Population Transfers and Education in Western Ukraine

With the war’s end, primary and secondary schooling emerged as one of the Soviet state’s first priorities in the newly annexed western provinces.⁹⁵ During the 1944-5 academic year, 1,018,290 students attended primary and secondary schools in these provinces, four hundred thousand less than the number during the 1940-1 school year.⁹⁶ According to the Ministry of Education of the Ukrainian SSR, the mass transfer of Polish students to Poland, the absence of enough teachers, and the harmful activi­ties of “the Ukrainian-German nationalists” contributed to the decline of student enrolment.

In establishing the Soviet model of education in Western Ukraine, the political authorities vetted the local teachers and found them wanting. They discovered two-thirds of all the teachers “unqualified” and demand­ed they attend “ideological” retraining classes. Between 1945 and 1951, Kiev sent almost 35,400 teachers to Western Ukraine from Eastern Ukraine. By 1947, teachers from Western Ukraine comprised only 54 per cent of the total number of teachers in this region. Nevertheless, 93 per cent of ele­mentary and secondary school students received instruction in Ukrainian.⁹⁷

In monitoring the teachers and the curriculum, the Soviet state would use the educational system as a tool to create a new Soviet man, homo Sovieticus. From Moscow’s perspective, the older generation was ideologically con­taminated before and during the war. Children, especially the younger ones, represented a blank slate. By taking youngsters out of the home for several hours, then providing after-school activities for them, the Soviet state would have the prime opportunity to inculcate its values to a new generation and transform the problematic Western Ukrainian society over the long run.⁹⁸ “Those who own the youth,” after all, “own the future.”⁹⁹

Concomitantly with these ideological declarations, the authorities dra­matically expanded Russian-language education in Western Ukraine for Ukrainians and for the burgeoning Russian population. Prior to 1939, very few Russians lived in this region.¹⁰⁰ Now, according to the census of 1959, the number of Russians was 246,000, or about 6 per cent of the total population of Western Ukraine.¹⁰¹ Not only did the Russians and Russified Ukrainians from Eastern and Central Ukraine constitute a good number of post-war administrators and leading communist cadres in this region, they also comprised most of the recently arrived skilled workers and tech­nicians.

Soviet authorities created twenty-two institutions of higher education in Western Ukraine. At first most provided instruction in Ukrainian. But un­der the leadership of Leonid Melnikov, the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine (1949-53), most of these institutions converted to Russian, even though the majority of students came from Ukrainian-speaking homes in Western Ukraine. Only the teachers’ colleges and agricultural institutes of­fered Ukrainian-language instruction.¹⁰³