Soviet Occupation of Galicia and Volhynia

On 1 September 1939, Germany attacked Poland from the west; on 17 September, the USSR invaded Poland from the east. The Red Army claimed that Soviet power would liberate the non-Polish minorities from Polish intolerance and the peasants from their oppressive masters.¹² Most importantly, the Soviets sought to impose a “revolution from abroad” by dissolving eastern Poland’s political and socio-economic organizations and by remaking the region in the image and likeness of the USSR.¹³ Independent Poland disappeared by the end of September, experiencing its fourth partition in two centuries.

From September 1939 to the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in June 1941, the communist authorities incorporated Poland’s majority Ukrainian- and Belarusan-speaking territories into the USSR and sought to introduce the Stalinist social system into these areas as quickly as pos­sible. The annexed region also included a large number of Poles and Jews who fled Nazi-occupied Poland.¹⁴

In the chaos and uncertainty during the first few days after the outbreak of the German-Polish War, law and order collapsed as the Polish authori­ties withdrew, became paralysed, or fled. In light of the political vacuum and the palpable tensions between the Poles and Ukrainians, many young men sought seized weapons in order to defend themselves and their com­munities. In some cases, Ukrainians sought to settle scores with the Poles. At the same time, some Poles acquired guns from the Polish army. In the confusing atmosphere before Poland’s final defeat at the end of September, these soldiers and deserters sought to defend themselves from the Ukrainians, if not to avenge their loss to the Germans.

The Soviets recognized these malevolent social dynamics in Galicia and Volhynia, even before their invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939. In order to crush any potential resistance, the Soviet authorities implemented a pacification model first developed during the Civil War and in the 1930s.¹⁵ Nevertheless, they made a number of accommodations to the lo­cal population. In the chaos of the first few days just before and after the Soviet arrival, Ukrainian nationalists and communist groups in Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia may have killed several thousand Poles.¹⁶ The underground communist forces may have received tacit approval from the new authorities to “square accounts” with their long-standing enemies. But it is highly unlikely that the new Soviet commissars entering Volhynia and Galicia wanted to encourage Ukrainian nationalists to arm themselves and kill Poles. Those guns, after all, would help the nationalists seize power and could be used against the new Soviet regime.

After establishing the first semblance of order, the new rulers intro­duced policies designed to win the political allegiance of the majority of eastern Poland’s Ukrainians and Belarusans.¹⁷ In Eastern Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the new regime deposed the old Polish and Romanian elites, introduced Ukrainian as the official language, and con­verted the Polish- and Romanian-language school systems and bureaucra­cies into Ukrainian-speaking institutions.

All adults in the newly designated “Western Ukraine” and “Western Belarus” voted on 22 October 1939 for delegates to assemblies that would request incorporation into the USSR.¹⁸ Soviet authorities predetermined the turnout for the elections (at 99.2 per cent, regardless of the actual num­ber of voters who would appear) and the results.¹⁹ With the implementa­tion of these careful preparations, the newly elected assemblies in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus “enthusiastically” voted to join the USSR.

But even before the region’s formal entry into the USSR on 1-2 Novem­ber 1939, the new authorities integrated this area into the Soviet state’s political and social framework.²¹ Under the direction of Nikita Khrushchev, Ukraine’s party chief, the new Soviet government abolished Polish Roman Catholic monasteries and nationalized the predominantly Jewish retail trades and industries. Jewish artisans and members of the liberal profes­sions now became state employees. The new overseers dissolved all politi­cal and civic organizations, including Ukrainian private schools, publishing houses, and the non-communist mass media, and arrested the men and women who headed them.²² The Communist Party emerged as the only legal political party. The USSR’s dissolution of Poland’s pluralistic politi­cal system and its organized civil society paved the way for the OUN and the ideology of integral nationalism to capture the imagination, if not the loyalty, of many Ukrainians during the war and in the first post-war years.²³ The Sovietization and Ukrainization processes in Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia also radicalized the Poles.

On 29 November 1939, the USSR Supreme Soviet issued a decree grant­ing Soviet citizenship to all who lived in Poland’s eastern borderlands (kresy). It included all citizens of Poland who resided in these areas on the night of 1-2 November and those who had entered the new Soviet zone on the basis of the 16 November citizen-exchange agreement with Germany.²⁴ Most importantly, the new authorities issued internal passports to its new citizens, counting and categorizing them in terms of national identity and social class.

Only the Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland had the choice whether to accept or reject Soviet citizenship and return to the German- occupied areas of Poland.

Although the local population may have welcomed the Red Army “with smaller or larger... visible friendly crowds” and constructed triumphal arches and put up red banners, the locals did not express a uniform re- sponse.²⁶ Many Jews may have greeted the liberators with enthusiasm, perceiving that only a strong central authority could protect them from Germany and from the surrounding populations.²⁷ Although many of the older people, Orthodox Jews, and the well-off may have had apprehen­sions about the Soviets, many of the younger Jews did not.²⁸ In light of the discrimination they experienced and occasional violence directed against them, many of the Jews native to Eastern Galicia imagined Soviet rule as a vast improvement over the Polish administration.²⁹

Of the two million Polish Jews in German-occupied Poland, 250,000 fled eastward and made their way to what became the densely populated Soviet zone.³⁰ In many areas, these refugees “seemed to double or even triple the local prewar Jewish population.”³¹ By the end of 1939, approxi­mately 300,000 to 400,000 refugees (including Poland’s Jewish citizens) arrived from German-occupied Poland.³²

Under Soviet rule, the status of the Jewish population improved dra­matically.

In contrast, the status of the Polish population in the newly proclaimed Western Ukraine instantaneously changed from that of the privileged na­tional minority to one discriminated against. Shocked by this turn of events, many if not most Poles imagined that the Ukrainians had betrayed Poland and stabbed it in the back. Still despondent over the sudden col­lapse of Poland, many Poles hoped that the Soviets would play a positive role in restraining the Ukrainians from acting against them, at least in the urban areas.³⁴ For the Poles, the new Soviet authorities played a dual, al­most a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, role as the creators of a new law and order - their protectors, as well as their partitioners and oppressors.

At the outbreak of the war on 1 September 1939 Vasyl Mudry, the head of UNDO, declared the loyalty of Ukrainians to the Polish state and the necessity to defend it with arms.³⁵ But his declaration, a noble effort to de­fend Ukrainians from future charges of disloyalty to Poland, did not reflect the feelings of the majority of his constituents, who welcomed Poland’s demise. But they were uncertain about the future, as was the Polish govern­ment, which pre-emptively arrested approximately seven thousand Ukrainian cultural and political leaders in the first two days of the war.³⁶

Some Ukrainians, especially the poorest and most ignorant peasants in isolated villages expected a vast improvement under the Soviet regime.³⁷ But most hesitated to embrace the “liberators.” Despite the introduction of pro-Ukrainian policies by the new Soviet authorities, the majority of the Ukrainian population adopted a “wait and see” attitude. Many remembered the Russian occupations of 1914-15 and 1916-17, the Holodomor, and the anti-Ukrainian hysteria in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.

Even before the Soviet takeover, the OUN split apart. Colonel Andrii Melnyk succeeded the OUN’s founder, Evhen Konovalets, whom Soviet agents assassinated in Rotterdam in 1938. But the followers of Stepan Bandera, head of the OUN’s Western Ukrainian Territorial Executive Committee (which included Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia), re­fused to recognize Melnyk’s leadership. Generational and ideological divi­sions fuelled the power struggle between these two groups. Melnyk supporters (OUN-M), concentrated in the exiled leadership of the OUN, matured during the reign of Austria-Hungary, fought in the First World War, lived in Western Europe (the Polish government wanted their heads), and possessed a more restrained outlook than Bandera’s younger, fanatical supporters (OUN-B), who were determined to attain an independent Ukrainian state immediately, without any compromise, and regardless of cost. Much “more radical than mainstream Ukrainian society and more impatient than the OUN leadership in Vienna,” they embraced terrorism as the only tool in their arsenal against the Polish state.⁴⁰ By 1940, the dis­agreements between the two rival factions became irreconcilable. Both, however, viewed the Poles and the Russians as their primary enemies and the Jews with great suspicion.

Despite the efforts of the new Soviet regime to “Ukrainize” Eastern Galicia, Western Volhynia, Bessarabia, and Bukovina by replacing Polish and Romanian officials with Ukrainians, it quickly antagonized the nation­ally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia and simultaneously alienated the peasantry. The communist government promised to redistribute the lands expropriated from Polish landlords, but instead, the authorities introduced collectivization, which the peasants bitterly opposed. By June 1941, just before the German invasion, Soviet officials enticed only 12.8 per cent of all peasant households to join the collective farms.⁴¹

More ominously, the peoples of Eastern Galicia experienced four waves of deportations between 1939 and 1941 (9-10 February 1940; 9-10 April 1940; the last week of June 1940; and May-June 1941), not just “volun­tary” departures to work in the Donbass.⁴² In this period, the Soviets ban­ished most of the former Polish elite, a large number of Polish settlers who had moved into Western Ukraine between 1919 and 1939 as well as active or retired Polish military officers, arrested large numbers of Jewish refu­gees, local businessmen, and “speculators,” and began to detain Ukrainian nationalists. The first wave concentrated on Poles, the second on the Jews, the last one on Ukrainians. All in all, in 1940-1 the Soviets sent between 315,000 and 325,000 men, women, and children to special settlements and nearly 100,000 to the Gulag from Poland’s former eastern regions.⁴³ Poles represented 57-63.5 per cent of those deported; Jews 21-4 per cent; and Ukrainians 8-10.5 per cent.⁴⁴ According to one Western scholar, the NKVD made more arrests “in the former eastern Poland than in the rest of the Soviet Union in 1939-41.”⁴⁵

The NKVD removed nearly thirty-three thousand Ukrainians, far less than the number of Poles or Jews.⁴⁶ Had Hitler not invaded in June 1941, more Ukrainians would have been arrested or deported. Having experi­enced previous Russian occupations, many understood that they would follow the Poles and the Jews.

In 1939, the Red Army captured almost 200,000 Polish soldiers and of­ficers. In the spring of 1940, on Stalin’s orders, the NKVD executed with­out trial 21,857 Polish officers as well as an indeterminate number of Ukrainians, Belarusans, and Jews at the Katyn Forest and other locations.⁴⁷ In late June 1941, just as the Germans marched into Galicia, the panic- stricken Soviets shipped thousands of people from all national groups, pri­marily specialists and draft-age males, eastward. At the outbreak of the conflict, the NKVD held nearly 150,000 prisoners (not all of them politi­cal) in their cells.⁴⁸ During this evacuation, NKVD troops in Western Ukraine moved all political and most criminal prisoners with very few exceptions eastwards, killed them, or both.⁴⁹ They executed between ten thousand and forty thousand prisoners in Galicia and Western Volhynia in only eight days, often leaving putrefying and unburied bodies in public view.⁵⁰ Ukrainians, especially active nationalists, constituted two-thirds of those massacred; Poles about one-quarter; and Jews and others the rest.⁵¹

Senior NKVD officers knew that these “enemies of the people” could not be reformed and that they would one day oppose the Soviet regime. In their view, these political prisoners should not be transferred into rear ar­eas; they should be eliminated once and for all. After the Germans entered Lviv, many families searched prisons for arrested relatives and friends. But their pursuit proved in vain. Instead of prisoners, they found corpses. “There were heaps of bodies everywhere, many unidentified, many muti­lated. Bricked-up cellars full of corpses in the Brygidki and Zamarstynow prisons were not even opened for fear of epidemics.”⁵² A Ukrainian- American newspaper provided a more graphic account:

In prisons, churches and public buildings heaps of dead civilians were found when the Reds evacuated Western Ukraine before the Nazi advance. Many of them were evidently executed by bombs, for their bodies were mangled and torn. Others showed signs of tortures. Some of the priests, for example, had crosses cut out on their bodies. Corpses of soldiers bore medals nailed into them. Even bodies of women and children bore signs of mutilation.⁵³

The prisoners in at least another twenty-five prisons in Western Ukraine and Lithuania experienced summary execution. Political prisoners were targeted first; criminals were not spared.

The extensive brutality of this 1941 prison massacre, the fact that the victims were “discovered within the space of a little more than a week in a single relentless wave,” and the extensive publicity surrounding the kill­ings poisoned relations not only between Western Ukrainians and the Soviet government, but also between the Ukrainians, on the one hand, and Poles and Jews, on the other.⁵⁴ In Lviv, the Germans initiated and the local OUN-B militias helped actualize one of the first major outbursts of vio­lence against Jews in the Ukrainian-speaking territories during the war.⁵⁵ This pogrom occurred between 30 June and 2 July 1941 and attracted large crowds of Ukrainians and Poles outraged by the prison executions. Mass grief fuelled the irrational notion that the Jews were collectively guilty for all the crimes the communists had perpetrated against the local popula­tion. Seeking to avenge the grisly deaths of their friends, relatives, and fellow compatriots, members of the hastily assembled crowd mercilessly beat, robbed, humiliated, and sometimes killed their Jewish neighbours, whom they stereotyped as “Judeo-Bolsheviks” or as communist agents. The Germans then organized mass executions. In the first few days of July 1941, between two thousand and seven thousand Jews disappeared during the pogroms and executions, and another thirteen thousand to thirty-five thousand throughout Western Ukraine.⁵⁶ In their fury, neighbours slaugh­tered neighbours or condoned their massacre.

According to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, approxi­mately 1.5 million Poles, Ukrainians, and others experienced some form of political repression (such as arrest, imprisonment, forcible evacuations, or execution) in the Soviet-occupied areas of the former Polish state.⁵⁷ This represented nearly 11 per cent of the total population of the eastern kresy. Much like the Russian occupations of Galicia during the First World War, the Soviet “liberation” of 1939-41 quickly embittered the Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, and Romanian communities against the Soviets and against each other. With the promotion of local Jews, an oppressed minority in Poland, into the new Soviet region’s bureaucracy, this “liberation” popu­larized the stereotype of Jews as “Bolshevik agents” (despite Soviet na­tionalization of the trades and industries dominated by the local Jewish population). The arrival of 250,000 Jews and approximately 50,000 to 150,000 Poles from German-occupied Poland coincided with the appear­ance of the Red Army to the most densely populated area in the former Poland. The migration of so many strangers to Eastern Galicia with un­clear loyalties in a very short period of time strained the availability of goods and services, especially food. The migrants and the subsequent shortages generated great uncertainty, if not fear. These apprehensions stoked anti-Semitic, anti-Polish, and anti-Ukrainian attitudes. The Soviet interlude exacerbated the already tense pre-war existence among the Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews, and prepared the region for the radicalization of inter-ethnic attitudes and behaviour under German occupation.