Chapter 23 The Victors

Soviet troops recaptured Kyiv from the retreating Germans on November 6, 1943. Forty-nine-year-old Lieutenant General Nikita Khrushchev, political commissar of the First Ukrainian Front — the group of armies that entered the city — was overcome with joy.

As Khrushchev, accompanied by Ukrainian party leaders, approached the Opera House in downtown Kyiv, which had miraculously survived the Soviet attempt to blow it up in 1941, he noticed a screaming man running toward him. “I am the only Jew left! I am the only Jew in Kyiv who is still alive!” screamed the man. Khrushchev tried to calm him down and asked how he had survived. “I have a Ukrainian wife,” came the answer, “and she kept me hidden in the attic. She fed me and took care of me.” People began to emerge from their hiding places, and a few minutes later another citizen of Kyiv, an old man with a huge beard, hugged and kissed Khrushchev, who later remembered being “very touched.” The soldiers of the regime, for whom many in the summer of 1941 had wished nothing but defeat, now returned as saviors. It was not so much what the Soviets did after their return but what the Germans had done during the occupation that changed the attitude of those who survived, leading them to welcome the Red Army soldiers not only as victors but also as liberators. Those who thought otherwise, including a good part of the Ukrainian intellectual elite, had left with the Germans.

The Red Army would spend the next year liberating the rest of the Ukrainian territories from German occupation, but the Soviets would fully secure control over those lands only after the final Allied victory over Germany in May 1945. In June of that year, the Soviet government would draw a new western Ukrainian border by annexing to the USSR not only the lands claimed in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact but also the Transcarpathian region of interwar Czechoslovakia. It was victor’s justice in its characteristically ruthless Soviet rendition.

Nikita Khrushchev had dreamed of returning to Kyiv ever since the loss of the city to the Germans in September 1941. In the spring of 1942, soon after the Red Army stopped the Germans at the approaches to Moscow, he pushed for a Soviet counteroffensive in Ukraine with the goal of capturing its old capital, Kharkiv, and advancing on the industrial center of Dnipropetrovsk. The offensive, which began on May 12, 1942, saw Soviet tank formations break through enemy lines and push beyond Kharkiv into the steppes of Left-Bank Ukraine. But as the troops moved further southwest, meeting little if any resistance from the Germans, they realized that they were walking into a trap. The Germans had closed ranks, creating an encirclement akin to those that the Red Army had suffered the previous year. Khrushchev pleaded with Stalin to stop the offensive, but Stalin refused. It was too late to remedy the situation anyway. In a disastrous operation that lasted eighteen days, the Soviets lost 280,000 men killed, missing in action, and captured. When Stalin asked Khrushchev whether the figure of 200,000 POWs reported by the Germans was a lie, Khrushchev said that it was about right. Stalin blamed him for the defeat; only the presence of other Politburo members when Stalin refused to follow his advice and halt the clearly doomed operation saved Khrushchev from possible execution.

The battle for Ukraine turned out to be prolonged and bloody.

As the party leader of occupied Ukraine, Khrushchev was deeply involved in organizing partisan units behind the German lines. The Nazi occupation policies provoked resentment, outrage, and eventually defiance, which drove people into the ranks of the resistance. While there were numerous urban resistance cells, the countryside provided a natural habitat for large groups of partisans, who waged a long and exhausting war against the occupiers. Ecology was the key. Since the steppes provided poor cover for resistance fighters, they fought in the woods of the northern Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, the forests and marshes of northern Volhynia, and the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Apart from their habitat, their professed Ukrainian patriotism and hatred of the Nazi occupation united the partisans.

As a rule, the Soviet secret police organized the communist guerrillas, who received orders and supplies from a body called the Ukrainian Staff of the Partisan Movement, headed by an NKVD general and part of the Moscow-based Central Staff of the Partisan Movement. One of the best-known partisan leaders of Ukraine, Sydir Kovpak, had headed a city council before the war. Apart from his experience as a guerrilla commander during the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, he had graduated from an NKVD school that trained cadres for partisan warfare. The Soviet partisans began their activities in early 1942 with attacks on German units behind the lines and centers of occupation administration. As time went on and the Red Army began its westward advance after the Battle of Stalingrad, the activities of Soviet partisans increased in number and scope. If there were 5,000 fighters in 1942, their numbers had increased almost tenfold by 1944.

The Germans tried to deal with the growing partisan movement, which not only challenged their control over Ukraine but also disrupted communications and deliveries of supplies, by unleashing a reign of terror on the local population. This included burning villages that the occupation authorities believed to be under partisan control or suspected of supporting the partisans. With German manpower in short supply, the authorities relied on police battalions recruited from the local population. Their members rarely joined the police for ideological reasons and included many former members of the Communist Party and the Komsomol (communist youth organization) seeking to escape persecution or even extermination by the occupation authorities. As there were locals on both sides of the divide, partisan warfare often turned into a brutal vendetta in which relatives of the partisans and policemen paid the ultimate price for choices made by their kinsmen.

After the capture of Kyiv, Khrushchev immediately immersed himself in administration, reintegrating the former Soviet territories into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) and reincorporating the lands that the Soviets had not controlled before the war. It turned out to be a long and formidable task that would take most of his time and energy. By early 1944, the front had moved west of the Dnieper. By March, Soviet troops had retaken Right-Bank Ukraine and crossed the prewar border, pushing into Romania. In October 1944, the Red Army crossed the Carpathians and gained control of Transcarpathia, which official propaganda hailed as the final act in the reunification of the Ukrainian lands. There was no talk of a possible return of the territory either to Hungary or to Czechoslovakia. More than half a million Red Army soldiers died in the fighting for western Ukraine.

“As we pushed the Germans west, we encountered an old enemy — Ukrainian nationalists,” recalled Khrushchev as he described his efforts to reincorporate western Ukraine into the Soviet state in 1944 and 1945. The Soviet authorities often referred to these nationalists generally as “Banderites,” given the overall control of the nationalist insurgency by the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Eventually, this term came to denote anyone who fought in the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), controlled by Bandera’s followers. The name was misleading in more than one sense. First, not all the UPA fighters shared the nationalist ideology or belonged to the OUN. Second, Bandera himself never returned to Ukraine after his arrest by the Germans in the summer of 1941 and had no operational control over the forces that bore his name.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which had close to 100,000 soldiers at its height in the summer of 1944, was fighting behind the Soviet lines, disrupting Red Army communications and attacking units farther from the front. A number of commanders led the insurgents, the most prominent being the former commander of the Nachtigall battalion, Roman Shukhevych. Like Shukhevych, many UPA commanders had German training, which they received as members of auxiliary police units. They abandoned those units with their weapons in early 1943. While they regarded the Germans as their main enemies, in 1943 the UPA mostly fought the Polish insurgency. The long history of animosity between Ukrainians and Poles in Volhynia and Galicia, exacerbated by each side’s mounting suspicions of the other’s intentions, led in the spring and summer of 1943 to mass actions of ethnic cleansing involving the burning of villages and mass murder of innocent civilians.

The influx into Volhynia, soon after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, of Soviet partisan units led by Sydir Kovpak triggered the Ukrainian-Polish conflict. They received support from some Polish settlers in Volhynia, who viewed the Soviets as potential allies against the Ukrainians. Ukrainian and Polish historians still argue over whether the OUN leadership sanctioned Ukrainian attacks on Polish villages and, if so, on what level. There is no doubt, however, that most victims of the ethnic cleansing were Poles. Estimates of Ukrainians killed as a result of Polish actions in Galicia and Volhynia vary between 15,000 and 30,000, whereas the estimates for Polish victims are between 60,000 and 90,000 — two to three times as high. The Germans, while not actively involved in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict, incited both sides to continue it, sometimes supplying weapons to the combatants. If they could not control the countryside, they could at least keep their enemies divided. They also benefited from UPA operations against the advancing Red Army.

Among the UPA’s major successes was the killing of a leading Soviet commander, General Nikolai Vatutin. On February 29, 1944, UPA fighters ambushed and wounded Vatutin as he was returning from a meeting with subordinates in Rivne, the former capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. He died in Kyiv in mid-April. Khrushchev, who attended Vatutin’s funeral, buried his friend in the government center of Kyiv. After the war, he came up with an inscription for the monument: “To General Vatutin from the Ukrainian people.” Khrushchev believed that the inscription would infuriate the Ukrainian nationalists, but party officials in Moscow treated it as an expression of the selfsame Ukrainian nationalism. Khrushchev appealed directly to Stalin, who allowed him to go ahead with his original plan. The Ukrainian-language inscription was placed on the monument, which was erected in 1948 and still stands in downtown Kyiv — one of many reminders of the complexity of Ukrainian memory of World War II.

In World War II, Ukrainians found themselves on more than one side of the conflict. The absolute majority fought in the ranks of the Soviet army. Moscow enlisted more than 7 million Ukrainians of various nationalities — every fifth or sixth Soviet soldier came from Ukraine. Over 3.5 million were called up at the start of the war, and roughly as many again were drafted in the course of it. Many soldiers who survived the German onslaught and imprisonment in 1941 were released to their families and then seized and drafted immediately after the Red Army retook the areas where they lived. They became known as “men in black jackets,” as most were thrown into battle immediately after being drafted — without proper uniforms, training, ammunition, or even arms. As people who had stayed under German occupation, the military command regarded them as traitors and considered them expendable. Most of the “men in black jackets” died in combat on the outskirts of their towns and villages days after the long-awaited “liberation.”

While the Soviets had no qualms about taking Ukrainians into the army and sending them into battle, the Germans long refused to enlist the men from the conquered territories in their regular units. They were welcomed, however, as auxiliaries — Hilfswillige (willing helpers), or Hiwis. An estimated 1 million former Soviet citizens joined Hiwi auxiliary units, with Ukrainians and natives of Ukraine constituting roughly one-quarter of that number. The policy began to change after Stalingrad as the Germans started running out of manpower. The newly formed non-German units came under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and became part of the Waffen-SS — the military branch of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Himmler’s brutal police force. Among Waffen-SS divisions were units recruited from almost every European nationality, including Frenchmen, Swedes, Russians, and Ukrainians. Close to 20,000 Ukrainians served in the course of the war in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, known as the Division Galizien.

The German governor of the District of Galicia, Otto von Wächter, promoted the idea of creating the division. A native of Vienna, Wächter played the old Austrian game of supporting the Ukrainians against the Poles, and his rule witnessed an increase in the number of Ukrainian schools in the district. His German regime banned political organizations and hunted down OUN operatives but tolerated Ukrainian welfare, cultural, and even academic institutions — a striking difference from all other parts of Ukraine. Wächter believed that the Ukrainians were loyal enough to entrust with arms. In Berlin, however, many doubted both their loyalty and their racial status. Eventually the leadership decided to call the division Galician rather than Ukrainian, deeming Galicians, as former Austrian subjects, a more “civilized” and reliable group than Ukrainians in general. Berlin not only divided Ukraine along the old Russo-Austrian boundary but also conducted its policy toward different parts of the country following the old Austrian patterns. The division would consist only of Galicians, and its name and symbols would make no reference to Ukraine and Ukrainians.

The recruitment of volunteers for the division, announced in April 1943, immediately caused a split in the nationalist underground: the Bandera faction was vehemently opposed, while followers of Bandera’s opponent, Colonel Andrii Melnyk, supported it. Mainstream Ukrainian political leaders, including bishops of the Catholic Church, were also divided. Those who supported the formation of the division thought as much in terms of Galicia’s Austrian past as did the Germans in deciding to create it. Back in 1918, the existence of a Ukrainian legion in the Austrian army had allowed the Ukrainians to train cadres and acquire arms that they used in the war for independence. Many in the Ukrainian community thought that history might repeat itself. Few were happy with German rule in Ukraine, even fewer shared the Nazi ideology, and no one believed in a German future after Stalingrad and Kursk. Apart from hard-nosed calculation, only their shared anticommunism brought the Ukrainian politicians and the German authorities together.

Backed by mainstream Ukrainian politicians and presented to Ukrainian youth as an alternative to going to the forest to join the Bandera insurgents or staying under imminent Soviet occupation, enrollment in the division seemed a lesser evil to parents who sent their sons to join its ranks. Most would soon have reason to regret their choice. Trained and commanded by German officers, the division got its baptism by fire in July 1944 near the Galician town of Brody. It was both a christening and a wake. Soviet forces surrounded the Division Galizien, together with seven other German divisions. Total casualties reached almost 38,000, with 17,000 taken prisoner. The Division Galizien, which numbered close to 11,000 men, was virtually wiped out: only about 1,500 managed to escape. The Battle of Brody spelled the end of the division as a fighting force. Later that year, replenished with new recruits, it was sent first to Slovakia and then to Yugoslavia to fight partisans. There history repeated itself as farce, if not as tragedy — vintage 1918 memories of Ukrainian units in Austrian uniform securing Ukrainian independence gave way to 1944 realities of Ukrainians wearing Nazi swastikas and putting down the liberation movements of fellow Slavs.

On July 27, 1944, the Red Army recaptured Lviv. The seizure of that city and western Ukraine presented Nikita Khrushchev and the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine with a new set of challenges. The main concern with Lviv was the possible formation of a Polish city government that would declare loyalty to the Polish government-in-exile in London. Khrushchev rushed into the city left open by the retreating Germans. “We were afraid that some local bodies might arise there that would turn out to be hostile to Soviet rule,” he remembered later. “We had to move quickly to put our people in charge of the city. And that is what we did.” In 1944, Lviv was a largely Polish city surrounded by a largely Ukrainian countryside. It became a bone of contention between Stalin on the one hand and the Polish government-in-exile, supported by the Western Allies, on the other. Khrushchev’s installation of Soviet administrative bodies meant that Stalin was not going to accommodate Polish hopes of keeping the city.

Two days before the capture of Lviv, Stalin had bullied the members of the Polish Committee of National Liberation — the communist government-in-waiting created by the Soviets to replace the Polish government-in-exile in London — into agreeing to the future borders of the Polish state, which would roughly follow the Molotov-Ribbentrop line of 1939 and leave Lviv on the Soviet side of the border. A letter Stalin had received a few days earlier from Khrushchev helped him in this effort. The Ukrainian party boss wanted to attach to his republic not only Lviv and other areas east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line but also the city of Kholm (Chełm), located in a predominantly Ukrainian-populated region — Khrushchev’s wife, Nina Petrivna Kukharchuk, came from that area. Stalin threatened his Polish clients with Khrushchev’s request, giving them to understand that if they did not agree to give up Lviv, he would push for Kholm as well. They caved in, taking Kholm and abandoning their claims to the Galician capital. Kholm, captured by the Red Army on July 23, became the first town west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line taken by the Soviets and the first seat of the Polish government dependent on Moscow.

In September 1944, the communist-dominated Polish government and the Khrushchev-led administration of Soviet Ukraine signed an agreement on the new borders and an exchange of population intended to make the borders not only political but also ethnic boundaries. The idea behind the agreement was quite simple: Poles were to go west, to areas beyond the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, while Ukrainians would go east of that line. Stalin was eager to move not only borders but also peoples in order to stabilize future frontiers, get rid of minorities, and thereby forestall any possibility of irredentist movements in the Soviet territories. While the nationalists had planned to bring prewar borders into line with ethnic boundaries, Stalin took a further step, adjusting ethnic boundaries to fit the borders he established by force of arms.

In February 1945, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain came to Yalta in the Crimea to discuss the future of the postwar world with Stalin, the Soviet leader insisted on drawing a new boundary between the Soviet Union and Poland along the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. The Western leaders agreed, giving retroactive legitimacy to the movement of population that had already taken place. Stalin also made sure that Ukraine and Belarus, with their new western borders, would become members of the United Nations, additionally legitimizing the new Soviet boundaries. The Potsdam Conference, which again featured the leaders of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union and took place in the summer of 1945, after the defeat of Germany and the end of hostilities in Europe, accommodated Stalin’s demand to assign former German lands in the west to Poland as compensation for the territories it had lost in the east. Moscow expelled more than 7.5 million ethnic Germans from the territory of the new Polish state, making room for Poles resettled from the east. The Soviets began to ship Poles westward even before Red Army troops captured the eastern German territories. Thus, in September 1944, Polish citizens of Lviv who were supposed to go to Breslau (Polish: Wrocław) were temporarily “parked” in the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek near the city of Lublin. Only later would they reach their final destination on former German territory.

Given the open warfare between the Ukrainian and Polish undergrounds and the ethnic cleansing that accompanied it, many Poles and Ukrainians were indeed more than ready to leave their homes and save their lives, if not their possessions. But some refused to move. In the end, it did not matter much. Stalin and his Polish clients were only too eager to use the experience the NKVD had acquired in the course of mass deportations of the war era to achieve their goal of creating minority-free states. Soviet officials called the deportation campaign “repatriation.” The “patrias” were imagined, as most of the deportees were not returning to but leaving their homelands. About 780,000 Poles were “repatriated” west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line from Ukraine alone. Approximately the same number were moved from Belarus and Lithuania to the territory of the new Polish state. The deportees included close to 100,000 Jews who had survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Most of those resettled ended up in the former German lands assigned to Poland by Stalin with the reluctant agreement of the Western leaders.

As Poles and Jews went west, Ukrainians headed east. In two years, between 1944 and 1946, close to half a million Ukrainians were deported from lands west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line to the Ukrainian SSR. Around the same time, more than 180,000 Ukrainians from western Ukraine were arrested and deported to Siberia and the Soviet interior for real or alleged collaboration with the nationalist underground. An additional 76,000 Ukrainians were deported in October 1947. The deportations aimed mainly to curb Ukrainian nationalist resistance, which continued in western Ukraine long after the end of the war. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that Stalin had been prepared to deport all Ukrainians to the east, but there were too many of them.

That seemed to be an option open to the Polish communist authorities, though on a smaller scale. In 1947, in an operation code-named Vistula, they deported from their eastern borderlands the entirety of the Ukrainian population still remaining in Poland — altogether 140,000 men, women, and children — and replaced them with ethnic Poles. They expelled the deportees from their homes and resettled them in the former German territories in western and northern Poland. The checkered Polish-Ukrainian boundary, with its ethnically and religiously mixed population, was becoming a clear-cut Soviet-Polish border, with Poles on one side and Ukrainians on the other. Ukraine itself, a multiethnic territory for most of its history, was turning into a Ukrainian-Russian condominium as a result of the extermination of the Jews and the deportation of the Poles and Germans.

Stalin moved populations around not to appease the nationalists but to fight nationalism and cement his control over the borderlands. He was sealing the Soviet borders not only with new demarcation lines and border guards but also with a neverending campaign against the capitalist West — closing the Ukrainian gates to Europe more tightly than during the interwar period or, indeed, any previous time in history. The reality of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine had crushed the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s dream of joining Europe. The Europe that the Germans brought to Ukraine came in the form of a colonial empire, its agents driven by notions of race, exploitation, and the extermination of “subhumans” (Untermenschen). The Soviets took advantage of this recent disappointment with the West to fuel the propaganda of the Cold War era. For years they would link Ukrainian nationalism with German fascism by constantly referring to the Ukrainian insurgents as “German-Ukrainian nationalists.”

The Soviet regime was also intent on erasing age-old cultural boundaries. In March 1946, working through its agents, the NKVD convoked a special council of the Ukrainian Catholic Church at which the participants were forced to dissolve their church and join the Russian Orthodox Church instead. The council took place in the absence of bishops, whom the NKVD had arrested a year earlier. The decision to destroy the church came immediately after the Yalta Conference and was carried out within the borders defined by the meeting of the Big Three. As Transcarpathia was not yet officially part of Soviet Ukraine, the Catholic Church there was allowed to exist for another three years until it was crushed with the start of the Cold War in 1949. The Soviets suspected the Catholic Church as a whole of doing the bidding of the Vatican and the Western powers. All institutional, religious, and cultural links with the West had to be cut, destroying an institution that had long served as a bridge between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East. In a few short years, more than 5 million Ukrainian Catholics became nominally Orthodox.

By 1945 the victorious Soviet Union, using its military force, had moved its boundaries deep into east-central Europe. The Soviets took a page from the book of Ukrainian nationalism by expanding the nominally Ukrainian republic to include Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian territories traditionally settled by Ukrainians.

These territorial acquisitions presented new challenges to the Soviet regime in Ukraine. After the Revolution of 1917, the Soviets had managed to anchor Dnieper Ukraine to the USSR by recognizing the Ukrainian claim to the industrial centers of eastern and southern Ukraine, often settled by ethnic Russians. By taking over largely Ukrainian-inhabited parts of the former Austria-Hungary claimed during the interwar period by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, Stalin brought into Soviet Ukraine fairly well-developed traditions of autonomy, parliamentary democracy, and communal and national self-organization that had been all but absent in the central and eastern Ukrainian lands. The Soviet regime also encountered a new ideological threat — radical nationalism, represented by a well-organized political structure with its own partisan military force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The full incorporation of those territories, which included their economic, social, and cultural integration into Soviet Ukraine and the USSR, would take decades to accomplish. Moscow still had to pacify those areas by driving the nationalist insurgency underground and then destroying it — a process that lasted into the 1950s. To become fully Soviet, those lands would have to undergo collectivization and industrialization, and their youth would have to be indoctrinated in the basics of Soviet Marxism. But even with the passing of time, the historical ties between the newly acquired Soviet territories and central and western Europe did not cease to exist. The westward shift of Soviet borders turned the formerly non-Soviet parts of Ukraine into internal borderlands, where for decades the regime imposed policies different from those that it pursued in the rest of Ukraine.

The Soviets used the Ukrainian card not only to legitimize possession of the region but also to Sovietize it. Moscow returned to its Ukrainization policy of the 1920s, offering the region the opportunity to join Soviet society through the Ukrainization of its political and cultural life. But the regime was slow to integrate local cadres, whom it did not trust, and therefore brought in Ukrainians from eastern and central parts of the republic. This delayed the full integration of the region. At the same time, the offer of Ukrainian culture in exchange for political loyalty helped slow down Russification in the rest of Ukraine. This policy of grudging Ukrainization, coupled with the historical tradition of high national mobilization within the boundaries of Austria-Hungary and then Poland, as well as memories of the nationalist insurgency, would turn western Ukraine, in particular Galicia, into Ukraine’s center of national culture and political activism for the rest of the Soviet era.