The Absorption of Western Ukraine

Since 1654, when the tsars began steadily to extend their control over Ukraine, Ukrainians had lived in two distinct worlds: one ruled by the Russians and the other by Poles or Austrians.

In achieving their goals, the Soviets had the great advantage of overwhelming military and political might. Nevertheless, their task was still a difficult one, for in Western Ukraine they confronted a society whose major components were antagonistic to them: the Greek Catholic church, the paramount West Ukrainian institution, was clearly incompatible with the new regime; the peasants, who constituted the vast majority of West Ukrainians, were terrified by the prospect of collectivization; and the youth, many of whom were committed to nationalism, saw in the Soviets their greatest enemy. The liquidation of the Greek Catholic church

Because it was the West Ukrainians’ strongest link to the West and because it functioned as the national church par excellence, the Greek Catholic church became an early focus of attack by the Soviet regime. The signal for the anti-Greek Catholic drive was the death, on 1 November 1944, of the immensely popular Metropolitan Sheptytsky.

As the hierarchy was being liquidated, a well-known priest, Gabriel Kostelnyk, was persuaded by the Soviets to organize a group of Greek Catholic priests to agitate for the abolition of the union with Rome. Opposition to the group’s activities was stifled by a campaign of terror launched by the NKVD among the clergy. On 8 March 1946, the group called a synod – a totally uncanonical act in view of the absence of bishops – to consider its links with Rome. The result was a foregone conclusion: the 216 priests and 19 laity who attended proclaimed the dissolution of the Union of Brest of 1596, a break with Rome, and the “reunion” of the Greek Catholic church with the Russian Orthodox church. Somewhat later, a similar process, accompanied by the seemingly accidental death of Bishop Teodor Romzha, was carried out in Transcarpathia, and by 1951 the Greek Catholic church in that region was also destroyed.

Confused by the disappearance of their hierarchs, cowed by Soviet terror tactics, and fearful about the fate of their families, many priests went over to Orthodoxy. Those who refused were removed from their posts and usually exiled to Siberia. Yet one should not suppose that the Soviets succeeded in simply decreeing the Greek Catholic church out of existence. Many of the priests and laity that supposedly accepted Orthodoxy continued to practice Greek Catholic rites and holidays surreptitiously. Certainly, the continuing flood of Soviet propaganda against the Greek Catholic church indicates that the loyalty of West Ukrainians to their ancient church is far from dead.

Despite the Soviet occupation of Galicia and Volhynia, the UPA continued to grow. In 1944–45, it had more recruits than it could equip. A major source of manpower was the members of the OUN underground, which continued to exist parallel to the UPA. Many recruits were men and women who had resisted the mass deportations or collectivization. Red Army deserters and those who fled to the forests to avoid mobilization also entered the UPA in great numbers, preferring its ranks to serving as Soviet cannon fodder at the front. Thus, while the victorious Red Army was storming Berlin, in Western Ukraine large, battalion-size units of anti-Soviet partisans gained control of considerable areas where they established an elaborate administrative structure of their own. At this point, the policy of the UPA and of its political superstructure, the UHVR, was to await developments in the West (and to hope for a new war between the Allies and the Soviets). At the same time, it meant to disrupt the establishment of the Soviet system in its homeland. This widespread activity of the UPA was the result of, on the one hand, its popular support and effective organization and, on the other, of the shortage of Soviet troops in Western Ukraine.

After Germany capitulated in May 1945, however, the Soviets were able to mount a systematic and extensive effort to destroy the the UPA. In 1945–46 their forces – which consisted mostly of MVD and NKVD troops because regular Red Army units contained many Ukrainians who were reluctant to fight against the UPA – blockaded and swept through huge areas of Volhynia and the Carpathian foothills, where the partisans were concentrated. In order to terrorize the West Ukrainian populace and deprive the UPA of popular support, the NKVD utilized a variety of ruthless tactics. It depopulated areas where the UPA had base camps, deporting to Siberia the family of anyone associated with the resistance, and even entire villages. It is estimated that, between 1946 and 1949, about 500,000 West Ukrainians were exiled to the north.

Suffering from heavy losses, the UPA attempted to adjust to the growing Soviet pressure by breaking down its large units into small, maneuverable squads. By 1947–48, when it became obvious that an American-Soviet war would not occur, many of these units disbanded on the orders of the UPA command. Some UPA members joined the OUN civilian underground, but because many of the latter’s members had been killed, captured, emigrated or lost their “cover” during the period of open struggle, the OUN’s secret network was also no longer as effective or extensive as it had been previously. Another serious blow to the UPA was the spread of collectivization because, unlike the individual peasant households, the strictly controlled collective farmers could not serve as sources of provisions for the partisans.

In this final stage, the UPA units and the OUN underground, which had in the meantime established loose, sporadic links with the British and American secret services, concentrated on anti-Soviet propaganda and sabotage. They disrupted collectivization, deportations, and the establishment of the Soviet administrative apparatus, and they assassinated NKVD officers, party activists, and those suspected of collaborating with the Soviets. Thus, in 1948, Father Gabriel Kostelnyk was shot, allegedly by OUN members (some accounts implicate the NKVD), for his role in the dissolution of the Greek Catholic church. A year later, the OUN underground killed the noted Soviet propagandist-journalist Iaroslav Galan.

A separate chapter in the history of the UPA was its activity on the Polish side of the border, in the area inhabited by the Ukrainian Lemkos. Between 1944 and 1947, the OUN enjoyed strong support and maintained a powerful presence in the area: thanks to careful studies of the UPA by Polish military historians (which are incomparably more informative than the propagandistic tracts of their Soviet counterparts), we know that its forces included about 2000 UPA soldiers and a network of over 3000 OUN members.³ Repeated efforts by the Polish military to dislodge the Ukrainian partisans were thwarted with heavy losses to the Poles. In March 1947, when one of its units ambushed and killed Karol Świerczewski, a famous Polish general and vice-minister of defense, the UPA in the region scored one of its greatest successes and at the same time set the stage for its own demise.

Angered by the event, the Polish government resolved to liquidate the “Ukrainian problem.” In April 1947, it launched an operation under the code name Wisła which had both a military and a civilian dimension. About 30,000 Polish troops, supported by large numbers of Czech and Soviet forces, surrounded the Ukrainian partisans and, in fierce fighting, killed or captured many of them. Some partisans managed to break through to Soviet Ukraine, and several hundred fought their way through Czechoslovakia and reached the Allied zone in Germany. The fate of the Ukrainian Lemko population that had sheltered the partisans was equally tragic: without warning, almost all the Lemkos, numbering about 150,000, were uprooted from their ancestral villages and resettled throughout Poland in order to prevent the UPA from ever reestablishing itself in the region again.

It was only in 1947–48, after the Soviets had broken the UPA resistance, that collectivization could begin full swing. In general, it followed the pattern set in Soviet Ukraine two decades earlier. Initially, the prosperous peasants (kulaks) were singled out and taxed so heavily that it became impossible for them to retain their farms. As usual, the most recalcitrant were deported to Siberia. Then the mass of the peasantry was harangued by Soviet agitators and pressured during lengthy individual sessions to join the collectives. Political control over the collectives, which was especially tight in Western Ukraine, was exerted by party cells that were established in the Machine Tractor Stations (MTS). Fortunately for the West Ukrainians, the collectivization of their lands was not accompanied by a famine. Another difference between collectivization in Western and Eastern Ukraine was that in the former it was accompanied by the armed struggle of the weakened but nonetheless lethal UPA. In the words of a Soviet source: “The greatest enemies of the working peasant – the kulaks and bourgeois nationalists – bitterly resisted the growing collectivization movement in the western territories, burning down farm buildings on the collectives, killing activists and spreading rumors among peasants designed to raise doubts about the collectives.”⁴ But resistance was to no avail for by 1951 almost all Western Ukraine’s 1.5 million peasant households belonged to collective farms, which numbered about 7000. A major pillar of the Soviet socioeconomic system was thus firmly in place in the newly annexed Ukrainian territories.

As was to be expected, collectivization was accompanied by industrialization. Under Austrian and Polish rule, Galicia had been an impoverished, economically exploited agrarian region, which served as a dumping ground for finished products but which produced few of these itself. Realizing that they could derive great political benefit by improving this situation, the Soviets invested heavily in the industrial development of the region. Old industries such as oil production were expanded and a series of new industries, which included the production of cars, buses, radios, and light machinery, were established. Because the factories were new and often outfitted with machines expropriated from Germany, the West Ukrainian enterprises possessed some of the most modern equipment in the USSR. By 1951 the industrial production of Western Ukraine jumped 230% over the 1945 level and accounted for about 10% of the republic’s industrial production, compared to less than 3% in 1940. Rapidly growing Lviv became one of the major industrial centers of the republic.

Along with industrialization came social changes. The initial lack of specialists and experienced workers required to staff the numerous new factories brought a flood of Russians into the region. But a local Ukrainian working class also developed rapidly. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, about 20,000–30,000 new workers were being trained annually in Western Ukraine. In Lviv the number of industrial workers rose from 43,000 in 1945 to 148,000 in 1958. A stratum of heretofore nonexistent Ukrainian technical experts also appeared. Thus, under the aegis of the Soviets, the long-delayed socioeconomic modernization of Western Ukraine moved rapidly forward.

Perhaps the most popular aspect of Soviet rule was the greatly expanded educational opportunities that it brought. To win the sympathies of West Ukrainians, the new regime expanded and Ukrainized elementary education in 1945 as it had done in 1939. Higher education also expanded rapidly, and in 1950 about 24,000 regular and 9000 corresponding students were enrolled in Western Ukraine’s twenty-four institutions of higher learning. However, the rise in educational level also entailed greater Russification. By 1953, instruction in all institutions of higher learning in Western Ukraine was in Russian, a clear indication that the modernization that the Soviets introduced was also meant to encourage Russification.

While education was the feature of the Soviet regime that was most readily accepted, the Communist party was not. Even after the Soviet victory, West Ukrainians showed little interest in joining it. In 1944 there were only 7000 members and candidates to the party in all Western Ukraine, and only several hundred of them were workers. In 1946 the number rose to 31,000 and in 1950, after an intense recruitment campaign, the number grew to 88,000 – still a tiny fraction of the general population. Most of these party members were newcomers from the east. For example, of the 23,000 members of the Lviv party organization in 1950, only 10% were of local origin. In the countryside, Communists were exceedingly few. Thus, although the party organization monopolized political power, it still lacked roots among the West Ukrainian population. Consequently, the latter had the distinct impression that it was living under foreign rule.