42 World War II and Western Ukrainian Lands, 1939-1941
After annexing Austria and liquidating Czechoslovakia, Hitler turned next to Germany’s largest eastern neighbor, Poland. Particularly disconcerting for the Nazis was the fact that throughout the entire interwar period the province of East Prussia was separated from the rest of Germany by a strip of territory, the so-called Polish Corridor, that included as well the Baltic port and free city-state of Danzig (Polish: Gdańsk).
In preparation for an assault on Poland, Hitler felt it was imperative first to reach an agreement with his greatest ideological enemy and the leader of the world Communist movement, Iosif Stalin. On August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a treaty which came to be known after the names of each country’s foreign minister as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The treaty provided for a large loan from Germany to the Soviets and a ten-year non-aggression pact between the two countries. Also, secret clauses were added which established a demarcation line between the two countries should war break out with Poland.
MAP 42 WESTERN UKRAINE, 1939-1941
42.1 (Opposite left) The Soviet Union’s supreme leader Iosif Stalin (in white jacket), flanked by Nazi Germany’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (to the left), looks on approvingly as Sovet foreign minister Viacheslav Molotov signs the August 23, 1939 pact between the two countries.
Assured of Soviet neutrality, Nazi Germany launched within one week, on September 1, 1939, a full-scale invasion of Poland. Unlike the situation with Czechoslovakia at the Munich negotiations one year before, Great Britain and France decided to honor the terms of their alliance with Poland.
On September 3 Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. World War II had formally begun, although the British and French declarations had little impact on the fate of Poland. Nazi Germany’s rapid military success in western and central Poland was complemented on September 17, when the Red Army attacked the country from the east. Within three weeks, Poland, as in the late eighteenth century, ceased to exist. Former Polish territory was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union along a demarcation line—and now international boundary—that began in the south at the crests of the Carpathian Mountains and proceeded northward along part of the San River, eastward to the Buh River, and from there to East Prussia.
42.2 Election poster from October 1939 in Ukrainian which reads: Defenders of Working People, Vote for Western Ukraine to Enter into the Framework of Soviet Ukraine and For a United, Free, and Blossoming Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Ukrainian lands were also divided between the conquerors of Poland. The largest portion fell on the eastern, Soviet side of the demarcation line. From the perspective of the Soviet Union, it was able to initiate the process of “reunification” of western Ukrainian and well as western Belarusan lands. The Soviet view was based on the assumption that these territories had once belonged to Kievan Rus’ and that after centuries of “foreign oppression” they were at last being “re-united” with that medieval entity’s successor state, the Soviet Union. Armed with such historical justification, the Soviets organized elections with a single slate of candidates on October 22 for a people’s assembly, which met in L’viv on November 1, 1939 to request “re-annexation” to the Soviet Ukraine. That same day a similar people’s assembly met in Bialystok to request the annexation of western Belarus (including the mixed Belarusan/Ukrainianinhabited area of Polissia) to Soviet Belorussia.
The total amount of territory added to Soviet Ukraine amounted to 36,300 square miles (93,200 square kilometers) with a population of eight million people. Following the Soviet system, it was divided into six oblasts: Volhynia (with its center in Luts’k), Rivne, L’viv, Ternopil’, Drohobych, and Stanyslaviv. Almost immediately the region’s large landed estates—mostly owned by Polish landlords, state officials, and the Roman and Greek Catholic churches—were confiscated. Of the 6.7 million acres (2.7 million hectares) expropriated, less than one-third was redistributed to landless rural dwellers and small-scale farmers, while the bulk of the land was given to the newly established Soviet state and cooperative farms. The Soviet authorities allowed the Greek Catholic Church headed by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptyts’kyi to function, although it was banned from the educational system and no longer had access to income from its confiscated estates and other properties. A worse fate awaited other Ukrainian institutions from interwar Poland. They were branded as anti-Soviet bourgeois nationalist organizations and banned. This included all Ukrainian political parties, cultural organizations (including the Shevchenko Scientific Society), cooperatives, and newspapers.
42.3 Nikita Khrushchev, at the time first secretary of the Communist party of Ukraine, chatting with delegates at the November 1, 1939 people’s assembly in L’viv.
The new regime did nevertheless consider itself Ukrainian and, therefore, instituted a policy of Ukrainianization that was somewhat reminiscent of the one undertaken in the Soviet Ukraine during the decade after 1923. The bilingual schools promoted by the interwar Polish government in eastern Galicia and the northern lands were fully ukrainianized, as was the Polish University in L’viv, renamed Ivan Franko University. A branch of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was established in L’viv.
A corollary to Soviet-style ukrainianization was de-polonization. All Polish cultural institutions in L’viv and other eastern Galician towns and cities were closed. The new regime also carried out several waves of forced deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, who were sent to slave labor camps in the Arctic and eastern regions of the Soviet Union. The deportations included several categories of people: the interwar socioeconomic elite (mostly Poles); persons suspected of real or alleged anti-Soviet attitudes (mostly Ukrainians and Poles); government officials, police, and civil servants in former Poland (mostly Poles); small tradespeople (mostly Jews); villagers living along the German-Soviet demarcation line (mostly Poles and Ukrainians); and Polish citizens who had fled into the Soviet zone during the German invasion (mostly Jews). Of the estimated 550,000 persons in those categories deported from western Volhynia and eastern Galicia, about four-fifths were ethnic Poles.
42.4 Delegates of Western Ukraine’s people’s assembly received by Stalin in Moscow, November 4, 1939.
42.5 Prisoners numbered 1746, 1770, 1920, and 1777 of Polish ethnicity from western Ukraine deported to Soviet slave labor camps.
Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union proceeded to carve out spheres of influence throughout eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. They were not always in agreement, however, and at times their geopolitical interests clashed. During the summer of 1940, while Hitler was preoccupied with the war in western Europe, Stalin unilaterally extended his country’s borders even further. In June 1940 the Soviet Union annexed from Romania the northern half of Bukovina and all of Bessarabia. Northern Bukovina, with its administrative center of Chernivtsi, as well as largely Ukrainian-inhabited southern Bessarabia between the lower Dniester and Danube rivers (a total 6,200 square miles or 15, 900 square kilometers with 1.3 million inhabitants) were added to Soviet Ukraine.
At the same time, the Moldavian A.S.S.R. east of Dniester River (see Map 36) was “moved” westward to Bessarabia, where it was raised to the status of a Soviet socialist republic (S.S.R.) within borders that coincide with present-day independent Moldova and the Dnistrian Moldovan Republic.
42.6 Soviet troops on the streets of Chernivtsi distributing newspapers confirming the Soviet annexation of northern Bukovina, June 1940.
Ukrainian lands west of the Soviet-German border were incorporated into an administrative unit called the Generalgouvernement Polen, which formed an integral part of Greater Germany (Grossdeutschland). The lands included the ethnically mixed Polish-Ukrainian borderlands in Podlachia and the Chelm region as well as the Lemko Region west of the San River. Aside from the local Ukrainian and Lemko-Rusyn population living there, these regions also became home to about 20,000 refugees (largely the Ukrainian intellectual elite) who had fled from the Soviet zone in eastern Galicia.
In the Generalgouvernement the Germans permitted existing and new Ukrainian institutions and the opening of some new Ukrainian-language schools. Several Orthodox churches in the Chelm Region and Podlachia closed in 1930s by Poland were allowed to reopen, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, banned in Soviet Ukraine since 1930, was reestablished with two eparchies in the Generalgouvernement. Finally, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which had carried out a guerilla campaign against interwar Poland, was allowed to exist in the Generalgouvernement. The OUN was considerably weakened, however, as a result of internecine factionalism.
42.7 Andrii Mel’nyk (1890-1964), Galician-Ukrainian military figure and political activist, from 1939 head of one faction (the Melnykites) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
The factionalism arose as a result of a power struggle following the assassination in 1938 (by a Soviet agent) of the OUN’s founder, Ievhen Konovalets’. Of the two factions that arose, one supported the new OUN leader, Andrii Mel’nyk (the successor to Konovalets’), the other favored the younger so-called revolutionary leadership allied with Stepan Bandera. A formal split between the Melnykites (OUN-M) and Banderites (OUN-B) took place in 1941, after which greater competition for members and even armed struggle dominated relations between the two factions. However, life in western Ukrainian lands, whether in the new western oblasts of the Soviet Ukraine or in Nazi Germany’s Generalgouvernement, was soon to be transformed by the next stage of World War II: Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union.
42.8 Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), Galician-Ukrainian underground revolutionary nationalist, from 1929 a leading activist and from 1939 the head of one faction (the Banderites) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.