The Soviet Return to Ukraine

In 1943 a decisive shift occurred in the Nazi-Soviet war: as the German offensive lost impetus, the Soviets began a huge counteroffensive. The first indication that Hitler’s armies had overextended themselves came at the dramatic Soviet victory at Stalingrad on the Volga in January 1943.

Marshaling the remainder of their reserves, the Germans made their last great attempt to recapture the initiative in the summer of 1943 at the Battle of Kursk. But here, too, they were defeated. Meanwhile, the Soviets benefited from their vast manpower reserves, improved war production, and a huge influx of Allied war materiel. Immediately after their victory at Kursk, they launched a counterattack whose major goal was to recapture Left-Bank Ukraine.

The Soviet push into Ukraine was massive, involving over 40% of the Red Army’s infantry and 80% of its tanks. According to Western historians, the Red Army enjoyed a three-to-one advantage in overall manpower and – thanks to American supplies – an estimated five-to-one advantage in equipment. Soviet sources, however, claim that their numerical advantage was less than two to one and that it was their valor and skill, rather than their overwhelming numbers, that brought them success. In any case, unlike the blitzkrieg of 1941, which had allowed the Germans to overrun Ukraine in four months, the Soviet “bulldozer” moved forward sector by sector, methodically pounding its opponents into exhaustion. In a little more than a year, it had reconquered all of Ukraine.

In late summer and fall of 1943, Soviet forces, led by Ivan Konev, Nikolai Vatutin, and Radion Malinovsky, took the Left Bank and Donbas regions. On 23 August, the Germans lost Kharkiv for the second, and final, time; in September and October, after vicious fighting, the Red Army breached the powerful German defensive line along the Dnieper; and on 6 November, Vatutin entered Kiev.

After a brief pause, in January 1944, about 2.3 million Red Army men launched the drive to force the Germans out of the Right Bank and Crimea. An important victory near Korsun-Shevchenko assured them of achieving this goal and, by March, only Western Ukraine remained in German hands.

The third stage in the reconquest of Ukraine began in mid July 1944. Near Brody, the Soviets encircled and destroyed eight German divisions, totaling about 60,000 men. Included among the latter were the 10,000 men of the Galician Division who had the misfortune of receiving their baptism by fire under these catastrophic conditions. About 5000 members of the Galician Division managed to break out of the encirclement, but over 3000 were killed, wounded, or captured. An estimated 2000 eluded captivity and many of them later joined the UPA. After this victory, Soviet forces quickly overran Galicia, capturing Lviv, Peremyshl, and Stanyslaviv on 27 July. In September they crossed the Carpathians and by October 1944 all ethnic Ukrainian territory was in Soviet hands.

Just as the Soviets had done in 1941, the Germans applied a scorched-earth policy during their retreat from Ukraine. In Himmler’s orders to his troops, he emphasized: “It is necessary that in retreating from the regions of Ukraine we do not leave behind a single person, head of livestock or measure of grain… The enemy should find there a completely burned and devastated land.”¹⁷ Consequently, in a 200-mile-wide strip along the left bank of the Dnieper, hordes of people were forcibly evacuated from their homes and large parts of Poltava, Dniepropetrovsk, Kremenchuk, and other cities were burned. The right bank of the river was spared the large-scale devastation, although not the massive evacuations. Stalin’s propaganda offensive

Unlike Hitler, Stalin was willing to learn from his mistakes. After seeing how ambivalent Soviet citizens had been toward his regime at the outset of the war, he launched a propaganda campaign.

It was designed to encourage Soviet citizens in occupied areas to resist the Germans and to portray his regime in a new light, implying that it would be more tolerable after the war. Because in the fighting against the Germans, nationalism was clearly a stronger motivating force than Marxism, it became the major theme of the campaign. Russian nationalism received the most attention as images of the Russian Empire’s glories, of its struggles against foreign invaders in the past, and of its great heroes were repeatedly conjured up. But Stalin also made a strong effort to assure himself of Ukrainian sympathies.

To create the impression that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was a sovereign state, supplementary Ukrainian ministries of foreign affairs and defense were formed. Like other republics, Ukraine was given the right – but not the opportunity – to engage in foreign relations. Prominent Ukrainians received high government posts. For example, the playwright Oleksander Korniichuk became minister of foreign affairs and the lionized partisan leader Sydir Kovpak was chosen to be minister of defense. There were even indications that Ukraine would have its own military units. Although this possibility never came to pass, the southern sector of the front was renamed the Ukrainian front and a prestigious award for valor was named after Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Control of Ukrainian cultural activity loosened perceptibly and Volodomyr Sosiura’s patriotic poem “Love Ukraine” even received the Stalin Prize.

Having noted how quickly and enthusiatically people had turned to religion in the German-occupied regions, Stalin made his peace with the Russian Orthodox church on Soviet territory by eliminating many restrictions on its activities and by disbanding the antireligious propaganda organization, League of Militant Atheists. The Orthodox church returned these favors by encouraging its faithful to fight the Germans and by excommunicating those who cooperated with them. The Soviet return to Western Ukraine

Because Western Ukraine had been under Soviet rule only briefly, the return of the Red Army had a markedly different effect there than in the Sovietized east.

In sharp contrast to their relatively cautious policies of 1939, the Soviets were determined to impose their rule on the nationalistic West Ukrainians quickly and uncompromisingly when they arrived in Western Ukraine in 1944. They mobilized all men between 18 and 50 years of age and sent them – poorly trained and badly armed – into battle. Repression against the Greek Catholic church began immediately. Metropolitan Sheptytsky was put under house arrest when Lviv was occupied and he died several months later. His successor, Josef Slipy, was sent to a Siberian concentration camp. Preparations were also begun for the forced incorporation of the Greek Catholic church into the Moscow-controlled Russian Orthodox church.

Over 30,000 party workers and 3500 specially trained propagandists poured into Western Ukraine to begin once again the process of Sovietizing the region. The intelligentsia was the most nationally conscious segment of the population and Soviet authorities made a concerted effort to alienate it from the peasants and workers. Because Soviet propagandists promised to give “special attention” to those who did not have a Soviet education and who had been brought up in “bourgeois” schools, a large part of the West Ukrainian intelligentsia fled, together with the retreating Germans, from areas that were not yet occupied by the Red Army.

The arrival of the Red Army in Western Ukraine placed before the leadership of the UPA the difficult question of whether to continue their fight against Stalin’s overwhelming forces. Initially the OUN had assumed that, in their struggle for empire, the Nazis and Soviets would bring each other down in a manner similar to 1917–18. When it became clear, however, that the Soviets were going to emerge the victors in the east, the OUN hoped that the defeated Germans and the Western powers would form an alliance to thwart Soviet expansionism. It was this false hope that, to a large extent, convinced the UPA/OUN leadership to continue the struggle against the Soviets.

After the main forces of the Red Army had rolled through Western Ukraine, the UPA staged attacks designed to disrupt mobilization efforts, to prevent deportations of “unreliable elements,” and to stem the repression of the Greek Catholic church. Its special targets were the NKVD, Communist party members, and those who collaborated with the Soviets. In spring 1944 in Volhynia, a UPA unit mortally wounded the famous Red Army general Nikolai Vatutin. To eliminate the UPA, Soviet forces staged huge blockades of partisan territories, sent agents to inflitrate UPA units and to assassinate their commanders, and formed special antipartisan battalions. Soviet propagandists also launched an intense campaign to portray the OUN and UPA as the henchmen of the Nazis – a campaign that continues to this day.

Some of the Soviet clashes with the UPA were on a large scale. In April 1944 near Kremianets in Volhynia, for example, about 30,000 Soviet troops participated in an anti-UPA operation. Most clashes, however, were small but frequent. According to Soviet sources, in the fall of 1944 in Volhynia, the UPA carried out 800 raids. In the Stanyslaviv region of Galicia alone it killed about 1500 Soviet activists. During this period, the Soviets claimed to have wiped out thirty-six UPA “bands” totaling 4300 men.¹⁸ As might be expected, the fighting was fierce and no quarter was given by either side. Wounded UPA soldiers frequently committed suicide rather than fall into enemy hands. As the war ended on 9 May 1945, Soviet control of the West Ukrainian countryside was still far from complete.

Even a cursory listing of losses reflects the terrible impact that the Second World War had on Ukraine and its inhabitants. About 5.3 million, or one of six inhabitants of Ukraine, perished in the conflict. An additional 2.3 million had been shipped to Germany to perform forced labor. Over 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages were totally or partially destroyed, leaving close to 10 million people homeless.

A graphic indication of the extremes of Nazi brutality experienced in Ukraine was that for one village that was destroyed and its inhabitants executed in France and Czechoslovakia, 250 villages and their inhabitants suffered such a fate in Ukraine. Because Ukraine suffered more damage in the war than any other European country, the economic losses were staggering. The complete or partial destruction of over 16,000 industrial enterprises and 28,000 collective farms meant that Ukraine lost much of what had been gained at such great cost during the 1930s. Estimates place the total damage to Ukraine’s economy at about 40%. Thus, for a second time in little more than a decade, Ukrainians had suffered greatly from the brutal excesses of totalitarian regimes.

Although more nationally conscious than they had been in the 1917–20 period, Ukrainians during the Second World War were caught between the Nazis and Soviets. To the great disillusionment of the integral nationalists, they had practically no opportunity to pursue their own interests. In contrast to the 1917–20 period, Ukrainians were in a position only to react to events in 1939–45 – not to influence them. Yet, despite horrendous losses and setbacks, the final outcome of the war did have some positive features from the Ukrainian point of view. Most noteworthy was the fact that, as a result of the Soviet conquest of Western Ukraine, all Ukrainians were united in a single political entity for the first time in centuries: in the USSR, or more specifically, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (URSR). Moreover, Stalin’s temporary concessions to the national aspirations of the non-Russian nationalities gave rise to hopes that after the war “things would be different.” Finally, as part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was included among the victors in the war. For many Soviet Ukrainians the exhilaration of victory gave rise to a feeling of hope, expressed by a Soviet officer in 1945: “The entire atmosphere was charged with the expectation of something new, something magnificent and glorious. None of us doubted in the brightness of the future.”¹⁹

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Source: Subtelny Orest. Ukraine: A History. Fourth Edition. — University of Toronto Press,2009. — 888 р.. 2009

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