Conclusion
The experiences of death and suffering unleashed by the Second World War on the eastern front produced a far more extensive, “much deeper and more intensely personal,” impact than the first total war fought on Ukrainian soil - and perhaps even the Holodomor.213 Despite the enormous variation in the scope and intensity of the violence directed against members of specific groups, every survivor suffered and endured an unbearable sense of loss and immeasurable trauma.
In Ukraine (as in all German-occupied territories) the Jews and Romani experienced near total annihilation. Both the Soviets as well as the Nazis exterminated anyone who stood out of the crowd, including large numbers of Ukrainian intellectuals and nationalists. Ukrainian nationalist groups avenged their enemies within their own camp, not to mention Poles, Jews, and members of the Soviet army and security forces. The Soviets did the same. Even before the Red Army reoccupied Ukraine in 1943-4, Soviet partisans and intelligence agents recorded the behaviour and loyalties of the people under German rule. After the arrival of the Soviet army, the new administration eliminated the nationalists and those who worked in the German occupational administration, and purified the Soviet body politic.
Although Soviet authorities deported ethnic Germans and the Poles in successive waves between 1935 and 1941, they discovered new, potentially disloyal national minorities in the course of the war. In 1944 they expelled the entire population of Crimean Tatars (approximately 189,000) to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, as well as a large number of Armenians (9,621), Bulgarians (13,422), and Greeks (15,040) from the Russian Federation’s Crimea.214 In response to the ruthless guerilla war conducted by the OUN-UPA in Western Ukraine, Soviet security forces removed approximately 200,000 to 300,000 people between 1946 and 1950.215
Earlier - during the war - rumours spread that Soviet authorities would deport all Ukrainians living in Nazi-occupied territory.
But these claims concerning Secret Order No. 0078/42, signed by Marshal Georgi Zhukov and Beria, on 22 June 1942, remain unsubstantiated.216 Although Nikita Khrushchev asserted in his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 that “there were too many Ukrainians, and there was nowhere to deport them to, but otherwise they would have been deported,” the accuracy of this statement remains unverified.217 Despite the document’s problematic nature, it highlights the Soviet leadership’s anxiety about the overall loyalty of Ukrainians to the Soviet state.Despite its ambivalence, Stalin’s circle did not ignore Ukrainian participation in the war, as it did with the Jews.218 Despite large-scale opposition against the Soviet regime, many more Ukrainians fought for the Soviets than against them. In 1941-5, 3.2 million Ukrainians enlisted in the Red Army, including 750,000 from the western regions (not necessarily voluntarily). Twice as many Ukrainians from Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia served in the Red Army as contributed to anti-Soviet resistance in 1944-50.219 Of the 115,000 pro-Soviet partisans who fought in the Ukrainian SSR in the later stages of the war, approximately 57 per cent identified themselves as Ukrainians.220 In light of this mass (and in many cases enthusiastic) involvement in the Great Fatherland War, Ukrainians soon became an integral part of the new Soviet legitimizing myth of the war.221 Soviet authorities “made a real effort to include Ukrainians rhetorically and physically in the war effort and in the partisan movement the Ukrainian partisans symbolically and physically contributed to the construction of a ‘Soviet Ukraine’ which enabled the inclusion of Ukrainians as Soviet patriots.”222 In the midst of the greatest crisis the Soviet Union ever confronted, the Soviet leadership sought to orient its Ukrainian population in a politically acceptable direction and demonized the Ukrainian nationalists.
In ferreting out their actual and potential enemies, the Stalinist leadership also recognized that the vast majority of those who survived the German, Hungarian, and Romanian occupations did not cooperate with or join the Soviet partisan movement until late in the war. Most passively accepted German rule. In assessing the fragility of Soviet power in the western borderlands during the war, Stalin’s inner circle introduced a fundamentalist ideological course in the post-war period. In order to redirect the population’s understanding of their place in Soviet society, perceptions contaminated by the German occupation and by hopes for a better postwar world, the Soviet leadership had to reconfigure its borders and to purify its new and old citizens.