (with the exception of Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv/Nikolaev and the city of Kiev)41 (see map 10).
As the authorities reconstructed one of the major industrial heartlands of the USSR after the war, they transferred many Russian and Russified cadres to Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions.The war’s casualties and the post-war population transfers established different clusters of “tipping points,” that critical mass needed to maintain the Ukrainian language and culture or to abandon it.42 These demographic changes and the introduction of new institutional arrangements provided a limited social and political menu of options. The masses could make choices after 1945, but only from the list the Soviet authorities provided them.
The Second World War brought immense population changes to Ukraine. With the expansion of the Ukrainian SSR to the west, Kiev now occupied a critical geopolitical position in the centre of Ukraine. As a consequence of its location and post-war reconstruction, Kiev’s population grew, surging ahead of Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Odessa. Not only did Kiev enhance its position as Ukraine’s “primate city” in the post-war period, it also attracted a majority Ukrainian population by 1959, increasing it in subsequent censuses.43