The Second Wave: Immigrants and Emigres of the Interwar Period

During the interwar period Ukrainian immigration to the West continued. However, it was notably different from the pre-1914 phase. A most striking feature was that the number of immigrants declined.

There were also considerable differences in the destinations available to the emigrants. Canada remained a favorite goal. But poor economic conditions in the farming regions and more restrictive immigration policies limited the number of new Ukrainian arrivals to 70,000 during the interwar period. Many tended to settle in cities such as Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal rather than in the western prairies. A more dramatic change occurred in the United States. There, extremely restrictive measures were taken against immigration during the depression years. Consequently, only about 10,000 Ukrainians entered the country between the wars, a drastic drop from the hundreds of thousands who crowded to its shores before 1914.

Although some countries no longer needed cheap labor, others continued to welcome it. In South America, Argentina opened its doors to immigrants, which it needed both to settle its vast expanses of territory and to work in the factories of its growing cities. About 40,000 Ukrainians immigrated there. Meanwhile, France, which also needed workers for the factories and mines in the north of the country near Metz, also accepted approximately 30,000–40,000 West Ukrainian laborers. The Ukrainian emigres

Perhaps the most striking feature of the interwar exodus was that it also contained a new type of Ukrainian emigrant – the political emigre. After the defeat of the various Ukrainian governments in 1918–20, tens of thousands of their supporters – soldiers, officers, government functionaries, and, mainly, the nationally conscious intelligenstia and their families – followed them into exile.

These refugees had been forced to flee because of their political convictions. Although many of them were simple soldiers, a large portion were members of the pre-1917 Ukrainian national intelligentsia. Indeed, they included some of its most illustrious representatives. Ideologically committed, frequently idealistic, and obsessed with the mistakes of the recent past, they were often people who had held responsible positions. For many, the desire to help Ukraine achieve independence remained an overriding concern. In order to be close to their homeland, most settled in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Like all political emigrants, these Ukrainians were prone to extensive fragmentation and infighting. Supporters of the various governments-in-exile often laid more blame on each other for their defeats than on the Bolsheviks. And they expended much time and effort in attempts to secure for their respective factions the mantle of national leadership. Some became political adventurers and opportunists in the service of foreign governments. Yet, given the many well-educated, talented, and committed individuals in their ranks, they also had noteworthy achievements to their credit. By means of numerous publications and scholarly institutions, they introduced West Europeans to Ukrainian national aspirations. They expressed these aspirations in terms of new, sophisticated ideologies. Their varied cultural activities were often of high quality – an impressive fact because they were carried out amidst dire economic difficulties and political instability.

The majority of the East Ukrainian emigres left their homeland in the fall of 1920, when the army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) retreated into Poland.

With the financial support of the Czech government, institutions such as the Ukrainian Free University in Prague and the Ukrainian Academy of Husbandry and Technology in Podebrady were established. During the interwar period, they produced hundreds of graduates. Meanwhile, Ukrainian scholarly research institutes were founded in Berlin and Warsaw. Numerous newspapers and publishing enterprises also came into being.

The various defeated Ukrainian governments continued a precarious existence in exile. While part of Petliura’s UNR government remained in Warsaw, Petliura himself moved to Paris where a UNR diplomatic mission, led by Oleksander Shulhyn, was still active. There, in 1926, he was assassinated by Samuel Shwartzbart, a Jew whom Ukrainian emigres considered to be a Bolshevik agent. (For their part, Jews praised Schwartzbart as an avenger of the pogroms that had occurred in Ukraine during the Civil War.) Hetman Skoropadsky and the Ukrainian monarchists established themselves in Berlin. After the West Ukrainian government dissolved itself in 1923, Petrushevych also settled in the German capital. Later, Konovalets and the OUN had their headquarters in Berlin for a time. Ukrainian socialists led by Mykyta Shapoval, and liberals such as Dmytro Doroshenko, congregated in Prague. As we have seen, an important contribution of the East Ukrainian emigres was their elaboration and expansion of Ukrainian ideologies.

Events in Ukraine in 1917–20 aroused interest in Ukrainian political issues, even among those who had emigrated for socieconomic reasons. This interest was further heightened when new, ideologically committed arrivals joined their communities in the 1920s. A variety of political organizations emerged wherever Ukrainians were concentrated. Soon ideological confrontations began to overshadow religious rivalries as the major bone of contention among the immigrants.

The first to organize were the socialists. As we have seen, already in 1907 a Ukrainian Marxist group was founded in Canada. That same year a socialist club, called the Haidamaks, emerged in New York. Its appeal was that its members addressed, in Ukrainian, concrete issues such as better wages and working conditions for laborers and fairer pricing policies for farmers. The group also provided an organizational base for those who resented the powerful influence that priests wielded in the Ukrainian communities.

After the First World War, impressed by the Ukrainization and modernization process in Soviet Ukraine and disillusioned by the depression in the West, about 1000 Ukrainians entered the Canadian Communist party in which they constituted over one-third of the membership. In 1918, those Ukrainians who were pro-Communist, but preferred to belong to purely Ukrainian organizations, established the Ukrainian Labor Temple Association. For decades, it was the largest pro-Communist ethnic organization in Canada. Dynamic and well organized, the association carried on educational and cultural work as well as ideological indoctrination. By 1939, it boasted over 10,000 committed members. Although the pro-Communists encompassed only about 5% of Ukrainian Canadians, their influence in the Ukrainian-Canadian community was far-reaching.

By the late 1920s, nationalist organizations began to emerge. Consisting largely of post-1920 emigres, they espoused the cause of Ukrainian independence and were uncompromisingly anti-Communist. Among the first to organize were the supporters of Hetman Skoropadsky. Committed to establishing a Ukrainian monarchy and intent on imbuing Ukrainians with military (“Cossack”) virtues, in 1924 they established a network of Sich organizations in the cities of Canada and the United States. Although never numerous, they were well organized. Their smartly uniformed members often participated in military maneuvers. Some branches even owned their own airplanes. The conservative ideology of these Ukrainian monarchists appealed to the Ukrainian Catholic clergy, which lent them its support.

It was, however, the OUN brand of nationalism that exerted the strongest appeal among Ukrainians abroad. At the initiative of Konovalets, pro-OUN organizations, which usually included a mixture of urban-based first- and second-wave immigrants, were created in all major Ukrainian communities in the West. Thus, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, UNO (Ukrainian National Union) was founded in Canada and ODWU (Organization for the Rebirth of Ukrainian Statehood) in the United States. Similar organizations appeared in France and Argentina. Their numerous members preached ultranationalism, protested against Polish and Soviet mistreatment of their compatriots, and collected funds for the OUN. The vast majority of Ukrainian community activists in the interwar period belonged to or sympathized with one or another of the nationalist organizations. Assimilation

While some immigrants were deeply immersed in Ukrainian politics, many grew increasingly estranged from things Ukrainian. This was especially so in the United States, where immigrants were systematically urged to assimilate into the American “melting pot.” Exposed to intense as-similationist pressures in the schools and repulsed by the constant infighting and bickering in their communities, young Ukrainians often opted to dissociate themselves completely from their ethnic roots. In Canada, where Ukrainians lived in self-contained communities, assimilatory pressures were weaker. But even here, the national consciousness of the early immigrants was weaker than that of recent arrivals. It was evident that wherever Ukrainians settled, assimilation into the dominant culture became, to a greater or lesser degree, an inescapable fact of life.