The default posture of human beings is fear.
Marilynne Robinson1
o’brien: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” winston: “By making him suffer.”
o’brien: “Exactly. By making him suffer.
Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing... If you want to see a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”George Orwell, 19842
The Second World War ignited a monstrous, all-encompassing inferno, a conflagration without end or mercy. Its boundless atrocities and colossal human losses (especially the extermination of the Jews and Romani), deportations, evacuations, and forced labour recruitment altered the political and demographic foundations of East Central Europe and the USSR, especially within the latter’s populous, western-most borderlands. This brutal contest helped divide the Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusans into modern nations and language communities with their own states.3 But between 1938 and 1945, the war’s historical conjunctures did not favour Ukraine’s independence.
Nazi Germany played an important role in these developments even before the Third Reich and the Soviet Union negotiated the Molotov- Ribbentrop pact in late August 1939. With the Munich Agreement, signed by representatives of Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain on 22 September 1938, Germany acquired the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s industrial heartland. Taking advantage of the weakness of the central Czechoslovak government, the Slovaks established their own autonomous government on 6 October. The central government then granted more administrative autonomy to the Ukrainians of Transcarpathia on 11 October.
With this act, Transcarpathia became Carpatho-Ukraine (Karpats’ka Ukraina). Recognizing Czechoslovakia’s impending collapse, Poland and Hungary demanded a common border with each other and the transfer of Carpatho- Ukraine to Hungary, which had administered this area up to 1918. On 2 November 1938, German and Italian diplomats agreed with Hungary’s territorial claims and ceded this region’s capital, Uzhhorod, and two other important cities (Mukachevo and Berehovo) to Hungary, which gained 1,586 square kilometres (612 square miles) and 181,609 people. Both Hungary and Poland sought to undermine the new Ukrainian autonomous government by engaging in border incursions with small special forces units.4Czechoslovakia’s partial dismemberment did not inspire its national minorities to back the post-Munich government. Supporters of a united Czechoslovakia attempted to shore up their support by granting more autonomy to Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine, but Slovakia declared its independence on 14 March 1939, as did Carpatho-Ukraine. The new Ukrainian state elected the Rev. August Voloshyn as president and adopted the symbols (the blue-yellow flag, the Trident of St Volodymyr, and the national anthem) of the Ukrainian National Republic of 1917-20.
At the end of 1938, the autonomous government of Carpatho-Ukraine created a paramilitary arm, the Carpathian Sich (Karpats’ka Sich), which attracted young activists from Galicia’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). According to one prominent Carpatho-Ukrainian, the newcomers began to introduce “uncompromising new revolutionary methods, which did not always conform to our... political interests or, at times, to our state needs either.”5 Members of the OUN viewed little Carpatho-Ukraine as the nucleus of a united Ukrainian state, “from Poprad and the Tatra Mountains to the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains.”6 While leaders of the Carpatho-Ukrainian autonomous government would agree, they understood that the resolution of Europe’s “Ukrainian problem” depended on the goodwill of the Great Powers, not Carpatho-Ukraine’s “frail resources.”7 In light of its short history, this small statelet would not play the role of Ukraine’s Prussia or Piedmont-Sardinia in the twentieth century.
The Hungarian army invaded shortly after Carpatho-Ukraine’s declaration of independence and occupied it by mid-April.
Despite strong resistance, Transcarpathia/Carpatho-Ukraine became a part of Hungary and remained so until 1945.8 At the same time that Slovakia and Transcarpathia broke away from Czechoslovakia, Hitler violated the promises he made at Munich and annexed the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia into the Third Reich. Betrayed by Hitler’s actions, Great Britain and France promised to defend Poland if Germany attacked. Seeking to avoid a two-front war, Hitler initiated secret talks with the USSR, which culminated in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939.This agreement represented a political alliance, not just an agreement concerning neutrality in case of an attack by a third party. By targeting Poland (“the bastard of Versailles,” as Molotov crudely put it), the largest country in the region, Hitler and Stalin upended the treaties ending the First World War and planned to reconfigure East Central Europe. Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, followed by the USSR’s invasion on 17 September. By the end of that critical month, the two revisionist powers conquered Poland.
With the new Soviet-German Treaty of Friendship signed on 28 September 1939, the Soviets withdrew from their previously assigned area of central Poland behind the Bug (Buh) River in exchange for Germany’s recognition of Soviet interests in Lithuania. The German zone encompassed 188,551 square kilometres (72,800 square miles) of Polish territory, inhabited by 20 million Poles. The Soviet zone embraced 201,294 square kilometres (77,720 square miles), populated by 13.5 million citizens of Poland. Hitler then annexed the Free City of Danzig, the Polish provinces of Poznan, Pomorze, and Lodz, and Polish Upper Silesia to the Third Reich.9
In addition to Poland, the non-aggression pact’s secret protocols assigned large parts of East Central Europe to the USSR, which forced Romania to surrender the Ukrainian-speaking parts of Bessarabia and Bukovina in June 1940.
Soviet authorities then incorporated the central part of Bessarabia into Ukraine’s Moldovan ASSR. After transferring 4,921 square kilometres (1,900 square miles) of this autonomous republic to the Ukrainian SSR, the Kremlin created a separate Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic on 2 August 1940 with a total area of 33,701 square kilometres (13,012 square miles).10 That summer the world’s first socialist state also occupied and annexed Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and started to introduce the radical changes which would transform the political and social landscape of this entire region. The USSR clearly emerged as the primary beneficiary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact. But only for twenty-one months.On 22 June 1941 Germany violated all of its agreements and launched a broad-based attack on its ally, sweeping deeply into the USSR by the end of the year. German forces quickly gained control of much of the western portions of the Soviet Union, including the newly expanded Soviet Ukraine. The ruthless effort to dominate the Ukrainian SSR and its human and natural resources produced one of the major killing fields of the war. Most importantly, almost all of the survivors of the war “had witnessed the brutalization of friends, family members, and neighbors” and experienced long-term grief and traumatization, however difficult to measure.11 The extensive physical destruction, enormous demographic losses, and vast psychological dislocations helped set the stage for Ukraine’s post-war contradictions.